The "Option" schools, such as TOPS, have provided true alternatives to families whose refererence area schools were not suitable for their child or family's needs, especially south end families. Access should continue to be by lottery (after siblings).

The current proposed assignment plan now limits access to some of the best alternative programs to the generally wealthier, whiter and more vocal north end families. A good example is TOPS. TOPS has provided a true alternative high quality choice for many south end families. One of the best aspects of TOPS is its diverse, all city population...its what makes TOPS "TOPS". It will now essentially become the neighborhood school for the wealthier Eastlake and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. Radically changing what was most attractive and successful about TOPS.

Currently we have a weak school board. The school board is a rubberstamp body, and serves as a cheerleader and buffer for the Supperintendent and her staff. The J.C. Policy-Governance model calls for the Board to limit its role to writing and revising policy, hiring, firing, and evaluating the Superintendent. The Superintendent's role in this model is to uphold and enforce Board policy, to make sure the entire district is observing all state and federal laws, to be appropriately responsive to the community, and to show good moral judgment.

The Board evaluates the Superintendent by reviewing his/her statement as to how he/she upheld and/or made progress on implementing each Board policy.

Instead of boundaries, use a relative distance metric to prioritize enrollment. Consider anyone whose closest school is School A to have a "zero" distance to that school and all such people have the same priority, whether they are one mile or 0.1 mile away. If you apply to some other school, prioritize by relative distance as compared to your closest school. So if you are 1 mile from School A (your closest, elementary/middle/high school), and 1.3 miles from School B, your relative distance to apply to School B is 0.3 miles. This would cure all of the zones (Queen Anne, Magnolia) that aren't closest to anything on a straight metric but all have a "zero" distance school (Ballard) by this metric. It also eliminates the need to draw/redraw/haggle about boundaries, and predict "guaranteed" enrollment zones based on demographic projections.

"Concerning a family who has a child or children who currently reside in and attend their CURRENT reference area school:

If the new boundaries would move this child and his or her siblings to a different reference school and/or cluster, that child, and his or her siblings will be able to continue to attend the historic reference school and cluster; essentially the family would be "grandfathered" to the previous reference school."

I feel that it is very important to distinguish these families, like ours, who consciously and deliberately purchased a home within a certain reference area so that our children, and family, could actively participate in the neighborhood school community. We worked hard to find a home that would ensure us the greatest opportunity to attend our neighborhood reference school. It is dissappointing (to say the least) to think that our hard work to accomodate and honor the historic reference area boundaries may be overlooked with a blanket policy elminating the grandfathering of siblings.

1) The single greatest determinant of student academic progress at a school is teacher effectiveness. It has more impact on progress along the learning continuum than class size, education spending, teacher pay, or student demographics/background. If we are going to spend a dollar to improve education, we’ll get the biggest bang for that buck by improving teacher quality.

· A student assigned to an effective teacher for a single year may gain up to a full year’s worth additional academic growth compared to a student assigned to a poor teacher.

· Effective teachers can achieve gains of 50 percentile points more than ineffective teachers when working with students of like background and prior achievement levels. This teaching difference can be the difference between future assignments of accelerated vs. remedial courses.

· A child that has two weak teachers in a row may never recover from that deficit without a major intervention. Even very effective teachers in future years are unable to make up the lost time.

· Over the last 50 years we have tripled the number of teachers in the US while the student population has increased by 50%, with no commensurate gains in academic performance. More teachers doesn’t equate to better learning. Better teaching does (it makes obvious intuitive sense -- a great teacher can be great with 28 or 32 students; an ineffective teacher is ineffective with 32 or 28 students).

2) The anger one feels when his/her child gets “the bad teacher” (or the relief you sense when you get the good class) is completely justified by the research. That placement decision will have a real and potentially insurmountable impact on a child’s future academic progress and thereby affect the rest of his/her life. Given that with two ineffective teachers in a row a child never makes up the difference, one could reasonably assume that knowing the effectiveness of each teacher should be of paramount importance, but…

3) The current processes for evaluating teacher quality/effectiveness are largely meaningless. In districts that use a binary evaluation rating (satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory), 99% of teachers are rated as satisfactory.

4) There is no incentive for anyone to change the evaluation process because evaluations have no impact in a system where seniority is the only factor in determining layoffs.

5) If our primary concern for our school system is how it can most improve the learning of our kids, then the issues that often get parent communities in an uproar (class size, numbers of schools and school closures, etc.) are red herrings that miss a (the?) critical point. It’s all about teacher quality – if parents are going to be outraged about something in schools, then the lack of clear measures of teacher effectiveness and the seniority-only RIF system should be at the top of the list.

6) Equally devastating is the missed opportunity of not actively identifying the great teachers who are in every school, capturing what they’re doing successfully, and finding effective means for sharing and replicating that success. The answers to many of our greatest educational challenges are sitting in successful classrooms across the country, and because we don’t have effective and objective evaluation systems we are failing to learn from the best and instead repeat the same mistakes and learning curves.

It’s the definition of insanity…

If we know all of this, then the adults involved are complicit in a negligent act – parents, teacher unions, individual teachers who remain silent, and district administrators.

We are knowingly maintaining a system that every year will condemn some children to an educational deficit they will never recover from in order to protect the lowest performing adults in the system who cause this deficit. We all allow them to keep doing their damage and hope it isn’t our kid who gets the short straw, keeping potential superstar (or at least competent) teachers out of classrooms. Although this may not meet the legal definition of “negligence”, it’s hard to accept that a reasonably prudent person would do this – it’s negligent.

The seniority-only system is the first lynchpin that needs to be pulled. While that remains in place, there will never be enough pressure or momentum to develop effective, objective evaluation processes for teachers – why bother with the effort to develop a complex evaluation system when it will have little/no impact on anything?

If teacher effectiveness becomes a legitimate evaluation factor, then we will be forced to:

1) Define effective means for evaluating that effectiveness

2) Acknowledge based on data rather than opinion that certain teachers are outstanding and should be the focal point for shared learning and growth

3) Identify/implement professional development that measurably leads to increased teacher effectiveness

4) Acknowledge, again based on the data, that some teachers are ineffective and have remained so after being given opportunities and support to improve, and remove them from the classroom

What say should a neighborhood have in its "neighborhood school"? If the district wants to increase enrollment in under-enrolled schools, they should start meaningful, on-going dialog with the parents of those communities -- not just a one-time feedback meeting or form, but something akin to a "customer advisory panel" charged with gathering broad community input. They shouldn't spend millions on a performing arts center, STEM program, or anything else without *knowing* that more students will enroll in that school as a result of that spending. That requires real buy-in from all stakeholders. All principals of neighborhood schools should be held accountable to neighborhood satisfaction. (Principals come and go -- especially as of late -- but the people who live in the neighborhoods deal with the long-term consequences of their schools.) Stop thinking of parents and neighborhoods as obstacles, and realize the opportunity they represent: Thousands of passionate, motivated people willing to do all kinds of work to help the district succeed.

The District's program placement policy says that programs should be located where the students live. The north-end APP students live in the north-end, but their program is located in Capitol Hill. It should be moved to a north-end location to reduce transportation costs and times, improve access, and facilitate family involvement. McDonald would be a good choice. Also, the Highly Capable Students Program Policy requires the program sites to be equitably distributed around the District. Right now they are both in the Central part of the city. If the program were created today, would it be located south of the Ship Canal?