Today, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) released its District Scorecard for the 2011-12 school year, along with school reports for each school in the district. The SPS Office of Public Affairs sent an email out to families enrolled in the District noting that “The District Scorecard for the academic year 2011-12 shows year-to-year growth in 12 of 23 area, including one of the District’s most crucial goals: on-time, four-year high school graduation.”
Both the District Scorecard and individual School Reports can be found online at http://bit.ly/school_reports.
For quick access to each of our neighborhood schools’ reports, click on the following:
Hamilton International Middle School
B.F. Day Elementary School
John Stanford International School
McDonald International Elementary School
Superintendent José Banda will also give an overview on the State of the District, starting at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 14 at the John Stanford Center auditorium (2445 3rd Avenue S.).
Man, BF Day just cannot catch a break ಠ_ಠ
re BF Day… I am deeply sorry because it is in the neighborhood. It would be ideal that one felt all neighborhood kids had the same envorionment and quality teaching as all the others.
Agreed, it’s a real shame. I don’t see the school getting any better for awhile. Are there any option schools that Wallingford students outside the revised John Stanford district have a shot at getting in to?
So before we all go through the yearly ritual of the uninformed throwing BF Day under the bus rather than celebrate the positive changes that are happening, due to our awesome new crop of engage parents, I’d like to point out a few things on this topic.
1. People constantly misread these reports. These are NOT scores, they are percentages of students that passed the test.
2. For all of the complaining that happens here on Wallyhood on this topic each year, you very rarely hear an actual BF Day parent from Wallingford complain about the school. We like BFD. It’s a great school.
3. The kids actually from Wallingford are doing just fine. BFD still has a huge 38% Free or Reduce Price Lunch (FRL) from back before NSAP when they bussed in from south of the ship canal.
FRL means you are living at or below poverty level, and in all likelihood, your home environment (the #1 determiner of educational success –check most any educational study) is not good. No warm meals waiting, few parents willing/able to help with homework. Contrast this to JSIS which is only at 7%. FRL.
4. Do the math before you speak. I assure you the kids that actually live in Wallingford are doing just as well as JSIS, but don’t trust me, do the math yourself using this year’s report to see the impact of poverty/FRL:
e.g. 38% of BFD’s population is FRL. 37% of the FRL kids are proficient in reading. Let’s assume that’s evenly distributed across each ethnicity. BFD is 52% White. With a total student population of 321, that means 167 White students and 38% of those White students are FRL, so that’s 63 White FRL Students. Of those 63, 37% are proficient in Reading. So that means 40 FRL White Students did not pass Reading proficiency. Let’s assume all of the Non-FRL kids passed for simplicity’s sake.
If we subtract off the FRL White students that did not pass we get 123 White students that passed the test. That’s 123/167 =73% and BFD’s actual reading proficiency score for White students was 78%.
This is overly simplistic, but I think you can see there’s a very tight connection between poverty and the proficiency gap. If you run the same math for JSIS you see the same correlation for poverty, but their impact is much, much lower because they draw almost entirely from Wallingford so their FRL is only 7%
So please give BFD a break. If in 3 years after NSAP geography has reduced our FRL% down to JSIS’s paltry 7% and our scores stil don’t match, please by all means, come after the teachers and administrators at BF Day, but for now please hold your tongue, and do your homework before you speak.
Sorry, small math error, but fixing it actually makes my case for the impact of FRL even stronger: (167 -40) White Non-FRL students that passed reading is 127, not 123. So the % of White Non-FRL Students that passed is 127/167= 76%, and BFD’s actual was 78%
Thank you for doing the math and being a positive voice for BF Day, Chris. I totally agree with you that people constantly misread these reports which is a big reason why I think BF Day gets such a bad rap. This is so utterly frustrating to me because I know better, as you do, that BF Day is a great school with exceptional teachers and a hard-working, energetic new principal. I especially appreciate all the diversity (socio-economic, cultural, etc.) at BF Day that I feel is lacking in the other Wallingford schools. There is a lot of real-life learning to be had here for my kids (and for me) that I find invaluable. Plus, wonderful programs for families and students who can benefit from it such as FRL, Special Ed, and Spectrum.
I am an educator. I was in BF Day last year. I was upset about some things I saw which spark my comment. My observations can and do not reflect on all teachers there. I do say, however, parents please go into the classrooms and LOOK to see which teachers and staff care enough to correct papers, clean their rooms, and to have books, posters, welcoming spaces available and student work posted and who may not. If you see/feel a lack in fundamental areas, communicate so to the appropriate parties. Ask questions..” how do you, can you plan your teaching based on evidence, daily student work samples?”
Chris, test scores are one thing, which allow for some comparison. Poorly prepared and/or functioning teachers is a completely different topic. Wallingford neighborhood kids do have ho tmeals and parents who can help with their homework, bu tif their teacher is laconic or not correcting student work or just going through the motions, hte subtlle influence may nto be felt in one years’ test scores but the impact on a child’s feeling towards the school environment and teachers may be impacted for a longer time than that year.
Chris, test scores are one thing, which allow for some comparison. Poorly prepared and/or functioning teachers is a completely different topic. Wallingford neighborhood kids do have ho tmeals and parents who can help with their homework, but if their teacher is laconic or not correcting student work or just going through the motions, hte subtlle influence may not be felt in one years’ test scores but the impact on a child’s feeling towards the school environment and teachers may be impacted for a longer time than that year.
I would completely agree with your comment Info. And there will always be teachers in the public schools that should have course corrected or removed a long time ago. And this problem of course is not unique to BFD, it’s one of the major knocks against public schools, unions, etc.
Everything you suggest is part of being an involved parent that’s not on auto-pilot. This is an advantage most of the kids in Wallingford have. -Active involved parents. (And I’m pretty sure we all know exactly which teachers you are talking about, and we avoid them, try to have them removed, etc.)
The parents of the FRL kids being bussed in from the south end don’t typically have the resources or time to be involved in the school as you suggest, and in addition to their home situation, this piles on to their disadvantage.
I for one make sure that any teacher my child has, understands my expectations of my child and their behavior, (e.g. ok by me to keep them in from recess if they aren’t working hard in class, etc.) how they learn best, and that I understand the teacher’s expectations, plan and my role in it. (and to your point Info, that they HAVE expectations and a plan for my child and the school year) and we work together to make sure they are moving forward and meeting those expectations in the way that works best for all.
I am an educator, over 25 years. Yes, I am very right about this. I well that the parents of kids from south end do not get into their child’s school. However, the point I thought of this particular article is about disparities among Wallingford neighborhood offerings for Wall. kids.
Chris, thanks for crunching the numbers. I need more information from you since you really seem to be “in the know”.
Are the classrooms mixed? Are ‘bussed’ kids (man, what a terrible term) in the same classes are neighborhood kids? Or is it a seperate classroom setting? A seperate facility?
I went to public school at a time when schools mixed ‘gifted’ kids with ‘FRLs’ under a progressive notion that high-achieving learners would inspire economically disadvantaged kids to succeed. The reality was that disruption and violence destroyed the classroom and the ‘gifted’ kids effectively learned at the pace of the slowest child in the classroom. About ten years after I left public shooling, they started putting ‘gifted’ kids in their own classroom with their own teachers and track.
I am extremely curious to find what the situtation is at BF Day. Please share more, and thank you in advance.
bussed kids and kids with disruptive behaviors ar emixed in with neighborhood kids along with teacher who cant correct papers and has uncaring environment. I hate to throw energy at maybe the severity of the kids mainstreamed wore her/him down.
David, They still mainstream, but gifted kids are put in Spectrum. Even special ed kids are mainstreamed as much as possible. (Here JSIS scores also benefit because by it’s very nature, a language immersion program excludes those with learning disabilities, so there is no special ed at JSIS.)
The impact of FRL and Special ed kids and disruptive kids does hold the mainstream class back to an extent, but it also teaches our kids to respect diversity, compassion etc. etc, and new teachers are taught Differentiated Learning which targets each child proceeding at their own pace, rather than slow everyone down. There are a couple teachers at BF Day that are quite masterful at this.
BFD is also really good at teaching the kids to deal with bullies, and I rarely experience lesson-stopping disruption when I am there, nor see that as a large factor. The biggest delays I see are more of a function of Summer Slide, than constant disruption throughout the year. If 20-30% of your kids aren’t ready to move on content-wise because they forgot a lot over the summer, you spend more time in the first 3-4 months recapping. -Possibly more often and interspersed with math because of the “looping” nature of the Everyday Math curriculum. Slide also affects FRL kids more for the exact same reasons. Park on the couch all Summer with a tv as your babysitter and you don’t remember a lot come Fall.
In spite of some initial skepticism, I found the special ed inclusion program to be a real benefit for my child. The classroom aides who were there to support specific students were a fantastic resource for -all- the kids. In addition, “special ed” doesn’t necessarily equal “disruptive”, and “disruptive” doesn’t equal “disruptive most of the time”.
I’m not sure what “info” saw, but in 5 years of having kids at B.F. Day, I have yet to see the “uncaring environment”. Just the opposite in fact.
i feel best not going into more detail. I ask and recommend you look into classrooms and observe if the room is clean, posters up, student work up, papers corrected vs piles all over with nothign corrected. And loud yelling and refusal to do simple acceptable normal class assignments. I can accept that the child may nto have had a bad. I KNOW from my years in education that that many stacks of un attended student work means an overloaded or thoughtless or uncaring about student instruction or planning profressional contracted teacher. This situation was a result of at least a week or more. It is not representative of all teachers there.
It is heartwarming to hear that parents have good experiences at BFD
I think I know which teachers Info is talking about. One retired over the summer. The others, from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, are reportedly disgruntled about the dynamic new leadership and probably won’t be around much longer either, probably by their own choice.
I’ll also say that, in general, any school with an intentional special ed prorgram is going to be much, MUCH better at managing disruptive behavior than a school with only a thinly-spread resource room teacher and classroom teachers who are inexperienced with special ed poluations. I always suspected this as a parent, but now that I’ve been actually working in SPS schools I am convinced. EVERY school has disruptive students. The ones who actually know how to provide positive behavior supports and have the extra staff to do it are better, safer schools for ALL kids.