Seattle Schools Community Forum

At Board meeting, Director Peters brought forth her motion for discussion of the use of the Smarter Balanced assessment, saying the discussion needed to be done "honestly, openly and immediately."  She said she asked about having it come before the Curriculum &Instruction meeting but was told their agenda was set.  (I looked and they haven't even posted the agenda for the next C&I committee meeting so if it is set, then it should be available for public viewing.  Since it's not, I would assume the agenda is not set. Hmm.) President Carr asked for comments on the motion itself - to add it - but not to discuss the content of the motion. Martin-Morris says he is "not opposed to having a conversation and it's important to have" but his real concern is timing.  Policy that lays out how "we do things" and this would seemingly be an exception. Brought up the code phrase of "good governance."  (I confess I do not know Board poli...

Directors Patu and Peters are offering a motion tomorrow night at their Board meeting to suspend Smarter Balanced testing. I support this motion if only for discussion purposes. I absolutely concur that on a technical level, I do not believe most third-graders are ready for this kind of testing on a computer.  I think it has a degree of motor skill AND computer skills that many third-graders are unlikely to have.  And, if your household does not have a computer, even more so. It's tentative because they have to get four votes to support it going forward to committee and then coming back to the full Board for a vote. * PLEASE, write to the Board and ask that they vote for this motion if ONLY to have a real discussion.  Please put SBAC in your subject line.

The district has quite a bit of information for parents on the new Smarter Balanced testing on this page . It's great that the district has put up this information (I'm not sure how long it has been up - I saw this on Facebook via a reader).  But, there's a lot of ed lingo in there and I really wonder many parents will truly understand it all.   There is also a lot of language that is somewhat but not totally true. For example:

As I previously reported, Chicago Public Schools had not wanted to give the PARCC (Common Core) assessment to all their students, saying they were not ready.  Arne Duncan twisted their arm and they rescinded that announcement. Here's a fairly amazing notice from one elementary PTA in Chicago where they say (as if it were a fundraiser): The Blaine PTA would like to achieve a 100% PARCC opt out so our students can get back 10 hours of vital classroom instruction! FYI, the Mayor unveiled a new 10-year city transportation plan , Move Seattle , yesterday.  I think it will come to us in the form of a levy this fall.   I read it with an eye to how it might help SPS.  The word "school(s)" is mentioned nine times in relation to: - fewer high school students getting a drivers license (from 1996 to 2010, from 85% to 73%) - one 10-year goal is to " Improve safety in school zones" - "make the 27% of the city without sidewalks more walkable - through construc...

Update : in other Special Education news, The Olympian is reporting that in the Legislature that the House passed this bill: New rules would govern how school employees can restrain or isolate special-education students under a bill that passed the state House Monday. Under House Bill 1240 , restraint and isolation could no longer be part of a school’s pre-established plan for responding to misbehavior by a student with a disability. Instead, such methods would be “permitted only when reasonably necessary to control spontaneous behavior that poses an imminent likelihood of serious harm.” HB 1240 passed the House on a 68-29 vote Monday. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, would also require school districts to report annually to the state how often their employees restrain or isolate students.  Additionally, school districts would need to adopt policies to reduce their use of restraint or isolation. Read more here: h...

EdWeek has a good round-up of test season news (with links to stories at the NY Times and others).  Even as assessment pushback grows, however, the state of the law on the right to boycott tests isn't as clear as you'd expect. The Education Commission of the States, a research group based in Denver, took on the thorny question of what's permitted, and found a confusing assortment of laws and policies, and a whole lot of even-more-confusing silence on the question on opting out. In a new white paper, the ECS found that only a handful of states have clear laws one way or the other on whether parents can keep their children out of state-mandated tests. But in most states, there is no law on the subject, or the law isn't clear. In such murky terrain, some state departments of education have clarified their policies on opt-outs, but others "are often silent on the issue," the ECS says. From the report on what happens in Washington State: ...