Seattle Schools Community Forum

This article appeared in today's Times. I had heard about this situation previous to the article; here's the problem in a nutshell from the article: "Two Seattle high schools are among seven statewide that will lose a chance to add and strengthen Advanced Placement courses in math and science because a $13.2 million grant that Washington state won last year has been scrapped. NMSI declined to give any specifics, but state Rep. Bill Fromhold, who resigned his legislative post as of next year so he could help administer Washington's grant, said it had to do with how teachers would be paid for the time they spent in training, and how they would receive incentives for how well students scored on AP exams. NMSI wanted to pay teachers directly, he said, while Washington's collective bargaining laws require that teacher pay be negotiated between teachers unions and school districts. "We worked hard to try to find middle ground," Fromhold said. But at the e...

I received this guest post from "Don't Know Where to Start", a public school parent in Seattle: Last week the Seattle Times carried an article about upcoming changes to special education in Seattle Public Schools, "Special education reforms would likely include classes taught in pairs" (Wed 30 April). The article says that “As a task force begins this spring to revamp Seattle Public Schools' approach to special education, it's likely many classrooms around the district will begin to look more like Eckstein's” where children who qualify for special ed services are in general education classrooms taught by two teachers, one general ed and one special ed. Currently this model only exists at the kindergarten level. However if you read the School Board Work Session on the Student Assignment Plan and Special Education, April 30th , there is no mention of this co-teaching model at all. The co-teaching model should be extended beyond these specialized kinde...

I have heard that Denny Middle School enrolled 29 students in their Spectrum program this year. That's wonderful news! It appears that the Denny program is gaining acceptance and credibility with West Seattle Spectrum families. This also means that Denny will have, for the first time in at least ten years (if ever), a self-contained Spectrum class. Congratulations to the Denny community and those working to develop the Spectrum program there.

Hello I was looking at the report on Revenues and Expenditure of Public Elementary and Secondary Education for the 2005-2006 school year. This is published by the National Center for Education Statistics. It is compilation of data by state. I took a look at how Washington stacked up and one first glance it is not too good. In overall spending per student, Washington spent $7,984. The average for the 50 states and Washington DC was $9,337 with a median of $8,645 (that means half the states spent more than that and half spent less). Washington ranks 38 th in overall spending per student. In spending on instruction (money that goes directly to the classroom for teacher, books, classroom aides, etc), Washington spends $4,725 per pupil. The national average is $5,651 with a median of $5,304. In this category, Washington ranks 36 th . Finally, on the percentage of overall spending used for instruction, Washington spends 59.18% (4,725/7,984) of i...

I received the following notice on one of the UW School of Education lists today: The U. S. Department of Education is holding a series of regional meetings to take comments on the proposed rules changes for NCLB that were published recently in the Federal Register. One of the meetings will be in Seattle on May 22. Click here to read the full meeting notice. An excerpt follows... ****************** Thursday, May 22, 2008 W Hotel, 1112 4th Avenue Seattle, WA 98101 Time: 9 a.m.-12 p.m. & 2 p.m.-5 p.m. Meeting Room: Great Room 1. Individuals who wish to present comments during a public meeting should register at Special.Events@ed.gov at least one week before the public meeting. Any meeting time that remains after the Web site registrations are processed will be made available on the day of the meeting. Individuals who have not registered on the Web site and who wish to present comments should do so at the on-site registration desk on the day of the meeting. We will process We...

This from the PI Education blog: "If you're interested in seeing the film, Two Million Minutes, there's a screening May 12 at Seattle University . The viewing starts at 6 p.m. in the The LeRoux Room, and is open to the public." It's about the uses of time by American and Indian high school students; there's a trailer at YouTube. I had heard about this film but know very little about it. I am technically on vacation (in Tucson; it's 85 degrees and sunny - what can I say?) but had the chance to check in, saw this and wanted to make sure (in case you missed at the PI blog but I hope you do check in there) it was on your calendar if you are interested.

This article about using real world examples to teach math appeared this week in the NY Times. About the study, “The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.” Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Though the experiment tested college students, the researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods." How did it work? "In the experiment, the college students learned a si...