Seattle Schools Community Forum

A lively meeting and I will flesh this out later but here's what's happening:

Personalized learning is the next big thing in public education but how it will play out in your child's classroom is, at this point, a big guess.  I note that Michael Tolley, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, seems interested in it and put forth requests to the Board about starting it up in Seattle Schools. (To note, I believe that many teachers are, of course, doing personalized learning as much as they can within the scope of the size of their classrooms and the resources they have.  This is what teachers have done since teaching began.)

I just read the Teaching and Learning update from the Friday Memo for June 24, 2016  and it makes the District's problem with accountability perfectly clear. While these problems are examined in Advanced Learning, the truth is that these failures are repeated all across the district in every school, program, and classroom. The problem is that no one checks to confirm that the work is getting done.

I had heard that Emerson Elementary was losing a large number of teachers (somewhere between 10-12) and I asked the district about this. Here is their reply:

 Update: added the Audit&Finance Ctm agenda.  See the bottom for a couple of items I called out to the Board. end of update I had wrongly assumed most meetings were done for the year but had forgotten that there are generally some left before the 4th of July holiday.

End of school year congrats to: - Queen Anne teacher, Joe Bailey, who was named Kidd Valley Teacher of the Year - John Rogers Elementary students earned the Anti-Defamation League's No Place for Hate® campus for the 2015-2016 school year. It's the first SPS campus to earn the award.

I actually had not meant to sit down and write this one but I had so many articles piling up on this subject, it seemed the right time.  To be clear (as I am certain that 99% of adults in the U.S. would agree), all is not well with public education.  There are many reasons for that.  Now, if you just looked at white and many Asian students, the U.S. is doing as well as most top-level countries. But the U.S. is a very heterogeneous country that tests all public school students.   We are also a country that seemingly is accepting that nearly 25% of our children live in poverty.  Anyone who thinks that a good teacher is going to overcome institutional racism, poverty and inconsistent/low funding is wrong.  Also, when I speak of education reform in the U.S., I mean corporate ed reform.  I'm not saying change isn't needed; I'm saying what is being pushed is not really working and, at the end of the day, seems to be serving to allow some people to make...