Seattle Schools Community Forum

One student and one teacher were killed yesterday in a St Louis magnet high school.  Seven others were hit and are in the hospital. There is some sameness to this story but also a couple of different issues. Same - AR-15 - 600 rounds of ammo - current or former student (the latter) - The teacher, Jean Kuczka, a health teacher, put herself between the gunman and students and was killed. Different - The shooter was killed. (School shooters tend to be taken into custody; this one died in a shootout with police) - Most school shootings are in suburban or rural schools; this was an urban magnet high school - The shooter left a note in his car which read in part: “I Don’t have any friends I don’t have any family, I’ve never had a girlfriend, I’ve never had a social life, I’ve been an isolated loner my entire this. This was the perfect storm for a mass shooting.” Sounds like textbook alienation.  The school's doors were said to be all locked and there were seven security people in t...

The 2022 NAEP scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress) have been released and it's a poor showing all around. But over on Twitter, there's many other questions that people have raised beyond just scores. To be noted, we were in the middle of a pandemic; not an excuse but certainly a reason. I would be more worried in a couple of years if this slide doesn't stop or gets worse.  Found, COVID School Data Hub, a great website about COVID-19 and school data that may answer some questions for you.  I also highly recommend Chalkbeat for the best coverage of NAEP scores.  For example: Reading scores fell by similar amounts between 2017-19 as between 2019-21. That's right: The decline in reading in the two years right before the pandemic was nearly as bad as the pandemic-era decline! I don't think there's a definitive explanation for what happened '17-19. Keep in mind that more granular analyses at the district level have found a clear relationship bet...

 Not sure how much of the so-called "culture wars" have reached uber-woke Seattle but I do wonder from school to school if there have been issues.  Here's a good article from The Washington Post, complete with map of laws passed because of the arguing over what gets to be said or not said in schools.  Over the past three academic years, 25 states have passed 64 laws reshaping what students can learn and do at school. Over the past three academic years, legislators in 45 states proposed 283 laws that either sought: to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history;  to change how instructors can teach about gender identity, sexuality and LGBTQ issues;  to boost parents’ rights over their children’s education;  to limit students’ access to school libraries and books;  to circumscribe the rights of transgender students;  and/or to promote what legislators defined as a “patriotic” education. Of these, 64 bills have bee...

I saw an article online from a media non-profit " telling stories of climate solutions and a just future," called Grist about U.S. schools and solar power.  According to the fourth edition of the “Brighter Future” report, released last week by the clean energy nonprofit Generation180 , the number of U.S. schools using solar power has more than doubled in the last seven years, reaching roughly 8,400 by the end of 2021. These so-called “solar schools” now account for nearly 1 in 10 public, independent, and charter K-12 schools and serve more than 6 million students nationwide. Since 2015, American schools’ total solar energy capacity has nearly tripled to 1,644 megawatts — enough to meet the electricity use of all the households in a city the size of Boston, Denver, or Washington, D.C. At the front of the pack is California; the Golden State has both the greatest number of solar schools and the most solar capacity. It’s in fourth place for the percentage of schools that have ...

Editor's note There are a couple of big stories that I want to give their own posts. One is about gender and students, the other is about COVID and vaccines for children. They are both going to be difficult conversations because we will be talking about the health - physical and mental - of children and their lives.  Look for that soon. From the Cato Institute - Public Schooling Battle Map . Pretty astonishing the volume of issues nationwide.  I do think the one case of the district that refused to take fundraising dollars from a high school satanic club is sad. From the New York Times - Health Panel Recommends Screening All Kids 8 and Up for Anxiety A panel of medical experts on Tuesday recommended for the first time that primary care doctors screen all children ages 8 to 18 for anxiety , new guidance that highlights the ongoing mental health crisis among American youth. In making its recommendations, the task force hopes to reduce the number of children whose mental h...

 This story from The Spectator - Why Boys Fall Behind - has a plethora of fairly disturbing info/stats. Finland is a good place to look at gender gaps in education because it is such a high-performing nation (indeed, one could say that other countries suffer from a bout of Finn envy every time the Pisa results are published). But although Finnish students rank very high for overall performance on Pisa, there is a massive gender gap: 20 per cent of Finnish girls score at the highest reading levels in the test, compared to just 9 per cent of boys. The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls.  Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in maths. Boys are 50 per cent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading, and science.  ...

Boy, am I glad I broke this coverage up in sections. The final part of last week's Seattle School Board meeting proved illuminating. This is because we see the cracks in the Board and the disingenuousnessof a couple of Board members. I also want to point out that the Board and the district have provided mostly lip service to inform parents and the greater community that they intend to move to a Student Outcome Focused Governance method AND what it will mean to all those people and communities .  This latter part of the meeting was taken up with Introduction items. These are new BARs (Board Action Reports, basically a document for work or initiative that will later be voted on by the Board that the Superintendent and staff will then follow through on, if approved) and there were three of them. They were: Approval of Revised Student Outcomes Focused Governance Goals and Guardrails. Approval of this item would approve the revised Goals and Guardrails as attached to the Board Ac...