Jose Banda Visits Wallingford and Talks School Reform

On Monday night Jose Banda visited Hamilton and fielded Q&A.  His introductory message was focused on making sure all students learn common core standards and making sure that there is equity access to opportunities for all student groups. He said he was most impressed so far with the level of engagement parents have their schools in Seattle, and that he hadn’t been seeing that in California.

The main Q&A line from parents was that many upcoming siblings of students at JSIS are not able to attend that school given the new neighborhood based student assignment policy. The school district is in a bind given that JSIS building capacity is maxed out with a tiny boundary area, so every new student let in can mean unfairly excluding somebody else. For more information and to try and help craft a compromise, see the SPS Web site on the school assignment plan.

I used his visit to follow up with him regarding the upcoming teacher contract negotiations and the school reform movement.  Below are a few written questions he submitted answers to before the meeting, followed by live reform related Q&A with him:

Test Scores and Teacher Evaluations: When speaking with district staff and teachers it is clear that high stakes testing is foremost in mind. Proponents of high stakes testing say it is necessary to establish teacher quality and to get teachers all on the same page regarding curriculum. Opponents say that the data is noisy and forces classrooms into dreary test taking drills at the expense of team teaching, student collaboration, project based learning, student presentations, and creative work. The issue was largely responsible for the unanimous no confidence vote by teachers in Goodloe Johnson, and may have also been partly responsible for the departure of Dr Enfield, who was a proponent of the MAP test. Do you think tying teacher evaluations to test scores is a battle worth having, or do you see a less contentious way to improve teacher quality?

A: Linking student growth to teacher evaluations is a part of a much larger national conversation regarding how we define teacher effectiveness. Certainly, we don’t want to provide incentives for narrowing the curriculum or forcing classrooms to focus solely on test preparation. We must ensure that we have a rigorous course of study for every student in SPS. The current state law (ESSB 5895) will ask that we look at student growth as one factor in the evaluation of teachers. Student growth is defined as growth in subject-matter knowledge, understandings, and skill over time. How we measure that must be based on multiple measures, and must look at the change in student achievement between two points in time.

More important, we must ensure that we are thoughtfully collecting a body of evidence – the work of the teacher via observations, artifacts, goal setting, their own process of self-reflection and continuous growth – to determine effectiveness and performance. Making the student test scores the focus of the conversation will only detract from the important work we need to do. In Seattle Public Schools we link student growth to evaluation, but only to ensure teachers who aren’t realizing student growth gains receive additional support, and offer additional career ladder opportunities for those who do. Making sure we continue to have conversations that look at all of this through the lens of equity and quality teaching is the more important conversation.

We want every child in SPS to graduate prepared and ready to enter college or the career of their choice.

District Accountability: Many teachers feel that the district is more interested in blaming them than in supporting them. On one side is the stack of requirements the district places on teachers, and on the other side many district officials are habitually late, bungle basics like student assignments, or are high handed when dealing with school communities. Teacher climate surveys reflected this perception with very bad district reviews up until a couple years ago, when the district cunningly removed themselves from teacher evaluations. How do you think SPS can overcome this issue to build a more collaborative and balanced relationship between schools and the district? In particular, what can be done so that district officials feel accountable to schools and teachers?

A: For the last several years, the economic downturn and shrinking state and federal budgets have taken their toll on Seattle Public Schools, which has seen more than $100 million in budget cuts. To protect classroom instruction, we have intentionally made the majority of those cuts in our central office. This reduction is central office staffing has come at a time that school staff numbers are increasing driven by increased enrollment.

However, one result of these cuts is that central office does not employ as many people and so doesn’t have the ability to be as responsive to the concerns of individual schools. We are working to address this by making processes more efficient centrally. But it’s a constant juggling act as the number of students, teachers and schools increase even as our central administration staffing has been cut.

We will continue to look for ways to provide supports to schools with the limited funding we do have.

In addition, we now have in place — in collaboration with the Seattle Education Association – a PG&E (Professional Growth and Evaluation) system aimed at helping principals work with teachers to improve their classroom instruction. This focus on teacher growth and evaluation isn’t unique to Seattle Schools; it is happening at the state and national level with the goal of closing the achievement gap and ensuring that every school is a quality school.

Teacher Relations with The District (asked at the meeting in person): It often seems like the district and teachers are on different teams, with teachers feeling answerable to their school communities and the district feeling answerable to the reform movement and standards-driven data goals. The end result is that even the “good” teachers that are the goal of the school reform movement stand opposed to it. They regard standardized curriculum and testing initiatives as an imposition cooked up by data-driven academics and semi-retired rich people that have no boots on the ground awareness of public schools and no interest in helping out or even listening. How can you overcome this issue organizationally and in the upcoming teacher contract negotiations?

Banda agreed that this was a frustrating issue that is hard to solve, partly because union rules require the district to negotiate with the union and only union representatives from schools. The reform movement is dictating the conversation from the top down, meanwhile contractual issues in the relationship with teachers muffles the district’s ability to discuss better models with them. For instance, an outreach model like having principals nominate their best teachers and then working with them on policy change would be perceived as a union end run. He indicated he was interested in ideas for overcoming the rift.

One idea he was very interested in was expanding teacher surveys to provide opportunities for feedback on district functions, standardized curriculum, and the MAP test. If you have specific questions that you think every teacher should be asked about the district, please list them in the comments section of this post!

An additional idea he seemed interested in was having teachers conduct trainings on days like this Friday, instead of district personnel.  Kate Martin suggested adopting a teacher review model like Montgomery County, Maryland. What other thoughts do you have on healing the labor / management rift in our public schools?