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.

"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.

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?

Most ideas for improving Seattle Public Schools require additional funds. For example, lowering class size, while appealing to close the gap with private schools, would be too expensive to implement easily.

Alternative programs can increase the appeal of public schools, expand the student population, improve market share, increase support from the community, and drive revenue, yielding gains for all schools.

For example, the extremely popular language programs at John Stanford are oversubscribed. Depending on parent interest, additional schools with other specialized focuses (science, green/nature, cultural, math. advanced learning) could be created with all city draws, then expanded if successful.

Alternative programs offer an inexpensive way to attract more students to our public schools. More students means more revenue, more support for our public schools in elections, and more community involvement in our schools.

Why don't we hire our school superintendent locally? Why not select someone who is already a respected member of the Seattle community -- maybe a beloved retired principal or community leader -- who already knows, understands and values our schools, parents, teachers and children? Maybe the superintendent should be elected directly by the voters instead of chosen by the 7-member school board. A local superintendent would not need to reinvent the wheel but would have a head start in understanding our schools and may more readily get parental buy-in for his/her ideas. The current national trend of hiring out of state superintendents who don't stick around very long is proving to be problematic. Plus, a local superintendent who will remain in the area after his/her tenure is up is more likely to be held accountable to the community for her/his decisions.

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

The Seattle School Board has little power. They merely appoint a superintendent. They have little ability to investigate policy, verify information they receive from the superintendent's office, or audit the performance of the administration.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that Seattle School Board seats are not full-time positions. School Board Directors have little time to spend on their duties and no funds to independently check or investigate the administration.

If the School Board Directors were full time positions with a modest budget, they may have more ability to investigate and audit. It would allow the School Board to serve as a check and provide more accountability in government.

Seattle has one of the lowest public school participation rates of any major city in the US. Only about 68% of Seattle children attend public schools compared to 80-90% for normal US cities.

This is aggravating most of our other issues with our Seattle Public Schools. High market share is critical to have community support for public schools, to be able to pass taxes that fund the public schools, and to maximize the involvement of parents in helping the schools. Seattle Public School funding from state and federal sources also is directly tied to enrollment.

Cutting costs by increasing class sizes, closing schools, and eliminating alternative programs may yield short-term gains, but only at the cost of larger long-term losses in revenue and community support. This is a death spiral that has been going on for many years.

Until most parents see Seattle Public Schools as an attractive option, our schools will have little support, fail to improve, and fail to educate the children of Seattle.

It would be interesting to know what the Superintendent's current approval rating is with the parents of students in Seattle Public Schools.

Polls can be run very cheaply these days. For $50-100, anyone could run a telephone approval rating poll of the current administration using services like CallFire.

It would be an easy article for someone in the press. At this point, it is widely assumed that the superintendent's policies have made her unpopular, but just how unpopular is not clear. Getting her approval rating would be of interest to parents, teachers, administrators, the school board, the mayor's office, the city council, and many others.

SPS High Schools are all very different......with unique programs that appeal to different kids and families due to interest or abilities.....some of those programs, like jazz at Garfield and jazz and drama at Roosevelt, tech at Ballard should be available to students who don't happen to live in the neighborhood. Those teachers should have a limited number of seats every year that would allow students to audition or test in......the same way kids do for Garfields' advanced academic program. Its a shame that a gifted trombone player would have to go to their neighborhood school, which may have music, but not at the national level that Garfield or RHS has, just because they do't live in the neighborhood.