Seattle Schools Community Forum

Some topics of interest in the Friday Memo from the Superintendent and senior staff:

The New York Times has an excellent series of articles called Room for Debate where they have various experts write an essay for or against a subject.  Their latest is about gifted education .  I didn't read each article thoroughly but two things did stand out. Professor Bruce Sacerdote had this to say: My paper with fellow economists James West and Scott Carrell examines peer effects among students at the Air Force Academy. We found that students benefit from their peers, but that these peer effects disappear if the group is comprised of the highest ability and lowest ability cadets. My work with economists Scott Imberman and Adriana Kugler examines peer effects from the arrival of Hurricane Katrina refugees in receiving schools. We discovered that high ability students benefit the most from high ability peers. And an experiment in primary schools in Kenya, researchers found that grouping students into classrooms based on prior achievement benefits al...

From Reuters , well, I'll let their headline say it all:  " K-12 Student Database Jazzes Tech Startups, Spooks Parents."    From the story: (bold mine) An education technology conference this week in Austin, Texas, will clang with bells and whistles as startups eagerly show off their latest wares. But the most influential new product may be the least flashy: a $100 million database built to chart the academic paths of public school students from kindergarten through high school. In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted . In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school - even homework completion. Local education officials retain legal control over their students' information. But federal law allows them to share fil...