by Maren Johnson

I'm not the counselor at the school.  I'm not the one out there telling people alcohol is bad. I'm the one at the end of the line trying to save the teenager's life after they have had too much to drink.

~Guest speaker in my science classes last week, my brother, an ER physician, talking about the effects of drug overdoses.

I was extremely appreciative of my brother for taking the time to come into my classes for the day and share his stories and knowledge with my high school science students.  The information he presented was scientific, relevant, and interesting—a great use of instructional time.

It was also interesting to hear his reaction, as someone outside the education system, at being a "teacher for a day."  While I was there to introduce him and provide some moderation of his presentation and student questions, my brother was essentially serving as a guest teacher for the entire school day.

So what were some of my brother’s impressions?  He remarked on the diversity of student backgrounds and attitudes.  (I teach all the tenth graders at my school.  Every one.)  Describing how he felt at the end of the day, he said, “I was tired.”

"I was surprised by the pace of the day.  The bell rings, and the students leave.  Immediately a new group of students come in, and within four minutes, the bell rings and the next class starts.  There's no time to think."  This was my brother, an ER physician, saying he was surprised by the pace of the school day.  My brother is a busy guy at work, so for him to say the day was fast paced tells you something!

There is clearly no extra time in our school day.  A new law would extend the number of instructional hours to 1080 annually in grades 7-12, and would not allow early releases or late starts for collaboration or professional development to count towards that 1080 hours.

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By Kristin

Every summer, we go to the lake to swim, and my daughters have to pass a swim test before they can go beyond the rope to the deep water, where it's fun.

Like being able to swim, and not drowning in deep water, being able to read and do math to a certain level of aptitude is important in our society.  Tests were written that measure whether or not a child has basic skills at certain points in her school career.

In the hysteria and panic following our realization that children who live in poverty, predominantly children of color, aren't meeting minimum standards of skill, we've focused more and more on the test.  That's unfortunate. We haven't lengthened the school day or year, reduced class size for those students, or put any money into summer training of teachers.  Instead, we're simply told to test more, and we're told the test results have real consequences.

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B y Kristin

Students Matter, a national non-profit organization whose mission is to sponsor litigation that will improve education, will go to trial on January 27th in what will be a groundbreaking lawsuit.  Vergara vs. California is about educational inequity – that current dismissal, tenure, and evaluation systems cause "devastating consequences" for students who live in poverty.  The focus is on teacher quality and how current firing, RIF, and tenure systems work to keep ineffective teachers in classrooms, disproportionately in classrooms of high-poverty schools.

The plaintiffs in the case are nine public school children, ranging in age from eight to seventeen.  If Vergara wins, enormous change could happen.  Teacher quality and how to measure it is a hot topic here in Washington State, too.  The vague anecdotes fly back and forth – a terrible teacher shuffled from school to school and reading the paper at her desk, a brilliant teacher whose politics earned her the wrath of her principal and who was unfairly dismissed.  I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

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By Tom

By now you’ve probably heard that Washington State’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction has agreed to provide the Seattle Times with a large amount of data concerning student test scores, attendance records, discipline records and demographics. They will also provide the newspaper with staff data. To be clear, this is data that is not already available to the public.

It seems clear why the Seattle Times wants this data. They are in the business of selling information. If they can get a better understanding of what’s happening in our state’s schools, they can package that information into news articles and sell it to the public. That seems obvious. What isn’t clear – at least to me – is why OSPI has entered this agreement. I honestly don’t see what they stand to gain by providing The Times with data that isn’t already released.

This bothers me at two levels. As a parent, I’m not crazy about my sons’ scholastic information being sifted through in some newspaper office by a bunch of reporters who are essentially looking for a story. It’s not that our family has anything to hide, but it’s still our information, and it should be our decision on who gets to look at it. The Times has tried to assuage those concerns by maintaining that the information will be “de-identified,” but as KUOW pointed out, it wouldn’t take much effort to use all the data to triangulate which student earned which test score or which student was suspended for which offence. That bothers me.

I’m also bothered as a teacher. It seems clear to me that The Times will have the capacity to report test scores aggregated at the individual classroom level. If you’ll remember, The Los Angeles Times did this a few years ago, and the fallout was disasterous. Whether the Seattle Times is planning this or not, we’re not sure; but it sure looks like they’ll be able to.

The problem is that when a specific teacher’s student test scores are published, they’re devoid of context, because that context would breach confidentiality. Here’s an example: two boys in our school recently lost their stepfather. He was killed violently while in the process of committing a felony. This had an adverse effect, not only on those two boys, but their teachers and their classmates. And when I say “adverse effect” I mean an effect that will probably show up in student test score data. Statisticians call this “noise,” which refers to random happenstances that push or pull data either up or down. They call it noise, because when you aggregate data, positive and negative noise tends to balance out, and the aggregated data isn’t affected. The negative effect of a homicide, for example, could be balanced by the positive effect of another family in the same school whose father got a huge promotion and raise.

But that doesn’t work so well when you drill down to the classroom level, where what remains of our privacy protections prohibit us from providing the context of our students’ test scores. Consider my classroom. I voluntarily took all eight IEP kids in our school’s fourth grade. This was a decision that worked well at the school level; by placing all eight of those kiddos in one class, I could more easily collaborate with the reading resource teacher. Instead of pulling out two or three kids from three different classrooms, each of which is at a different place in the curriculum, she can pull her whole group out from one classroom and focus on the specific skill that they’ve been working on. It works great at the school level, but it’s not going to look so great (for me) if and when my students’ test scores are published in The Times.

It’s great that the Seattle Times is taking such a keen interest in education. They don’t always get it right, but sometimes they do. And obviously, the more information they have to work with, the better. But it seems to me like this agreement gives them access to more information than they can be trusted with.

And that bothers me.

By Tom

Snow Days are literally, if not figuratively, a gift from above. They usually come with some warning, and frequently don’t come despite warning, which is why they always come as a surprise.

Snow Days, of course, aren’t much of a gift. They’re more like a bad loan. We trade a day with inclement weather and 8 hours of daylight for a day with 16 hours of daylight and 70 degree weather. That’s a horrible deal.

And as much as we might think we need a day off now, that need will be far greater in mid-June. Trust me.

But of course Snow Days are neither a gift nor a loan. They’re a response to nature. Moisture blows in off the ocean over a mass of cold air and precipitation falls in the form of snow. Snow makes it hard for vehicles to get around, so schools close for the day. And everyone sleeps in.

And for me, the beauty of a Snow Day is that act of yielding to nature. They remind us that we are not fully in charge here. We can predict snow, we can hope for it, we can even pray for it, but we can’t order it. It either happens or it doesn’t.

And when it does happen, it makes no sense to wish that it didn’t happen or worry about the plans we made that won’t reach fruition.

Just let it happen.

And enjoy it.

By Kristin

The first time I tried taking a practice Smarter Balanced assessment I almost lost my mind.  I was overwhelmed by the user interface, which required me to scroll up and down through a long skinny column of text.  I was defeated by my inability to mark up the text, see the questions and text at the same time, and the test's awkward expansion tab which allowed me to widen the text's column but then prevented me from seeing the questions.  With a big knot of anxiety in my stomach, a headache, and a sense of failure I shut it down without answering even the first question.

When this video went viral, I cheered the student's every word.  Yes, I thought, this has all gotten out of hand!  But then I remembered how much I really liked both the Common Core and its intent – that every student in the country be held to the same high standards.  I like the standards, and I like how well they're aligned from K-12, so I decided to try the SB assessment again and guess what?  It's a good test.

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By Tom

I was reading the Seattle Times the other day when I came across an editorial by the venerable Lynn K. Varner. In it, she describes an essay written by a guy named Ron Clark who quit his principal job because he was fed up with dealing with over-involved parents.

That’s too bad. It sounds like Ron Clark was a good principal, and it’s unfortunate that he was essentially run out of town by people who actually love him. He’s not alone, of course; the education world is awash with tales of helicopter parents who badger their children’s teachers and principals with complaints, questions and comments. They want to know more about a grade on a test. They want to suggest the next field trip. They want to know why their child is sitting in the back of the room. They wonder why their daughter is always picked fifth in kickball.

What they don’t realize is that in a typical elementary school there are 26 kids per class, and twenty classrooms in the school. A teacher deals with fifty parents each year; a principal deals with about a thousand. If every parent contacts their child’s teacher twice a week, either by voice or email, that teacher has to produce one hundred responses. If each response takes three minutes to compose and send, that’s five hours. That’s a lot. Nothing, though, compared to the principal. If she gets only one message per parent per month, that’s 250 responses per week. Her responses, of course, take much longer, since she probably has to find out exactly what happened in whatever classroom the child is in. If this takes ten minutes per message, then…well, you get the idea.

My point is this: teachers and principals in some schools spend an incredible amount of time dealing with parents. Granted, some of this time is well spent. Dealing with parents is an important part of our job. Parents have every right to advocate for their children and we have the responsibility to address their concerns. And there are legitimate concerns that do need to be addressed.

But this should even out across schools. There’s no reason to think that parents in school A, in the affluent, well-connected suburbs, should have more legitimate concerns than parents in school B, twelve miles away, in the high-risk low-income area. (If anything, they should have less) Yet, it seems that wealthy, connected parents have more concerns – and send more messages – than parents in less affluent areas.

In fact, educators in high-needs schools seem to have the opposite problem. They can’t seem to get parents involved at all with their kid’s education. They have low turnout for events, fund raising efforts are futile and permission slips go unsigned.

Then there’s my school. Right there in the sweet spot. Our parents are generally supportive, yet generally hands-off. Permission slips get signed, but emails go unsent. There are well-packed lunch boxes in every backpack, but no helicopters in the hallway.

And that’s just fine with me. When I tell my district colleagues from the rich side of town that I get about two parent emails per month, they ask if we have any openings. I get the same response from teachers in the other end of town when I tell them that I don’t have to buy any coats or shoes for my students.

Life in the sweet pot. And for that I’m thankful.

How about you? Which side of the sweet spot is your school? And how are you coping with it?

By Tom

The National Board recently released the scores to last year’s candidates. If you’re one of those who received some good news, I have a few things to tell you.

First of all, congratulations! You did something incredibly difficult, and you did it successfully. You should celebrate. And I mean a real celebration, not a six pack and a thing of Oreos. This is why they make champagne. This is why they sell “surf and turf.” This is why they let certain bottles of bourbon sit there for ten years. Have fun! If not you, who? If not now, when?

So after your party – and the inevitable hangover – you’ll begin to wonder “What next?” The first thing you need to do is thank those who supported you. Start close to home. Then branch out. Your colleagues. Your cohort facilitator. Your cohort. Your Jump Start trainers. The students who endured your mood swings. Yes, you worked your butt off last year, but you probably weren’t alone. Thank those who helped.

And then think about giving back. Those of us on whose shoulders you now stand worked very hard to build a strong support system in Washington State for National Board Certification. We created Jump Start. We created a system of facilitated cohorts. Most importantly, we pushed for legislation to provide bonuses for NBCTs. You need to know that when we pushed for this legislation, we sold it as an investment. Lawmakers were convinced that the state would get more back than what they spent on the bonuses. We convinced them they would get better instruction and leadership from NBCTs. What that means for you is that you now have to live up to that portfolio you wrote. It also means that you should give thought to taking on a leadership position or two. That shouldn’t be too hard. Most teachers, especially NBCTs, have more opportunities than time. If you’re the rare teacher who has to actually seek out leadership opportunities, please consider your local association. For two reasons: they need your expertise and they, more than anyone, were instrumental in getting the bonus legislation through the legislature. And by the way, you’ve no doubt noticed that the state also has an additional bonus for those teachers who choose to take their expertise to a high-needs school. If you decide to do that, you are truly awesome.

So after the party, the hangover, the thank yous and the committee-joining spree, then what? The next step is to head over to the National Board website and download the renewal materials. So soon? Yes! The renewal process is essentially a continuation of the initial process. You basically have to document what you’ve done since certification to impact student learning. It’s not nearly as difficult as the first time around, but here’s the thing: if you look through the documents now, you can use them as a blueprint for organizing and planning your professional development over the next eight years. If you don’t, you’ll basically be playing a game of backfill; choosing things you did that kinda-sorta meet the requirements of the renewal process. Trust me on this.

A word of warning: don’t fall into the trap of perseverating on those aspects of your results that didn’t measure up. Yes, it was a ten-part assessment, and no, you probably didn’t hit 275 on every single assessment. Neither did I. But let it go. In the world of National Board Certification, no one cares what your final score was. And no one cares whether you passed every one of the ten assessments. It’s about as meaningful as your middle school GPA. There are no mitigating factors or caveats when it comes to certification. It’s only certify or not certify. The only exception is those teachers who certified on their second or third attempt. Those people are in a class by themselves. A higher class. Those people have the perseverance, determination and grit that the rest of us can only envy.

Again, congratulations. And welcome to the community. Now get busy.

By Kristin

CSTP turns ten this year. 

Ten years ago I was teaching at Ingraham High School in north Seattle, pregnant with my first child, and somewhere down in Tacoma Jeanne Harmon thought it would be great if teachers were given the tools they needed to be more involved with creating the education policies that affect them and their students.

I don't know when I first took advantage of CSTP.  I can't remember if applying to write for this blog came first, or if I attended a teacher leadership training through CSTP and then learned about the blogging opportunity, but this is what I do remember about that first interaction: we met at a beautiful retreat center in Seattle.  It felt luxurious.  It felt really good to be sitting in a room with grown up tables and chairs, with windows that looked out onto a fountain instead of in a drafty cafeteria.  For lunch we went to the retreat center's cafe and ate delicious food in a beautiful room, and I thought, "This is what happens when teachers take care of teachers." 

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By Tom

Hi there! Come on in! You must be Paul’s mom.

Yes I am. Hello.

You didn’t bring Paul?

No, he wanted to stay
home. I hope that’s OK.

No problem. It’s good to see you again. We met at curriculum
night, but didn’t really get a chance to talk.

Yes, there was a lot
of people that day.

There was. So Paul tells me your family is from Romania?

I am from Romania. But
Paul was born in America.

So you must either be a vampire or a gymnast.

(laughing) I am not a
vampire! They are all from Transylvania! My family is from Bucharest, south
from Transylvania. But I was a gymnast; most of my life until college! In my
country all of the girls they do gymnastics.

Does Paul do gymnastics?

No, he likes soccer.

Not baseball?

Not baseball, only
soccer.

Well, let’s talk about his academics.

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