High Schools

The New School Plan

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

SARAH BOWEN plays a mean violin. For three years at Eckstein Middle School, she was her grade’s concert master, a desirable designation bestowed upon the top violinist in the entire orchestra. In other words, her path to higher learning is paved in half notes and treble clefs. Or it was until she found out last winter that, based on nothing more than her address, she’d been assigned to Nathan Hale High School, which didn’t even have an orchestra program. “We became very active last year in trying to have a reasonable discussion about this with the district,” says Sarah’s dad, Keith Bowen. “And basically we got snubbed each time.”

The neighborhood-school concept is so accepted—and entrenched—in most cities not named Seattle that it’s practically passe: If you live within the boundaries for Clark Kent Middle School, you’re going to Clark Kent Middle School. What that system lacks in options it presumably makes up for by encouraging neighborhood ownership of the school.

On the other hand, Seattle Public Schools’ decades-old open-choice program has given picky parents the power to apply, on their kids’ behalf, to any school in the district. And what that plan lacked in community building, it presumably made up for by encouraging niche curricula: Don’t think the science program at West Seattle High is challenging enough for your overachieving teen? See if you can get her into Ballard High—and the district will pick up the crosstown transportation tab.

At least that’s how it worked until the 2010–11 school year: From now on, all incoming kindergartners and sixth and ninth graders are assigned to their neighborhood school. At its core, it was a change jump-started in 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down SPS’s method of integrating schools. But the district prefers to focus on the positive, pointing out that the new student assignment plan excises the complexities inherent to the open-choice system, which included tiebreakers for students who fought for spots at in-demand schools. “In the past, you had every choice except predictability,” says SPS enrollment manager Tracy Libros. But Sarah Bowen’s less-than-desirable school-assignment sitch underscores the ways in which the new plan is testing some families’ ability to adapt to change—and the district’s ability to meet every student’s educational needs.

Image: Charlie Schuck

iPad illustration by Benjamen Purvis

In theory, the neighborhood-school plan wouldn’t be a problem if parents believed the educational offerings were comparable at every SPS high school. And although superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson says the district is trying to level the academic playing field across the city, it’s a work in progress. In Bowen’s case, it wasn’t until other parents like hers complained that administrators at Nathan Hale tuned up an orchestra there. But faced with the prospect of languishing in a fledgling program, Bowen decided her only choice was to go private and attend Bishop Blanchet.

Now, the neighborhood-school system hasn’t stripped parents and students of all of their options. In fact, this year 10 percent of the seats at each high school were left open for students who live outside their preferred school’s attendance-area boundaries. But unless they had an older sibling already there, they landed in a random lottery. And there’s no guarantee that the district will be that flexible in the future. The new student assignment plan mandates that each high school offer open-choice seats, but it doesn’t specify how many. A subsequent transition plan approved by the school board set the 10 percent target for this year, but even Libros isn’t sure what will happen next year. “The percentage of open-choice seats may decrease and it may increase.”

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Even more troubling for parents whose kids were assigned to schools they wanted to attend is the potential for overcrowding. Contrary to district projections that enrollment at SPS high schools would drop this year, the incoming freshman class at every high school except Ballard and option school Nova was actually higher than the average enrollment of the other three classes. According to enrollment figures released in mid-October, this year’s sophomore, junior, and senior classes at Garfield each average just over 400 students, while the freshman class has ballooned to nearly 550. The crowding was so extreme earlier this year that students struggled to get through the cafeteria line before their lunch period was over. It’s hard to say for sure why enrollment spiked. The economy may have hit parents’ budgets for private school. But it’s not a stretch to presume that kids who went private in the past are going public now because they’re guaranteed entrance to desirable public schools. The very thing that the district was striving for—namely, predictability—may be what’s choking its schools’ hallways.

Of course, it’s not all bad. In fact, it’s mostly good. School-choice applications at all grade levels dropped from more than 13,000 last year to less than 6,000 this year, which means that instead of spending money busing kids all over the city, the district can devote more funds to classrooms. And those students who applied to schools outside of their ’hood had a considerably less complex system to navigate: After receiving their assignment in February, they could opt for open enrollment, choose their preferred schools, and wait until May to hear if they got into one of them. Even the educational offerings are expanding. For the first time ever, every SPS high school offers some Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. “And that’s the promise of the new student assignment plan,” says Goodloe-Johnson.

As for violin virtuoso Bowen? She’d requested a seat at Roosevelt, but because it’s an in-demand school she’d resigned herself to attending Blanchet—and her parents had paid the $500 deposit. But then last summer she got a call: She’d been accepted to Roosevelt. “We put in a whole lot of time and energy and money,” says Keith, “and really, the only thing it came down to was that we won the lottery.”

One Size Fits Some

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: James Yang

YOU CAN’T SAY Seattle Public Schools didn’t need to do something: A few years ago, SPS language arts department heads sat in on classes at each of the district’s comprehensive high schools and found that, not only was there no consistency in what, say, 10th graders were learning from one school to the next, there was none from one class to the next in the same school. The district saw more than just an achievement gap. It saw gaping holes in who was learning what and when. “We had different levels of rigor and complexity being taught, so a student could graduate from one high school with a completely different education than a student who graduated from another,” says Cathy Thompson, SPS executive director of curriculum and instruction.

The solution was—at least in theory—fairly simple. Set standards common to all of the schools in the district and build syllabi around them. That way, if Sally sashays out of Franklin with a B average and Bobby walks away from Ingraham with a B average, they will have—again, in theory—mastered the same skills.

Teachers and administrators call it curriculum alignment, and as far as the district was concerned, it was long overdue in Seattle. For years, each high school had been left more or less to its own devices to set standards, write curricula, and develop classes. Some found their own niche, excelled at what they taught, and became desirable all-city draws under the old school-choice system. Others foundered. “There was the sense during that time that schools would be competitive,” says Kathleen Vasquez, the district’s project manager for curriculum alignment. “You create your own curriculum, you outperform other schools, and there would be this natural competition. I think that ended up not serving us very well.”

So last year, under Vasquez’s watch, teachers from around the district began adapting national and Washington State standards (and in some cases, standards from other states) to build aligned curricula in math, science, language arts, social studies, and world language. And no one could accuse them of slacking on rigor. (Do you remember being required to “analyze an author’s use of satire, sarcasm, irony, understatement, or other means that requires a reader to understand various layers of meaning in a text” as a senior in high school?) Those standards began to roll out in SPS math and science classrooms this year.

Sounds reasonable—unless you’re a teacher at one of those schools that had built a reputation as go-to buildings for big-brained book learnin’. Because as they see it, the new method of raising expectations at the underperforming schools is lowering them in the overperforming ones.

Consider language arts. The required courses are intro to literature and composition, world lit and comp, American lit and comp, and comparative lit and comp. Anything outside of that track doesn’t count toward graduation, which has teachers who have spent years developing specialized classes that strayed from traditional curricula but still met rigorous, school-specific standards worried that they’ll have to abandon lesson plans that worked in the past. “Part of what we do is adapt what we teach to what’s happening in the world, what we know about, what our kids know about,” says Eric Muhs, a science teacher at Ballard High School. “Education is ultimately a very personal thing. It’s about creating an environment that’s exactly what your students need at that moment.”

Muhs teaches an astronomy course that qualifies students for five science credits at the University of Washington, but as the aligned curriculum shifts to a four-year life sciences, biology, chemistry, and physics track, he’s convinced the astronomy course will die. (Strangely, the district says that the new aligned science curriculum was in place this fall, but Muhs says that for the 2010–11 school year it’s been business as usual at Ballard.)

At Roosevelt, some departments had “blocked” their lesson plans, so that when students were learning about China in social studies, they’d be reading a book written by a Chinese author in language arts. Now that language arts teachers must choose four novels from a district-approved list of 20, that’s no longer an option. “And that’s just the ninth and 10th grades,” says Maggie Everett, a language arts teacher at Roosevelt. “At the junior and senior levels, we had an options program, where students were allowed to choose classes like African American Literature. But the district has come along and said, ‘Nope, one size fits all.’ ”

Everett, Muhs, and other teachers in their position say they’re not just resisting centralized oversight after years of autonomy. Instead, their argument boils down to a simple request: Don’t punish us for doing our job well. The district insists that it isn’t and points out that students from low-income families who are more likely to change schools deserve to receive a consistent education no matter where they land. And it says teachers who believe their specialized classes meet the new standards can submit the syllabi for district approval—although it may need to do a better job of getting the word out. Neither Muhs nor Everett was aware of any process for approving their nonaligned classes.

Muhs—who will cop to sounding like a bit of a conspiracy nut—is livid about the perceived attack on his class and even wonders aloud if curriculum alignment is the first step to basing teacher evaluations on standardized tests. Everett, on the other hand, is resigned to the district’s new world order. “This isn’t a problem for me. I’ll work around it,” she says. “I just feel like teachers and people on the front lines know their students best and know how to teach them from where they are to where they can go.”

Talk Supe

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Courtesy of Seattle Public Schools

SEVEN YEARS AGO, Maria Goodloe-Johnson declined to apply for the job as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools and instead took the same job with the Charleston County School District in South Carolina. “The [Seattle] school board was very confused,” she says. “And I wasn’t interested in confusion.” She won’t get more specific than that when describing the district circa 2003, but it couldn’t have been drastically different than the situation she inherited when she accepted the Seattle school district’s top spot in 2007.

Attendance at South Seattle schools was sinking. The school board had adopted a new student assignment plan without any idea of how to implement it. Schools were teaching to vastly different standards. Heck, the district’s computer system was so outdated, prospective teachers had no means for applying online for jobs at multiple schools at once. SPS lacked accountability and administrative oversight, and Goodloe-Johnson whipped out her ruler and started rapping knuckles almost immediately.

A firm hand may have been just what Seattle schools needed, and administrators aren’t paid to give warm fuzzies. But in three years, Goodloe-Johnson has—fairly or unfairly—developed a reputation as a prickly leader who favors top-down rule over democratic collaboration. As one SPS parent who worked for years in the tech industry put it, “The district would rather just shove the answer down everyone’s throat: ‘This is what we’re doing. This is what the best practice says to do.’ And you know what? It might even be the right answer. But if you don’t convince parents and teachers that it’s the right answer, you’re going to have a hard time succeeding.”

Many parents and teachers have been left cold by Goodloe-Johnson’s seemingly distant demeanor. But they’re more concerned by what she’s done as they are by how she’s done it. They question her commitment to accountability in the wake of a 2010 state audit that found school employees were overpaid by more than $335,000 between September 2008 and August 2009. And when they learned last winter that she sat on the board of the Northwest Evaluation Association (whose Measures of Academic Progress test the school board agreed to use in Seattle schools, at a cost of $370,000 for the 2009–10 school year and $453,000 for the 2010–11 school year) their faith in her leadership abilities plummeted. She’s made efforts to reach out to teachers and parents, promised to correct the district’s fiscal miscues, and stepped down from the NWEA board, but the damage may already have been done: The teachers’ union, Seattle Education Association, voted no confidence in Goodloe-Johnson in September and declared that “students deserve a district where educators work collaboratively and seek solutions based on the best evidence available. It has become increasingly evident…that Seattle superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson does not represent these ideals.”

Six weeks after the vote, she addressed some of those criticisms.

Your management style has been described as autocratic, that there’s an aloofness, that there’s an unwillingness to listen.
Aloof? I’ve never been described as aloof. What does that mean, and where was that observed? I listen to people all the time, in various settings. I’ve done teacher chats since I’ve been here. I’m at community events. I’m at PTAs. There’s a very clear difference between not liking what I say or disagreeing with what I say and calling me aloof. So it would be interesting to know what that example is.

They say you spend more time using your BlackBerry during school board meetings than engaging the public.
I use my BlackBerry all the time. I had one person who was offended that I use my BlackBerry. Okay, so I won’t use my BlackBerry. How is that interacting with people?

I guess it would be a lack of interacting. There’s concern that you’re not receptive to input from parents. People say you’ve said, “If I’ve heard a complaint from one person, I don’t need to hear it from anyone else.”
That’s an absolute misrepresentation of the truth. I’ve never said that.

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Do you need the teachers’ confidence to do this job?
We need everybody’s confidence for our children. It was a very fast pace of change, lots of things had to change, lots of things went into place, so it’s hard. Change is very difficult. So I believe that we have to continue to determine how to integrate what teachers are concerned about. And it’s not just me, it’s the entire system. It’s unrealistic to think that I’m the only person that needs to hear it. Because it takes lots of us to get the work done. I can’t do this work by myself.

What do you hope to do to regain the confidence of those teachers?
Hope’s not a strategy. This year when I do teacher visits, I also have brown bag lunches. So I give teachers an opportunity to talk. And I’ve actually done it in three schools. No agenda. Just [an opportunity] for them to ask questions [and address] concerns and rumors. That’s a strategy that I’m using this year when I go out to visit schools. We also did a newsletter that will go out to talk about the things that I hear. I’m going to do that again.

What do you think when you hear—
When I hear that, I ask the question, What is it based on? Instead of playing a guessing game, there have to be things that are happening that they feel like need to change or they’re frustrated with. So what I did was look at what the vote of no confidence was about to get some kind of context of what our teachers are concerned about. If you don’t have any context for what they’re concerned about, then any road will get you there or won’t get you there.

"Aloof? I’ve never been described as aloof. What does that mean, and where was that observed?"

What did you find when you looked into what the vote was about?
The interesting thing that I found in talking to SEA leadership is that they had a concern about MAP, Measures of Academic Progress. People interpret the fact that I sat on the board for NWEA—which is a governance, not a paid position—as the reason that we’re doing MAP. So I no longer sit on the board because it’s a distraction. It’s not true.

What’s not true?
That we did MAP because I sat on the board. There was no financial connection at all. I forget how many districts in Washington use MAP. It’s a formative assessment that gives real-time data and information to teachers. They thought it was a conflict of interest. It wasn’t a conflict of interest. It continued to be a concern, and I thought that if that’s the biggest issue, it’s not worth the distraction.

I think the concern came from the fact that you didn’t disclose your position on the NWEA board before the school board decided to implement MAP. Do you wish you had disclosed that sooner?
Sure, absolutely, because it’s not worth the confusion. But when the confusion is corrected, then how long do we hang onto it? I didn’t think about it at the time because I wasn’t involved in the RFP. I wasn’t involved in looking at all of the different assessments that could be chosen. I wasn’t involved in any of that—just in taking the recommendation to the board.

So what’s next on the agenda? What’s the next big thing?
Continuing to implement the strategic plan. We need the levy to pass so we can continue with the curriculum alignment. We still have a lot of work to do. Bottom line: Close the achievement gap and improve academic achievement.

You bring up the levy, so I have to ask: There are teachers who are rallying against it, because they don’t have the faith that the funds would be used for what the district says they would be used for.
You clearly have to say what you’re going to use the levy for.

I understand, but what is your response to the fact that you have teachers in your district who plan to vote against a levy for the schools?
That’s unfortunate, because if teachers vote against the levy, then they won’t have textbooks, they won’t have curriculum alignment, there will be huge cuts that will impact schools and teachers. And there won’t be the support for the new contract that rewards teachers through career ladders, which is really treating teachers like professionals. So they’ll be hurting themselves and kids to vote against the levy. But of course, everybody has a choice.

[And they exercised that choice November 2, when they overwhelmingly voted to approve the levy.]

Geek Boot Camp

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Charlie Schuck

Stylist Ashley Helvey; hair and makeup by Megan Dodge

"CHECK THIS OUT! We’re cutting and pasting, people!”

You’d think David Friedle’s shoes were spring-loaded, the way he pogos around in front of his students. The Cleveland High School media studies teacher is amped. He yelps. He points and clicks, and fires off questions. He’s…teaching desktop publishing. Wait, what’s so exciting about that?

For starters, it’s not just the subject. It’s how he teaches it. As of this year, Cleveland has dumped the stuffy old stand-and-deliver lecture style that most of us suffered through in high school. And in its place, teachers develop projects that hit all of the same standards that kids at every other Seattle Public School must meet, but unlike their fellow fledgling learners at, say, Ballard or Garfield, Cleveland students tell their teachers what they need to learn to finish those projects. Right now, Friedle’s kids are learning how to design a magazine-style feature article—complete with photos, sidebars, timelines, etc.—for a presentation on historical revolutionaries that they’re working on in their social studies class. A touch of “inmates running the asylum”? Maybe, but the idea is to put the onus on the kids and get them thinking about what they know—and what they don’t know. “If we can give kids not just a knowledge base, but also give them the tools for finding out what they need to go forward, we’d be doing the best possible thing for them,” says Cleveland principal Princess Shareef.

That project-based learning style is Part One of the school’s academic face-lift. Part Two: ramping up the rigor, through a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math. (That’s STEM, for short.) After years of tumbling test scores and paltry enrollment, Cleveland is trying to rebuild its reputation and draw from all over the city college-minded kids—and their parents—who in years past would have scoffed at the idea of going to a Southeast Seattle School. And to cultivate that magnet-school vibe, Cleveland’s exempt from the district’s new student assignment plan; 100 percent of the ninth-grade seats from now on will be open-choice.

The idea is to put the onus on the kids and get them thinking about what they know—and what they don’t know.

Actually, it’s not entirely accurate to say the STEM curriculum is a focus. It’s more of an all-encompassing, total-immersion boot camp. Freshmen enter one of two academies: the school of life sciences and global health or the school of engineering and design. From there, they move on to the college-readiness academy in 11th and 12th grades. And in those four years, they’ll not only take life sciences, biology, chemistry, and physics (which, by the way, is one more science class than the state mandates), but they’ll also take four additional science classes specific to their chosen academy. Oh, and then there’s four years of math, too. “When colleges look at their transcripts, they’re going to see a lot of advanced math and science,” Shareef says. “Regardless of whether they want to continue in STEM-related studies, they’re going to be able to get into the schools they want to get into because their transcripts will look so great.”

It’s hard to argue with that, but all of this—the project-based learning, the STEM program—was a lot of change in one year. Because it’s an option school, this year’s freshmen came to Cleveland knowing that they’d be thrown into the science-and-math deep end. But the sophomores, juniors, and seniors who were enrolled there last year didn’t necessarily sign up for this. Shareef says that by and large those students who were grandfathered into the program have coped well, and she notes that non-STEM subjects like language arts, history, and world language are still part of Cleveland’s curriculum, as required by the state. And although those classes will incorporate the project-based learning method, they won’t—as some parents assumed—be crammed with unnecessary tech content. “You want technology integrated into all of the classes, but you don’t want it forced,” Shareef says. “That puts the focus on technology instead of on the learning that’s supposed to be going on.”

And then there was the faculty. Turnover at Cleveland was high this year, partly because some teachers couldn’t—or didn’t want to—adapt their instructional style to the project-based learning method, and partly because they had to commit to a longer day and submit to a new, multitiered teacher evaluation. Friedle is one of the ones who stuck around. “I’ve been wanting to do this for years,” he says, still visibly buzzed from his demonstration. “It’s hard to do, and it takes a lot of maintenance. But I love it.”

Smart and Smarter

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: James Yang

THE QUESTION SHOOK Molly Seaverns from her bed like a late-night earthquake: “If the viaduct goes down, where will my kids go to high school?” It was 2004 and the longtime West Seattle resident was still three years and a natural disaster away from needing to worry about her older son’s post-middle school plans. But given her choices on the peninsula, it was a justified freakout: Chief Sealth had long been considered a school for slackers, and at the time West Seattle High had just a four-period day. “I’d been around schools long enough to know that they’re like battleships,” Seaverns says. “They take a while to turn around.”

After her viaduct-inspired panic attack, she found the solution to her quality-school conundrum on the other end of the city. Since 2002, North Seattle’s Ingraham High School had offered an International Baccalaureate degree, and after touring the school and seeing the impressive results they were getting, she set out to convince one of West Seattle’s high schools to launch a similar program. IB is a decades-old system of challenging college-prep courses that 11th and 12th graders can take a la carte or combined in a two-year diploma track. Students tackle subjects in greater depth than in AP courses, they take a discussion-heavy class that explores how they know what they know, and their test scores are verified by IB administrators outside of the school. “When you have an IB program, it lets the whole world know that you have rigorous, well-rounded classes that don’t have any grade inflation,” says Ingraham’s principal, Martin Floe. “It’s meaningful.”

Heartened by what she’d learned at Ingraham, Seaverns invited community members and the instructional councils from Chief Sealth and West Seattle High for a meeting of the minds at the Fauntleroy Community Center to pitch them on her IB plan. Nearly 250 people packed the house. (“It was really exciting,” Seaverns says about the turnout. “Usually you can get people to show up if they’re angry about something, but it’s really hard to motivate people to think about, ‘What if?’ ”) One of the attendees was Chief Sealth’s new principal, John Boyd. He’d been looking for a way to draw neighborhood kids back to the school, and this, he thought, was it. “From a grassroots demand standpoint, we felt it could be powerful for our school,” he says. “The prestige of IB changes the image of schools.” Boyd walked out of the meeting energized and presented the idea to his teachers. Nearly 80 percent were in favor of installing the program at Chief Sealth.

In 2007—after some in-depth internal discussions and a yearlong accreditation process—Chief Sealth rolled out its IB offering. By the next year, 14 juniors had signed up for the full diploma program. This year, 115 juniors and 75 seniors are taking at least one IB course. Even better, the program’s emphasis on deep thought is starting to seep out of the classrooms and into the school’s culture. “Kids used to talk about what was happening at homecoming,” says Chief Sealth’s IB coordinator, Laura Robb. “Now you hear kids talking about what they did in class and having intellectual discussions in the school.”

Actually, the IB bug is spreading outside the school, too. The viaduct hasn’t come down and Seaverns’s sons ended up going to Garfield (having begun the Advanced Placement program in middle school, they were guaranteed admittance), but the IB program is already accomplishing one of her other goals: reducing the number of West Seattle defectors. “I care about my community and friends,” she says, “and I really didn’t want anybody else moving out because they didn’t have options.”

About That “Knowing What You Know” Class…

It’s called Theory of Knowledge, and it’s one of the harder-to-classify courses in the IB curriculum. We asked Ingraham senior and IB diploma candidate Nick Westmoreland to explain it.

Every junior asks his friends who are seniors, “What is theory of knowledge?” And he usually hears a lot of laughs. The seniors say, “You’re just going to have to wait and see.”

It’s a class unlike any other class that I’ve ever taken before. You’re talking about knowledge and learning, but it’s not about what you’re learning. It’s about how you’re learning it. It’s pretty light on homework. It’s really just discussion. So it’s sort of a philosophy class.

A lot of kids think it’s kind of a drag. I think part of that is just because it’s after school two days a week, and who wants to be at school two extra hours, two days a week? But I think they take away a lot more from it than they think they have.

6 Ways for Seattle Schools to Score Higher

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: James Yang

MELISSA WESTBROOK and Charlie Mas have been schooling parents on the local public education system for four years at the Save Seattle Schools blog (saveseattleschools.blogspot.com), a meticulously researched compendium of news about and analysis of Seattle Public Schools. We asked them to weigh in with their priorities for getting the most out of public schools in Seattle.

The district’s number one goal should be to support students. How to do this? We need to provide early and effective interventions for every child working below grade level as well as ensure that those who are working beyond grade level are given access to challenging curricula. But most important, the district must fulfill its commitment to “academic assurances.” When SPS wrote the new student assignment plan, it noted certain items that were important for all schools, including special education, gifted programs, and bilingual services. Committing to individual student needs would send a powerful message about what this district is willing to do to make sure that every student succeeds.

1. Start students thinking about college early. For example, frame every single teacher’s college diploma and put it at child’s-eye level near the classroom door. Make sure every teacher references that diploma throughout the school year.

2. Get help to struggling students fast. The Everett School District launched an aggressive multiyear effort in 2003 to graduate more students, and it worked: By 2010, the district graduation rate had spiked from 53 percent to 90 percent. Teachers identified every high school student who was in academic trouble (and in some cases used Facebook to determine what happened to students who stopped showing up for class) and, with the help of full-time “success coordinators,” they designed personalized tutoring and encouragement strategies to get students back on track. This kind of intervention needs to happen in SPS across all grade levels.

3. Increase access to special education. SPS’s new student assignment plan includes having more special ed students in general education classrooms in their neighborhood school, rather than sending them to schools farther from home with larger special ed programs. Under the new system, most teachers need an instructional aide at least part of the day to give those students the one-on-one attention and guidance they need, and that currently isn’t happening. The district must provide teachers with the necessary support to meet this inclusion goal.

4. Maintain high-quality programs for gifted students. The district’s gifted programs are part of the Advanced Learning department. This system is popular, but with the new student assignment plan’s emphasis on neighborhood schools, the district needs to do more to make sure each program has the same quality and services from school to school. And the schools themselves must continue to reach out to minority students who are underrepresented in these programs by doing something as simple as calling parents of gifted students to outline the benefits of the program.

5. Offer more support for bilingual services. Nearly 129 languages are represented in the district, and it’s a big task to try to address bilingual students’ needs. But the district has long been neglectful of these programs, especially at the secondary level. For example, last year the district moved its Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center—a transitional program for new foreign students—into the decrepit building that used to house Meany Middle School. And millions of capital-building fund dollars promised to the program have yet to be spent. A firm financial commitment needs to be focused on these students.

6. Expand language immersion programs. What might also help with bilingual services is better access to immersion programs for all students. When the John Stanford International Elementary School began offering such classes in Spanish in 2000 and Japanese in 2001, they were an instant hit. The district now has two other elementary schools with language immersion programs. Yet, not only are these attendance-area schools (meaning only students in that assigned area have access to those programs), the district hasn’t rolled out a comparable program at any SPS high school for those students to continue their studies. The district needs to commit to a timeline for expanding these options.

Parents As Search Engines

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Charlie Schuck

Stylist Ashley Helvey; hair and makeup by Megan Dodge.

MY DAUGHTER’S IN seventh grade, and by the time you read this I will have been to one private high school fair, four private high school open houses, and at least one party where I turned perfectly pleasant small talk into a ruthless interrogation on the relative merits of Seattle Prep and Holy Names. (What can I say? Their kids were students!)

My friends know how highly my husband and I value education; so now do my readers, whose incendiary responses to a column I wrote in these pages when we were searching for a middle school possibly crashed the Seattle Public Schools community blog. And we support public education—having sent our daughter to public elementary school, then moved across town for the sole purpose of penetrating the attendance area of the public high school, Garfield, we figured was the best fit for our kid.

Now Garfield is 150 to 300 kids oversubscribed (depending on whom you ask), has a football program freshly in shambles (depending on whom you ask), and—I discovered when I called to do a little preliminary scouting last week—employs at least two staffers who don’t know whether non–AP track kids can take AP classes. (They can. And let the record show: Those Garfield staffers were themselves a step ahead of an SPS employee who didn’t know Garfield was a high school.) In other words—and, uh, no need to stop the presses—Seattle Public Schools is loaded with enhancement opportunities.

Thus our new willingness to consider private high school—possibly the only logical conclusion to our heightened standards—a position we didn’t expect to be in after throwing (all of our spare) money at what has been an extraordinary middle school. This explains the two-years-early research—which my friends never tire of teasing me about, but which all the experts say is the smartest way to winnow the field—and the boorish party behavior, which is…well okay, it’s a personal failing. But one that stems from the second biggest expert recommendation: Poll everyone you know.

Pay attention when schools offer up info. Pay more attention when they don’t.

That’s because school open houses and tours tell you everything they want you to know, much of which is indeed significant. (Pay attention when schools offer up info on class sizes, how easy it is to get into good classes, graduation rates, that sort of thing. Pay more attention when they don’t.) But parents whose kids have been there can dish on the culture of the school—a much more revealing indicator of its suitability for your kid. Don’t ignore what those parents have to teach you—talk to enough of them and you’ll draw a pretty solid bead on which school is filled with future ulcer patients, which is impenetrably cliquey, which is overrepresented by designer handbags and, sigh, designer drugs.

And I’m narrowing the field to the ones our daughter and we will pay closer attention to next year, when we’ll have our hands full with tests and applications. It’s a two-year process all right—particularly this year, when the new neighborhood-draw system for populating the public schools is so fresh. That new system is altering Seattle’s school landscape in strange and subtle ways. Families like us are moving to snag seats in schools they like—or, in more than a few cases, lying about their address to achieve the same end. Worse, public elementary schools will undoubtedly grow even less racially and socioeconomically diverse than they already are, reflecting more narrowly the demographics of the neighborhoods they draw from.

O irony, when the private schools—once the country clubs of Biff and Muffy, but now, being smart, genuinely committed to diversity—are, at the elementary level anyway, the most integrated game in town. The other wild card these days is the grim economy, which many local private schools insist has not reduced applications so much as it has increased quests for financial aid.

So… more competition for the precious few private school openings—last year Lakeside got 272 applications for 48 freshman slots—and, thanks to this recession, less disposable income with which to pay for them?

Alas, the best advice of any is to understand that—with private schools—it’s ultimately not your choice at all. Wise is the private-school shopper who learns enough about her local public school to make peace with her child becoming a student there, should the privates shut the little darling out.

You know, Garfield does have a killer music program.

Private Lives

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Charlie Schuck

Stylist Ashley Helvey; hair and makeup by Megan Dodge.

THERE ARE 50 private high schools in the greater Seattle area. Some have sprawling tree-lined campuses, others are urban enclaves nestled among the bustle of downtown. Championship football teams, award-winning mathletes, budding artists, future humanitarians, and technology whizzes have all found homes at some of the city’s most prestigious academic institutions. And while your options are vast, narrowing the field to the school that best suits your child’s needs is no small task. So we went back to high school, walked the halls and sampled some of the most exciting programs and extracurriculars. Which school is best? It’s all about finding the right match.

Wi-Fi High
Unless you hail from the future, your high school chemistry class was nothing like the chemistry class—heck, any class—at Eastside Preparatory School. Students curl over touch-screen tablets and scrawl equations, which they submit with the press of a thumb to the chem teacher, who projects the entries onto a large screen for close scrutiny. The school, founded in 2003 by parents working at Microsoft and other local tech companies, takes its gadgets seriously. Assignments are posted on the school’s intranet, synced to students’ tablets, and are completed, graded, and returned without the use of printers. Even art is relatively paperless, with a “digital reality” course—filmmaking with digital cameras and stop-motion animation—attracting more students than the old-school paint-brush-and-canvas classes.

Parents are the driving force behind Eastside. “A couple of years ago I was asked to put together a three-year plan for the rollout of new systems to bring our school up to a higher standard,” says director of technology Jonathan Briggs. “The parents raised the money in one year and challenged me to implement all of it immediately. ” Eastside Prep graduated its first senior class in 2009. Those 11 students will likely fill their parents’ shoes at the top tech companies.—HM

PRIVATE SCHOOL GAME PLAN

A calendar for parents.

June Choose at least three schools to apply to

July Do your research: Surf the web, interview parents

August Learn the deadlines for applications and decisions

September Schedule testing

October Attend school open houses

November Line up letters of recommendation

December Fill out applications

January Mail applications

February Schedule visits at prospective schools

March–April Acceptances and denials arrive; inform schools of your decision

May Attend new-student events

Real Initiative
High school senior John Curry voted for the first time on November 2. But we bet he knew more about what was on the ballot than you did—especially when it came to Initiative 1098. The 18-year-old volunteered to campaign for the initiative to create a state income tax for the wealthy. “Volunteered” might not be the right word. Northwest School, on a tree-lined street in Capitol Hill, requires seniors to spend 18 hours working for a political cause before they can graduate. Not that Curry’s complaining. Though the gig entailed phoning voters who often hung up on him, the canvassing paid off. “Those times when you connect with the voter and tell them something that they don’t know—that to me is what this whole project is about.”

Part of a humanities class that also includes politics, the program furthers students’ understanding of the real-world applications of the Constitution, says teacher Daniel Sparler: “There is some resistance to the requirement at first, but by the end of the experience there is a lot of ownership among the students.” And for some students, the real-world applications become immediately apparent. Hannah Rempel joined a campaign against Initiative 1107, the proposal to revoke the sales tax on certain foods and beverages, only to realize, while watching a news segment on the initiative, that her family would be directly impacted. In the segment, her father, who works in the health-care industry, was interviewed, commenting on how much the initiative would affect his employment. The initiative failed.

Check Mates
Lakeside School, where mini Bill Gates and mini Paul Allen once nerded out over proto computers, is an obvious hatching ground for world leaders—a teen Ivy League campus with brick facades and a clock tower. But these days, the future masters of the universe are as likely to be at chessboards as keyboards. Blame Siva Sankrithi, a math teacher who moonlights as the chess coach. By placing Lakeside’s chess team on par with, say, the football team—Lakeside nabbed first place at both the Seattle Metro Chess League and the state team championships last year—Sankrithi has turned rook wrangling into the extracurricular activity on campus. During lunch and other downtimes, cadres of kids can be found bent over speed-chess matches and Bughouse, a variant of the game played in teams. On Monday night the more formal training ensues, as Sankrithi leads 25 students through drills with the help of local chess master Josh Sinanan of the U.S. Chess League. The sessions, says Sankrithi, not only make for better board game jockeys, but reward critical thinking and ingenuity. The pawn-pushing posse’s goal: Dominate the United States Chess Federation tournament in Nashville in April 2011. After that: Dominate, like the Lakesiders before them, everything else.—CD

Social Ed
There are just 67 students in grades nine through 12 this year at Seattle Waldorf. That’s because Waldorf’s new at the high school game. (Until three years ago it was only a collection of K through 8 schools.) You could argue that the traditional concept of school would be new to Waldorf, too. There are no electives. Virtually no textbooks—students create their own, called “morning lesson books.” No courses as you might recognize them. Instead, this fall the freshman class spent two weeks working on a biodynamic farm; the sophomore class worked at a sustainable forestry camp; the junior class focused on urban manufacturing. “The world needs human beings who can work with each other in a profound way,” explains admissions director Neil Weinberg. “It’s a social education.”

And once students go for the nontraditional track, they never go back. Alum Clare O’Connor tried. After attending Waldorf for grades K through 8, O’Connor wanted to branch out and attend a traditional school. So for ninth and 10th grades, she did, earning straight As. But she was bored by nightly worksheets and weekly quizzes. She reentered the Waldorf fold for her junior and senior years with rekindled interest in a learning environment that nurtured independent thinking among a class full of like-minded peers.—HM

High Schools

The New School Plan

GROWING PAINS

One Size Fits Some

ADVANCING

ADVANCED PLACEMENT

With Honors

18

Talk Supe

Geek Boot Camp

BRANCHING OUT

47

Smart and Smarter

INTERNATIONAL STARS

About That “Knowing What You Know” Class…

6 Ways for Seattle Schools to Score Higher

Parents As Search Engines

STIFF COMPETITION

Private Lives

PRIVATE SCHOOL GAME PLAN