Schools eligible for federal improvement grants released

Posted on 12. Mar, 2010 by Heather.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn released the names of 47 schools identified as “persistently lowest-performing schools” as identified by federal guidelines. The identified schools will be eligible for additional Title I funds and must choose one of four intervention models to receive the funds.

The four intervention models are:

1. Turnaround model. Replace the principal, rehire no more than 50 percent of the staff and grant the new principal sufficient operational flexibility (including in staffing, calendars/time and budgeting) to implement fully a comprehensive approach to substantially improve student outcomes.
2. Restart model. Convert the school or close and reopen it under a charter school operator, a charter management organization, or an education management organization that has been selected through a rigorous review process. Washington does not currently authorize charter school operators or charter management organizations. The restart model can only be used through an education management organization.
3. School closure. Close the school and enroll the students who attended that school in other schools in the district that are higher achieving.
4. Transformation model. Replace the principal and take steps to increase teacher and school leader effectiveness; institute comprehensive instructional reforms; increase learning time and create community-oriented schools; and provide operational flexibility and sustained support.

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Lawmakers reach agreements on key education bills

Posted on 12. Mar, 2010 by Mike.

Parents, educators and students have a lot to celebrate this morning. On the final day of the 2010 legislative session, lawmakers reached agreements on key education bills.

Thank you to legislators and especially parents and education advocates who worked so hard on behalf of kids this legislative session.

Basic education funding bill

Lawmakers took the next step in implementing last year’s historic education reform bill (House Bill 2261) by approving the Quality Education Council’s recommendations in House Bill 2776. The legislation:

• Establishes a new and more transparent school funding formula;
• Lowers class sizes in kindergarten through third grade and increases funding to cover maintenance and operations costs; and
• Revises how the state pays for pupil transportation costs.

Thank you to Rep. Pat Sullivan, Rep. Marcie Maxwell and Rep. Skip Priest for your hard work to begin fully funding basic education.

Race to the Top reforms

Washington is in a better position to win a $250 million federal Race to the Top grant thanks to the passage of Senate Bill 6696. The bill will also improve Washington’s public schools by:

• Adopting the State Board of Education’s guidelines on turning around consistently low-performing schools;
• Revising teacher evaluations and creating new principal evaluation criteria; and
• Expanding teacher preparation and recruitment pathways.

Thank you to Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, Sen. Eric Oemig and Sen. Curtis King for your work on this bill.

Early childhood education

Our state’s youngest learners received tremendous support from Olympia in House Bill 2731 and Senate Bill 6759. The bills reaffirm the state’s commitment to ensuring kids start kindergarten ready to succeed. The bills:

• Expand pre-school programs for three- and four-year olds across the state;
• Protect funding for early learning by making it a new state entitlement program; and
• Consider the establishment of a program of early learning in basic education.

Thank you to Rep. Roger Goodman, Sen. Claudia Kauffman and Rep. Ruth Kagi for being champions for kids.

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Oh what a night!

Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by Heather.

Today, the last of the 60-day 2010 legislative session, was a big day for education. First, in the late afternoon, Senate Bill 6759 passed both chambers. Then, this evening we had rapid final passage of three other bills, Senate Bill 6696, House Bill 2776 and House Bill 2731 (last of the night). Together, these four bills will bring meaningful reform to our state, and improve opportunity and education for all kids.

To all of the parents, students and citizens who advocated for kids this session, THANK YOU for all of your time, energy and hard work! We certainly could not have done this without you.

Now that it’s Sine Die, I think I am going to go watch something besides TVW.

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To CORE 24 or not to CORE 24?

Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by Mike.

Mark Mansell has been superintendent of La Center School District for four years.

Mark Mansell, superintendent of La Center School District, is the author of the following guest blog post on the new CORE 24 high school graduation requirements. He is also a member of the State Board of Education’s CORE 24 Implementation Task Force. The next Task Force meeting is scheduled for Monday, March 15th (agenda).

Guest Blog: To CORE 24 or not to CORE 24? That is the question.
By Mark Mansell, Superintendent of La Center School District

La Center School District is a small (1,550 students) mostly rural district in southwest Washington. When the state legislature required a change in math requirements in order to receive a diploma, our school board and community began a process to change our high school graduation requirements. During this process, the State Board of Education (SBE) began to move toward increasing graduation requirements in other areas as well as math. The result is now known as CORE 24; twenty-four credits in total (previously only 19 credits was required). Because CORE 24 is only going to be instituted when and if state funding is provided, initially we didn’t include much about it in our thinking as school staff and administrators. It was simply hard for us to imagine how the state would ever pay for the additional credits. But soon that thinking would change and in a big way.

During this work to explore various proposals on possible new La Center graduation requirements that included the additional math credit, our school board and community stakeholders involved in the process kept comparing our proposals to what the SBE was proposing. They kept asking, “How does this proposal match up with CORE 24?” As superintendent, my answer to this question was probably very typical. I would state, “CORE 24 has not been funded by the state and we are all very aware that the state doesn’t even fund what they expect us to do now.” We would then return to the work of focusing on simply adding the additional math credit and making other adjustments to address what our students needed to achieve. But the questions about CORE 24 kept occurring in one form or another. Each time I would provide a different variation of the same answer revolving around funding or the need for additional organizational capacities, that well, involves additional funding. Round and round we went for I don’t know how many meetings.

What makes this community discussion about CORE 24 more interesting is that I was at the time of this work (and still am) a member of the Implementation Task Force (ITF) working to develop recommendations for the SBE regarding implementing CORE 24. I was in the middle of all this effort on CORE 24 at the state level with more than twenty other practitioners from across the state, all working to ultimately develop recommendations on how to move these proposed new state graduation requirements from concept to reality. Yet all I could come up with in my own community was to provide some answer about lack of funding or the needed additional system capacities. Please don’t get me wrong. Funding is absolutely essential to successfully providing the types of learning experiences students need to prepare them for the world they are expected to live, work and most importantly learn in throughout their lives. So before you go to the place where you decide I must be some kind of Kool-aid drinking ideologue that believes schools can be operated on bake sales and you are wasting your time reading this, please hang with me.

Our high school operates on a six-period schedule and our old graduation requirements were set at 23 credits. With 24 credits possible (6 credits per year for four years), each student had, for lack of a better description one “Do Over Credit”. Even with this one extra credit, we believed we were already asking our students to work at their capacity. Honestly, we felt there wasn’t much more we could ask of them without additional funding to provide more teacher contact time. Even then, how many students would want to go to school longer? But then everything changed for us was when we stumbled onto a question that we simply could not answer. As they say in sports, it was a game changer. The question was, “What do our students actually achieve in terms of credits and courses right now when they graduate and how does that align with CORE 24?” I was stumped! I had no answer and could not find a logical way to link it back to funding. I had never thought of that before as I had always considered CORE 24 relative to our graduation requirements and not what students were actually doing/achieving. Looking back on it now I think, “Well that is a no-brainer”. But it simply never dawned on me to think about this issue from this new perspective. To get at an answer to this question, we completed a transcript study of our most recent graduating class. Our goal was to determine exactly what our students were accomplishing compared to the minimum graduation requirements we expected. What we found changed our thinking about what was possible.

What we learned was that 100% of our graduates met CORE 24 in English and Social Studies. 73% of our students achieved the credits necessary in Math and 53% met CORE 24 standards in science. Furthermore, 60% of our graduates earned 24 or more credits, even though we only required 23. In fact, without ever changing a thing to our graduation requirements, 45% of these students actually met all the requirements of CORE 24 without even knowing they did so. It became instantly clear to us that we were limiting ourselves by using funding as the barrier for seeing how we could align our graduation requirements with CORE 24. But you might be thinking, “Hey, what about the other half who didn’t meet CORE 24?” This is the part that really knocked me for a loop. We then looked deeper at the transcripts of these students and found many examples where students had either a short senior year schedule, had TA (teacher assistants) credits on their transcript or simply needed only a few course changes (credit substitutions) in order to meet CORE 24 requirements. In short, there were numerous examples where it appeared as though students “coasted” through their senior year given that they didn’t need to use their “Do Over Credit”.

Without question, we had an estimated 10-15% of our students who probably would have been between a rock and hard place to meet CORE 24 for various reasons given the current structure. But given four years (the class of 2008 didn’t know they were aiming to meet CORE 24 standards) and a clear awareness that the “bar” is raised, we decided it was entirely possible to align our new graduation requirements with CORE 24 beginning with the class of 2013 (incoming freshmen in 2009). We have now begun learning how to provide the necessary supports for those potentially struggling students. For us, thinking about ways to support the 10% to 15% of our students who need to be supported differently is a much more doable endeavor than operating from the perspective that 100% of our students need to be supported differently. Quite frankly, aligning to CORE 24 standards was simply a way for us to catch up to what most of our students were already achieving.

So you might be thinking about now, “I am glad that it is working for you guys in La Center, but our district is different.” I have served in several districts around the state over my career, so I am not naïve to the fact that every district, school and community is different. What has worked for us in La Center may not work for your district. However, I believe that funding may not be the issue we are all making it out to be relative to CORE 24 implementation. As stated above, I firmly believe that the state of Washington needs to fulfill its constitutional requirements to amply fund public education. But on the other hand it is our opportunity to use the funding we have garnered to provide what students need as best we can. Let’s face it, raising expectations both for our students and for ourselves is a good thing not only because we are absolutely capable of it but also because it’s what is needed. To tackle this challenge, we must not limit our thinking nor overlook data that can truly define the barriers before us.

In La Center, completing a transcript study allowed us to think differently and to see more clearly the possibilities before us. I would encourage every district in the state to consider doing the same and then decide from there what they can and can’t do without more funding. To quote Albert Einstein, “The ultimate form of insanity is to do the same things over and over again and expect different results.” This not only applies to our actions, but also needs to apply to our thinking. I wish you the best as your district works through (and hopefully thinks differently about) this important and essential endeavor.

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Education advocates send letter to Sen. Brown and Speaker Chopp

Posted on 10. Mar, 2010 by Mike.

More than two dozen parents and education advocates sent a letter today to Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown and Speaker Frank Chopp urging them to work together to pass critical education bills. The full letter is below.

——————————-

To: Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown
House Speaker Frank Chopp

CC: Senator Rosemary McAuliffe, Chair, Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee
Senator Margarita Prentice, Chair, Ways & Means Committee
Representative Dave Quall, Chair, House Education Committee
Representative Pat Sullivan
Senator Mike Hewitt, Republican Leader
Representative Richard DeBolt, Republican Leader
Governor Christine Gregoire

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Dear Senator Brown and Speaker Chopp,

First and foremost, thank you for all that you do every day for the people of Washington, including the 1 million Washington children who are the future of this state. We appreciate your leadership in the last session to advance education reform in a concrete way that hasn’t been done in 30 years. We are so grateful because we measure things in kid years, and for the first time your historic leadership on education reform reflects a level of urgency and commitment that really stands apart.

This letter is addressed to both of you because, as parents with no agenda other than simply advocating for children, distinctions of chamber, party, and parliamentary procedure are not the lens through which we view this issue - we simply view you as Washington’s leaders representing Washington’s children.

We are writing to ask that the Senate and the House work together to pass a package of education bills (6696/2776) that addresses both RTTT and continued commitment to increase basic education funding. We fully agree that giving our state the chance to compete for RTTT funding is important. We also feel strongly about concurrently advancing the House and Senate’s commitment to basic education funding as laid out in 2261.

As the rest of the country and the world move forward with bold investments in their children’s futures, we want Washington State to take its place among the leaders in public education. Please come together to find a solution that preserves the progress made last year while creating new opportunities to bring world-class education to Washington’s children.

Thank you so much for your public service - your dedication is deeply appreciated.

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Draft Common Core standards released

Posted on 10. Mar, 2010 by Heather.

The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers released the draft K-12 Common Core standards this morning. NGA and CCSSO are asking for feedback, so those interested should have at it.

Education Week coverage here. Press release below:

DRAFT K-12 COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS AVAILABLE FOR COMMENT

NGA Center, CCSSO Release First Official Public Draft

WASHINGTON-The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) today released the first official public draft of the K-12 standards as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a process being led by governors and chief state school officers in 51 states, territories, and the District of Columbia.  These draft standards, developed together with teachers, school administrators and experts, seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce. 

The NGA Center and CCSSO have received feedback from national organizations representing, but not limited to teachers, postsecondary education (including community colleges), civil rights groups, English language learners, and students with disabilities  The NGA Center and CCSSO encourage those interested in the standards to provide further feedback by Friday, April 2, 2010, at www.corestandards.org.

“We are pleased to release the K-12 standards today and to begin reviewing comments from the public,” said Dane Linn, director of the NGA Center’s Education Division. “These standards build upon the goals articulated in the college- and career-readiness standards released last year and will ensure our students are prepared to compete and succeed in a global economy. We look forward to working with educators, leaders and state board members in the states as they consider adopting these standards that will guide their educational programs.”

“The feedback and comments states and our additional stakeholders have provided us are solidifying these standards into the better standards our students need,” stated Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO. “We will continue to work diligently and tirelessly to ensure these standards are where they need to be, and today we are asking the public to help us do just that.”

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards are:

• Aligned with college and work expectations;
• Clear, understandable and consistent;
• Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
• Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
• Informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
• Evidence- and research-based.

The standards are expected to be finalized in early Spring. For more information, visit www.corestandards.org.

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Time’s running out for pre-K in the Senate

Posted on 08. Mar, 2010 by Bonnie.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Session is nearly over. It could finish with a solid step forward for early learning OR more talk without action. Right now, it could go either way. Last week, the House passed a robust bill (SSB 6759) that would pave the way for increased access to affordable preschool for kids across Washington. Now it’s up to the Senate to take action.

Thousands of kids are crossing their fingers hoping the Senate will stand up for kids and support quality early learning. We only have three days to influence the final outcome.

We need YOU to make it happen.

The final legislation must include these key elements:

1. Improve K-12 outcomes across the board and close the achievement gap by offering all eligible at-risk children with quality preschool as soon as possible;

2. Protect funding for the state’s comprehensive preschool program (the Early Childhood Education & Assistance Program); and

3. Develop a blueprint to provide quality preschool opportunities for all children in Washington State.

The House took a position last Friday and passed a bill that includes all three. Please ask your state senator to support high-quality preschool

Want more specifics on the bills?

The Senate version of SB 6759 creates an implementation group to look at how we can get from a program that serves only the most at-risk children to one that offers quality preschool opportunities to all children. The bill charges state officials and community partners to be very thoughtful and deliberate about the next steps and what we need to do to take them - and how such a program could work with the state’s overall program of basic education.

The House passed a floor amendment that improves SB 6759 by adding two key elements (from HB 2731). First, it would protect the current funding levels for the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) preschool. It also makes sure that all children who qualify for the program get served as soon as possible and it asks the Department of Early Learning to report with recommendations about what other groups of children might also need the program right away.

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State House passes Race to the Top legislation

Posted on 05. Mar, 2010 by Kelly.

The State House has passed legislation to help Washington win a federal Race to the Top grant and begin fully funding basic education (E2SSB 6696). The bill now goes to the state Senate for concurrence.

Now, parents and educators need to contact their state senators to urge them to support Senate Bill 6696 as it passed in the House. This plan will begin fully funding basic education as they promised in House Bill 2261 and help Washington win a $250 million Race to the Top grant.

Here’s why it’s urgent you contact your state senator. Currently, the Senate is making:

• No commitment to begin fully funding basic education as they promised in last year’s House Bill 2261. Yesterday evening, they passed legislation that ignores HB 2261 by rejecting key recommendations of the Quality Education Council.
• No commitment of state dollars to make real the required education reforms necessary to help Washington win a Race to the Top grant.

Tell your state senator to support Senate Bill 6696 as it passed in the House. This bill adopts Race to the Top reforms and keeps our commitment to begin fully funding basic education.

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Spokane mom sends video message to legislators

Posted on 05. Mar, 2010 by Mike.

Lisa Layera Brunkan, one of the famous library moms in Spokane, sent a video message to state education leaders today. In the message, she asks lawmakers to pass legislation to begin fully funding basic education and help Washington win a federal Race to the Top grant. Lisa talks about her young kids and why passing Senate Bill 6696 matters to them.

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Students protest higher education budget cuts

Posted on 04. Mar, 2010 by Mike.

University of Washington students joined their peers across the state and nation March 4th for a National Day of Action to protest tuition increases and cuts to financial aid programs at colleges and universities. View the video below of UW students protesting higher education budget cuts.

In Olympia, students at Evergreen State College marched to the state Capitol building where lawmakers are considering further cuts to higher education funding. The students were escorted from the Senate gallery after they began singing. Read more coverage from the Olympian.

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