Reader: How Do You Define a "Quality" School?

• It just keeps coming. I received my flyer on the School Levy in the mail. It is eight pages of "factual information provided about the levies by Seattle Public Schools". The flyer begins with these words: "<i>At Seattle Public Schools, we are committed to providing an excellent education for every student and to ensuring the every school is an excellent school.</i>" I would find that statement a lot more credible if I had a definition of "an excellent education" and "an excellent school". In the absence of any such definitions, I find the statements disingenuous - if not outright cynical and false. I hate this talk about excellence in the absence of any definition, metrics, assessments or benchmarks. It's all hot air and lip service.

• There is a common misconception among the public that there are "good" schools and "bad" schools. As any reasonable person knows, every school is good for some students and bad for others. The question isn't "Is it a good school?" the question should be "Is it a good school for my child?" Of course, folks in Seattle no longer have to ask themselves this question as the District's new student assignment plan doesn't offer them the same opportunity to choose a school based on their student's individual needs or the school's culture and offerings. Instead, students will be matched to schools based on zip codes. This change is what has created more urgency around the talk about "make every school a quality school". But what does that mean? It is a sort of rhetorical band-aid that is supposed to cover the gaping head wound of diversity of performance expectations from school to school. Next time anyone uses this slogan on you stop them immediately and ask them to make clear just what they mean by it. Ask them "What do you mean by quality school?" Ask them "How do we make every school a quality school?" Ask them "What steps have been taken in that direction?" Ask them "What results have we seen?" Ask them "When will we know that we've done it?" There is another common misconception, this one among education administrators, that there are schools that are working well and schools that are "struggling". That may be, but they are relying entirely on student outcomes to identify them. These measures can properly identify struggling students, but are much less reliable at identifying struggling schools. Oddly, when the District finds a school full of "struggling" students, they send the help to the school, when they should be sending the help to the students. It is unclear that the help that the District provides to the school ever results in much positive difference for the students. Let's be careful that we can tell the difference between a struggling school and a school full of struggling students. Students come to schools with a wide diversity of preparation and support. These factors, more than any school-based factors, are the primary determinants of student outcomes. So let's not presume that schools with a lot of under-performing students aren't doing excellent work with those students. Likewise, let's not presume that schools with a lot of high performing students are doing good work with those students. Public K-12 education is a weird culture. It is almost completely lacking in any real data, analysis, or science, yet pretends to be chock full of it. We are told that the reform math pedagogy is better even as we see lower math test scores after its implementation. We are told that teachers can differentiate instruction, but it hardly ever happens. We are told that teachers need formative assessments to individualize instruction, but when they have the results of the assessments they still don't have time to tailor instruction for students. We have plenty examples of things that work, but no effort to duplicate those successes. There's a lot of talk, but very little action.

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