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.

Another first . . .

Well, it became official today - Washington became the first state to lose the ESEA flexibility waiver.  As I have shared in many posts this was not unexpected, but it doesn't make the distinction feel any better.  You can read about it in many places.  I first saw it on the Tacoma News Tribune site, then in an announcement from OSPI that included Secretary Duncan's letter.  Below is the paragraph from the Secretary informing Superintendent Dorn of the waiver loss that was caused by not putting into legislation the requirement to use state assessment data in teacher evaluations.

This means going back to the accountability requirements of NCLB as measured by AYP.   The accountability target  is for EVERY student in the state to be at standard on all state administered assessments by this year, a standard that will not be met I believe by any school district.  Since we and many districts are now piloting the new Smarter Balanced assessments and will not be getting any results from the pilot I wonder how we will be measured.  In any case we, like all across the state, will be sending letters home informing parents that we did not meet AYP goals and providing them with the required options.  We will also need to set aside 20% of our Title 1 revenue for transportation and/or private tutoring for next year.

Given all that we are doing to change practice and support teacher growth that results in increased student achievement this is a step backward driven by federal decisions on what is best for our schools.  I struggle with this decision and with what we will now face as captured in this Comment by Secretary Dorn in the Tribune article.

Dorn, the state superintendent of public instruction, said in a statement Thursday that he agrees with Duncan that "student progress should be one of multiple elements in a teacher's evaluation." He said lobbying by the state teachers union was to blame for Washington lawmakers' failure to act, and now the state's loss of the federal waiver.

"Unfortunately the teacher’s union felt it was more important to protect their members than agree to that change and pressured the Legislature not to act," Dorn said in his statement.

TPEP was a collaborative effort between multiple agencies including WEA and OSPI to design an evaluation system  focused on growth over time to influence practice and student achievement.  The statement above captures the  loss of collaboration that went into the development of this model and describes an adversarial current reality that emerged in the last legislative session.  We owe the creation of these battle lines to a decision made at the federal level that once again tells us their one size fits all prescription for school reform has greater potential to increase achievement than anything that we might come up with at the state and local level.

National honors for another school . . .

Congratulations to Shadow Lake Elementary School students and staff for joining a select number of schools recognized as National Green Ribbon Schools.  They join 47 others across the nation in receiving this honor and are one of only two from our state this year.  They also join three others from our system Tahoma Junior High School, Tahoma High School, and Glacier Park Elementary School who received the honor in year one and two of the program.  I know that no other district in the state has this many recipients and wonder if it has been replicated anywhere in the country.

We also were honored at the state level as a Green District Leader, a step below being nominated for national district honors.  Many thought we were in position to be the district nominated by the state for this honor, but Vancouver received distinction.  Wonder what we need to do to make it over that hump and also wonder which of our schools will come forward to continue the tradition of having at least one school receive the honor in each year of the program.