And you can view them here. Seattle Public Schools says the reports—being issued for the first time—seeks to increase transparency and start a conversation between parents and the district. They will include a school’s “academic growth, student climate, accountability, family and staff engagement, and overall school performance.”
Parents will be able to ask questions at a series of regional community meetings starting Nov. 29 (.pdf). “I commend school district leadership for telling us the truth about which schools are failing our children,” said Council Member Tim Burgess, who chairs the City Council’s Public Safety and Education Committee, in a statement today. “We can only make progress when we acknowledge what’s not working.”
The district has grouped schools based on their performance, rating them on a level of one to five, with one being the lowest. District spokesperson Patti Spencer said that this was not done to put “negative labels on any school,” but to help them improve by looking at how they were performing district-wide.
However, if schools fail to improve after three years, there will be consequences, the most draconian of which will be removing the principal and staff.
Schools at the absolute bottom (Level 1) include Dearborn Park, Dunlap, Emerson, Gatzert, Hawthorn, Highland Park, Leschi, Madrone K-8, Martin Luther King Jr., Northgate, Roxhill, and West Seattle elementary schools.
Schools at the very top (Level 5) include Cathrine Blaine K-8, Bagley, Coe, Hay, Lafayette, Loyal Heights, McGilvra, North Beach, Schmitz Park, Thorton Creek, View Ridge, and Wedgwood elementaries.
No high schools were listed at Level 1 or Level 5. Garfield and Roosevelt were both listed as Level 4, while Ballard, Center School, Chief Sealth, Franklin, Nathan Hale, and Nova were at Level 3. Cleveland, Ingraham, Rainier Beach, and West Seattle came in at Level 2.
So if you are the parent of a child who goes to a low-performing school, are you supposed to run out of your house screaming in shock? No, says Spencer. Parents are already aware of how their child’s school is doing thanks to No Child Left Behind’s Adequate Yearly Progress report, so this information will help them understand the situation better, she says.
More on school reports after the jump
However, Seattle’s school performance report is different from NCLB because it measures individual student growth, whereas NCLB only measures student performance.
There’s more: Take a peek at the district’s second annual scorecard, which shows that the district is on track for a lot of things it wants to achieve by 2013, except high school reading and math, reading scores for every grade except seventh and eighth, and the performance of repeat ninth graders, among others.
Also, watch out for Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s State of the District address from Mercer Middle School tonight (.pdf).
Odds are that if you’re kid goes to a bad school, you’re a shitty parent. I’m sure the schools that are underachieving are full of yellow and white kids. We used to have the best public school system in the world, that changed after 1965. I wonder why that is?
Most underperforming schools are in high density urban environments and ironically these schools often spent twice per pupil ($12,000 in Washington DC) what is spent in suburban and rural areas ($6000) where very often high levels of academics are achieved.
In some sense, the urbists who have ruined Seattle with their blissfully stupid attempts to turn the place into a “real city” are to blame.
Best for everyone to move east to Richland. Cascades Tunnel with maglev anyone?
Why stop at Richland? Keep on going to Coeur d’Alene–I think you guys will love it there.
Jesus H. Christ, I am getting tired of the ubiquitous race-baiting in Slog comments. I appreciate that the Stranger does not want to over-moderate, but it’s getting pretty ridiculous.
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Dearborn Park Elementary School
Ethnicity
Black – 42%
Asian – 40%
Hispanic – 13%
White – 4%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 1%
———————
Dunlap Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 50%
Asian – 35%
Hispanic – 11%
White – 2%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 1%
——————
Emerson Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 60%
Asian – 24%
Hispanic – 11%
White – 3%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 2%
——————
Bailey Gatzert Elementary School:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 46%
Asian – 23%
Hispanic – 22%
White – 7%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 2%
———–
Hawthorne Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 55%
Asian – 21%
Hispanic – 14%
White – 6%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 5%
———————–
Highland Park Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Hispanic – 32%
Asian – 31%
Black – 18%
White – 17%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 3%
——————
Leschi Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 81%
White – 6%
Hispanic – 6%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 4%
Asian – 3%
——————————-
Madrone K-8 – stats seemingly unavailable on greatschools.org
——–
Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 45%
Asian – 41%
Hispanic – 10%
White – 2%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 2%
——————
Northgate Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Hispanic – 39%
Asian – 27%
Black – 19%
White – 12%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 3%
—————-
Roxhill Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Hispanic – 37%
Black – 24%
Asian – 23%
White – 14%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 3%
———-
West Seattle Elementary:
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 34%
Hispanic – 23%
Asian – 22%
White – 17%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 4%
————-
Cleveland High School
http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/wa/o…
Ethnicity
Black – 55%
Asian – 26%
Hispanic – 10%
White – 6%
American Indian/Alaskan Native – 3%
———–
etc. etc. etc.
@1 In 1965 we discovered what selective statistics were.
This post isn’t really up to your normal level of bile. I’m disappointed. You’d been on such a roll.
@4 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4858… will help.
And I wish we had a native ignore or rating system for comments. Let us rate comments on 1-10, and let us set our own option to ignore any people or posts below a threshold of our choosing maybe. It’s a pretty basic system these days.
@4, we are only responding with facts to Slog’s constant fact-free race-card playing, race-baiting, and incessant excuses for black violent criminals.
First, the district is trying to say this info has never been around before. Nonsense, every school had a narrative with a lot of this info in years past. Please don’t give the district too much credit; it’s just better organized.
What I found interesting was the difference between what Roosevelt student think in terms of school climate/teaching satisfaction and what their parents think. The parents give both a score in the 80s and the students in the 50s.
This is all just a set-up for charter school legislation to come rolling in so they can declare some schools underperforming and shut them down and make them charters.
What school did you go to, #1, that didn’t teach you the difference between “you’re” and “your”? Or is that just the fault of shitting parenting?
Jeez Louise.
MLK closed two years ago.
Not all Seattle Public Schools are listed, and the SPS Website has been intentionally designed to not provide an e-mail address point of contact to ask why certain schools do not have reports. “Everyone accountable, just not visible nor accessible.”
What this does show is that these numbers shouldn’t be used to penalize staff. Clearly, there are socioeconomic and cultural issues at work here (which the bizarre racist comments above don’t get us any closer to solving, either). There are great, good, and crappy teachers in every school. If we can get rid of the crappy ones, at least, everyone will be better off and public schools will not lose so many families with energy, talent, and resources to private schools. But the way SPS is using their reams of data will not help us with that. We need an assignment plan that promotes integrated schools (our city is just not as segregated as some are, yet the new plan makes the schools look that way), desirable academic programs at all schools (so that high achievers and wealthier families won’t simply move their resources to private schools), and family and student involvement that includes the principal and district LISTENING to which programs and teachers are good and which are not. MGJ and the current John Stanford staff will never do that. We give them a “1.” How many more failing years do we have to wait before we can replace THEM?
“We need an assignment plan that promotes integrated schools”
Bullshit, there is no evidence that busing northend kids down to some shitty southend school helps those kids down there one bit. 30 years of busing has been a total failure.
Seattle parents wanted neighborhood schools and we got them. You want to know the biggest difference between white and black families in the SPS system? Having two married parents at home. Until black families get their shit together and start valuing marriage and education, no amount of forced integration will change a thing. You can drop a Korean immigrant fresh off the boat into the worst southend school and I can guarantee in 15 years you’ll have a college grad.
BTW in my kids’ level 5 northside school there are several black kids ….so much for ‘segregation’. Looks to me the only segregation going on are a segment of the poor black urban population that sees education as ‘acting white’. Go talk to all the Somalis and Ethiopians moving to the northend to get their kids out of the BS that passes for culture on the southend and CD.
@14
Amen.