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.

Continue reading →

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?