Promoting student voice . . .

The Board met this evening in a work study session with the newly elected members of the High School ASB Executive Board and adviser, Dave Peters.  It was an opportunity for the Board to share their commitment to increasing opportunities for student voice in decisions that impact their school experience and for the students to provide input, feedback, and hopes or the future.  We talked about many things with a focus on school culture, their current reality, and how a shared aspiration can become the catalyst for change.  I believe that they left feeling some tension around a couple of issues in their current reality that they would like to see change.

These are committed young people wanting to support change in their school that results in a positive experience for their peers and for their teachers.  As adults, we need to reflect on our practice and create structures that identify when the student voice is value added and how that student voice will become a part of these decisions.  It was an energizing evening with both groups deciding to continue the conversation in August and then again following Homecoming.  I am pleased to have played a small role in this transition as I believe that these young people have much to offer in changing our practice as adults from what can we do to them to what can we accomplish together.

Not worth it . . .

I must once again post about our state's loss of the NCLB waiver to share the letter below written by a Lake Steven's School Board member, David Iseminger, to Secretary Duncan.   I came across it in an article by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post.  He does an excellent job of letting the Secretary know what he and many of us feel about the recent decision to pull the waiver.  I applaud him and welcome the conversation that comes from his letter around how we will respond in August to the requirement to send the "failure" letter required in the NCLB sanctions.  Perhaps it is time to once again push back. Would the Secretary take the step to withhold funding if districts didn't send the letter required by legislation that the he has called flawed?

Many thanks for Iseminger's leadership with this letter and for setting the stage for how we should respond to the bullying from Washington D.C.  His conclusion that the waiver is not worth it is one that should be echoed by all of us as we join WSSDA in pushing our legislators in Washington D.C. to replace this broken legislation with a model that supports learning and growth and one that can support achievement gains for all students.

Though not the norm for me, I will share the entire letter as Strauss did in her article.

April 29, 2014

Dear Secretary Duncan,

Last week you revoked Washington State’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver, resulting in nearly every school in Washington being considered failing by your Department of Education. This summer, as a School Board Director in Lake Stevens, WA, you’re requiring I send a “failure letter” to parents of any school that receives your funding.

Your reason for revoking our waiver: we didn’t pass legislation you wanted. More precisely, we passed legislation, but it didn’t have the wording (actually, one specific word) you wanted.

Since you’re so distant from us – nearly 3,000 miles by one measure – let me tell you about this other Washington: We have strong leadership in our board rooms, schools, and classrooms; we have professional and effective educators; and our students are capable, confident, and work extremely hard. But don’t take my word for it – our SAT scores, among other measures, speak for us.

When NCLB was passed twelve years ago, it focused America’s resolve to elevate our children and our future. It was about accountability, about setting lofty and worthwhile goals, but it was also about believing in our educators, leaders, parents, and students. It was about what we would strive for, work toward. It was aspirational.

Today, NCLB has been subverted into a name-calling, label-applying bully pulpit. It languished in Congress, now six years stale, until failure according to its antiquated yardstick has become a certainty.

We tried to help. With input and work from many education advocates, Congress was provided an extensive list of fixes that would make NCLB workable and forward-thinking, and keep us all accountable. I was there too – as a member of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) Federal Relations Network (FRN), I made the trek to Washington D.C. multiple times to ask our members to reauthorize, year after year. While there, many of us from Washington also met with people from your Department of Education, in your building, trying to create relationships and press for a change in policy and tone: stop telling our students and educators they’re failing, I said.

In Lake Stevens — and in school districts across America — we lead by example. We create confidence, capacity, knowledge, and opportunity for everyone in our community. There is a palpable and ubiquitous culture of excellence in Lake Stevens, where it’s common knowledge that each individual is supported, challenged, engaged, and empowered. Such things don’t appear overnight, they’re not accidental, and I have no intention of having our work undermined by distant labels and bracketed explanations.

The schools you’d have us call “failing” are anything but: we have Schools of Distinction (one of them four years running), we have Washington Achievement Awards schools, and we have a Reward School.

The leaders whom you also assert are failing – me included – are not. Our school board has won the national Magna Award and is a recognized Board of Distinction. I am an elected member to the Board of Directors for our state-level Washington State School Directors Association (WSSDA), and my fellow Lake Stevens Board Director is President of WSSDA.

It’s not that I don’t understand your NCLB numbers or metrics. I work in the Business Intelligence group at Microsoft, part of the Cloud + Enterprise Division, so data and analytics is what I do.

And I’ve done the analysis. I’ve weighed the cost of your revoked waiver and considered its benefits, and the conclusion is clear: it’s not worth it.

You can keep the waiver. And regarding your failure letter – I have little interest in using our Lake Stevens letterhead to tell our students and educators they’re failures, because they are not. That letter is the topic of much discussion in our state – including whether we send it at all.

Our school leaders are strong, our educators are exceptional, and our students are dedicated. Fourteen days before school, what they will hear from leaders in Lake Stevens is this: the bar this year is raised again, we believe in you, and you must continue to strive for excellence. They will hear that we are behind them, and that we believe in them without reservation, or caveat.

If you pull our funding, you’ll be forsaking Washington’s most needy students – the very students for whom the original ESEA legislation was passed 50 years ago. You’ll be abandoning those students, but we won’t. In Lake Stevens – and in everydistrict across America – we’ll do whatever we must to ensure no child is left behind, waiver or not.

The irony is not lost on me: you revoked our waiver because we didn’t pass a law that you wanted. If you’re not sure what to do with our education-related failure letter, I know 536 folks in Washington, D.C. who seem pretty deserving right now.

Sincerely,

David Iseminger

School Director, Lake Stevens School Board, Washington State

Something to get behind . . .

Mari Taylor, Washington State School Director Association (WSSDA) President, today distributed a resolution from her organization asking Congress to prioritize passage of a revision to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.  Doing so would replace NCLB, a law that Secretary Duncan in 2011 said was broken.

“No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now,” said Duncan during testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk,” Duncan continued.

Three years later the law is still in place and has led to the Secretary having the power to cancel our state's waiver from a law that he called broken.  This WSSDA effort makes complete sense to me and I welcome the opportunity to share it with our School Board.  This is an effort that I support, can get behind, and I thank WSSDA for taking the initiative to start this process.  The law has been in place for twelve years and should have been revised many years ago.  The time is now before other states suffer a similar fate for pushing back against a one size fits all model to school reform.

Common ground leads to . . . .

In a post by John Thompson at This Week In Education he shares a piece by John Merrow called the Common Core Brouhaha.  Merrow identifies a set of circumstances involving unlikely political allies that could lead to the end of Common Core State Standards and national tests.

. . .The glib analysis, which is is actually kind of clever, goes something like this: the right hates the CCSS because they are ‘common,’ and thus denigrate individualism and limit choice, while the left detests them because they are ‘core.’ (Or maybe it’s the other way around.)

When left and right find common ground, something big is happening. In fact, we may have a perfect storm brewing, where forces upset about a variety of controversial issues create enough noise, rancor and controversy to reshape public education. These groups may not be against the same things—and they definitely are not for the same things, but the weight of their outrage may be enough to topple the Common Core State Standards and the accompanying national testing.

It is an interesting piece and not long if you have a few minutes.  I want to share one additional paragraph from the article that captures one of our core beliefs. Though we identify it as such, we are finding that it is easy at times to identify words on paper that capture it, but more difficult to consistently align with our behavior.  This was reinforced in a recent bargaining session with teachers that resulted in some creative tension, self reflection, and commitment to change practice.  On a larger scale all those that come to the table, including teachers and technocrats, must come capable of suspending long held assumptions and willing to be influenced.

If we end up starting the higher standards process all over again, let’s agree that teachers must be well-represented at the table. Education is, at the end of the day, about relationships. It’s not a commodity to be acquired, and children are not objects to be weighed and measured. Teachers have to be trusted, because the enterprise cannot succeed without them, no matter what technocrats may believe or wish.

Falling short or drawing the line . . .

Today, the Joint Select Committee sent their required response to the Supreme Court's directive for a detailed plan on how the legislature will fully fund their definition of basic education by 2018.  As expected it fell short of a detailed plan since none emerged in the recent short session.  I'll share the first two responses I saw that capture the deep divide on this issue and the state of Education in our state.

The first is from Liv Finne in a post at the Washington Policy Center.  In it, she echoes what we have heard from many legislators.

In the report lawmakers tell the Court that it is the Legislature’s duty to define the program of basic education and to fund it:

“With the bounds of the constitution, the Legislature retains authority for selecting the means for Article IX implementation. And within the bounds of the constitution, the Legislature may change these means.”

The Select Committee also noted:
“...this case has not surprisingly sparked significant debate over the separation of powers and the role of the judiciary in budgeting policy.”

She makes her objections to the court's position clear and believes that the McCleary decision has little chance of improving public education in our state.

With each passing year it seems increasingly clear the McCleary process is not working. The McCleary lawsuit started in 2007. Five years later, on January 5th, 2012, the state Supreme Court issued its decision. Now, two years further on, the justices continue to wrestle with the long and tortuous process they created when they announced they would “retain jurisdiction” over the case and ordered lawmakers to submit regular reports.

The second response is from Superintendent Dorn in an OSPI release.  In it he takes the opposite view of Liv Finne and challenges the legislators to provide and fund the plan to meet their definition and timeline for basic education implementation.

The 58-page document released today says very little, and is far from complete. It isn’t even a plan. It reads like a small history lesson. It includes a list of bills that “are meaningful because they show significant work is occurring.”

The problem is that “none of these bills passed the Legislature.”

The document concludes with the plea that the Court “recognize that 2015 is the next and most critical year for the Legislature to reach the grand agreement needed to meet the state's Article IX duty by the statutorily scheduled full implementation date of 2018.”

In other words, Wait until tomorrow.

But I have to ask: Will tomorrow ever come?


The Legislature isn’t going to take its responsibility seriously unless the Court forces it to do so.

I believe that these responses demonstrate the deep divide that describes our current reality and that results in the lack of collaboration and capacity to reach agreement on how to close the gap.  One views the response as falling far short while the other sees it as appropriate and necessary to draw the line on court intervention into the policy arena.  If you are inclined, you can read the report here.  If not, you can wait like me to see how the court will respond.

Losing the capacity to compare . . .

As we read about the growing number of states considering their commitment to the Common Core State Standards we need to remember that the push back started with states reconsidering their alignment with one of the two national testing consortia supported by $360 million in federal money. Recently, in a contested action the State Superintendent of Education in South Carolina joined others from one of the two Common Core testing consortia in the recent decision to drop the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.  That leaves 22 still with Smarter Balanced, 16 with PARCC, and 1 with both groups. What will the other 13 be doing for state assessments since all states, as a condition of the waiver process, are required to assess using these or state developed college and career ready standards? They will work with other testing organizations or develop their own.

This leaves us with an interesting situation since having all states using the same set of standards and administering similar assessments was a major selling point for Common Core implementation.  With the recent pull out by South Carolina and others from PARCC such as Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Alabama the capacity to rate states on a one time test is diminishing.  How many more states will withdraw before mandatory implementation in 2015 is anyone's guess.  Though the Smarter Balanced pilot seems to be going well in our state there have been problems in others that may influence the outcome.

Like many systems across the country, we have expended considerable resources on common core to align curriculum, assessment, and instructional practice and still have far to go.  I do not believe that moving away from these standards and assessments in the short term is best for our students and teachers as we have experienced far too many standard changes over the years.  We need stability and opportunity to refine our practice not more shifting of priorities in the political winds.  Below, is a map from Education Week with the current state testing alignment.

Following up on our FIRST . . .

My last post on Washington State being the first state to lose a NCLB waiver resulted in a few comments that included one from Scott where he shared a statement from State representative Reykdahl. Later, Amy Adams shared a post from Diane Ravitch's blog with additional quotes from Rep. Reykdahl that I will share below.  Though many would dispute the belief that the recent legislative decision was collaborative I believe that all would share that the process used in developing TPEP was a collaborative effort and that TPEP implementation is having a positive impact on teacher growth in our system.

I like what Scott shared.

“My message to President Obama and Secretary Duncan is that Washington State is committed to education reform that is collaborative, bipartisan, and focused on student success and teacher growth. Our legislative decision to reject the federal government’s demands was done with substantial deliberation and a deep respect for state and local control.

And, from the Ravitch post this part of his statement that captures my concern with the one size fits all strategy used by the federal department to force change.

“The bipartisan rejection of this federal government demand during the 2014 legislative session is a strong and unifying message that our state fully embraces our constitutional 10th Amendment guarantee to develop, fund, and administer our state’s education system as the citizens of the state of Washington and their elected representatives determine, not as federal officials deem it appropriate.

Finally, the following statement that captures for me the absurdity of holding our state, young people, and schools accountable to policy that should have been replaced seven years ago and that all realized would not be possible to achieve.

“No Child Left Behind is a failed policy of the Bush administration that focuses on student failure and school punishment. This is no way to run a public education system. Enacting bad policy at the state level as a result of bad policy at the federal level will not help schools – and certainly won’t help students – be successful.”

We had to wait two months for Secretary Duncan to officially revoke the letter and now we wait to understand how the archaic accountable measures of NCLB will re reimplemented in our state.