Seattle Schools Board Special Meeting Oct 21, 2026

Good afternoon, everyone.

It is 4.31, so we're going to get started.

This is President Taup and I'm calling the board's special meeting to order at 4.31 p.m.

Please note that this meeting is being recorded.

We would like to acknowledge that we are on ancestral lands and the traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

Do I sound a little bit louder than normal?

Maybe a little bit, but it works, okay.

All right, for the record I will call the roll, Vice President Briggs.

Here.

Director Lavallee.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Present.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Song.

Here.

Director Smith, here.

And this is President Taup, Representative Mangelson.

Representative Faust?

Here.

Thank you and we have both our Superintendent Schuldner and Director Rankin online from the Council of Great City Schools in Boston and I know I think Evan's also somewhere on the East Coast so they will be online but with that I'm going to pass it over I think first to you Superintendent Schuldner.

Sure well thank you first of all can everybody hear me?

Awesome.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here digitally.

Of course, I wish I was with all of you in the flesh, but as President Topp mentioned, both myself and Director Rankin are at the Council for Great City Schools, which is a really important conference and I try never to leave the state if I can try.

But this conference is all of the kind of the large school districts in America getting together to share best practices, talk about different things.

And so I'm really thankful to the board for allowing me to go.

And it's also, of course, always a pleasure to be with Director Rankin at something like this.

What I want to do to preface the presentation is that I think, you know, it's now been eight months and 21 days since I've been here.

And I think that what is really important is that really since the moment I've been here, what I've heard from the board, what I've heard from the community is we really want to focus student success.

We really want to make sure that we know where our children are in terms of their academic performance, as well as social and emotional, but really say, this is where we are.

This is where we need to go and this is how we're going to go there.

And so today in this ISS, in this informational study session, we're going to have the academics department really talk about and describe our kind of current state of things, where we want to go, and certainly some of the ways that we think we What I would ask from the board is it's a pretty intensive slide deck.

I think they originally had something like 120 slides.

It is less than that, I promise.

But it's I think they're going to want to go through it as much as they can.

And then, of course, we'll have time for questions, comments.

or anything like that.

So I want to thank Dr. Swarovski and his team.

Mike has really been kind of leading this work well before I got here, but really this concept of this is where we are, this is where we need to go, and this is how we're going to get there is a kind of common refrain that you're going to hear from us around all things.

And I also want to thank the board.

You know, you have been very steadfast in your belief about We want academic goals.

We want goals for our kids.

We want to know why these are the goals, what the goals are, and we want to know how you're going to get there.

And we want you to get there.

And so that's really helpful, I think, from the board around all of this.

So without further ado, Mike, I'll turn it over to you.

And if you want to introduce the folks that you've brought to the table, since I can't really see, although I have a feeling I know who they are, and then you could take it from there and I will chime in as I always do.

So thank you so much, President Topp, and I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Starosky.

All right, and I'm going to butt in real fast just to say also online we have Representative Michael and Representative Tsai-Ghazab.

So with that now, Dr. Starosky.

Oh, she's right.

Sorry.

In person.

Yes.

So I'm so sorry, Representative Michael.

She appeared before us.

That's awesome.

Sega's up.

I'm all mixed up now.

I'm so sorry.

Michael is online.

Sega's up is in person.

So sorry about that.

Now we will get going.

Okay, good evening.

Mike Strausky, Assistant Superintendent of Academics.

I'm here with Cashel Toner and Dr. Caleb Perkins, Executive Directors of Curriculum Assessment and Instruction.

And we're excited about this opportunity to be able to share and to privatize some of the work that we've been doing that we're really proud of.

and a public setting.

And so we just want to take the opportunity to thank the board for this opportunity, but also to highlight what we're proud of and also the direction that we're going in a very short amount of time, specifically since Superintendent Shoulder has been here.

So some of the slides that we're going to be starting off this evening with should be repetitive things that we've seen before things that we've heard before and it's just for us to model that in every specific place that we're going into that we want to make sure that we're reminding people what our goals are and first and foremost is to make Seattle Public Schools the best urban school district in America and where every single family, community can be assured that they can enroll their child in Seattle Public Schools knowing that we will serve them at the highest levels possible.

And for us, what we've been focusing on how are we going to do this is through the framework of great schools.

And at the center you can see here is student achievement.

and for student achievement is to always be at the center for us when we're talking about whatever it is that we're doing in Seattle Public Schools.

But for us in curriculum assessment instruction, it's the heart of what we do and why we do it.

And when we're looking at this ring here, if we see that students are in the center, the part that we're really going to be focusing in on tonight is this very specific part about rigorous instruction.

and what we are all about is supporting rigorous instruction on the day-to-day lives of our educators.

Our educators, I mean our instructional assistants, our teachers, our teacher leaders, our assistant principals and our principals, and people who work in central office who are driven to support those people out in buildings.

And so when we're looking at why we exist, it's to support rigorous instruction.

And so if it's inclusive, it's motivating, and it's aligned to high standards, that's what we want to be supporting in Seattle Public Schools from a CAI perspective.

and if we start to get into the acronym business, I apologize, but I just want to make sure that when we're saying CAI, we're talking curriculum assessment and instruction, essentially it's our academics department.

So as a reminder of our goals, defining how we will be a top school district in America, in the top five and five, and so when we're looking at specifically Our third grade reading for English language arts and smarter balance assessment is a focus area for us about how we report out and you'll notice again a replication of our baseline about where we're starting from is 62.6% and where we're going to be moving towards in order to be a top five and five in the western United States including Washington, California, Nevada and Oregon So in addition to third grade reading, it's also eighth grade math that we'll be reporting back on tonight, where we have a higher trajectory that we need to be reaching and being specific about how we're going to do that, where we're starting at 50.3% and moving towards 65.9% and essentially 66%.

and finally I think what tonight will be really beneficial for members of our community is to be able to hear about how we're talking about graduation rates and grad plus.

I think that's really important for us to be able to define that for you and share with you how we're choosing to measure that.

One of the things that we're excited about this year is that we're focused on providing more clarity, partnership, alignment, mutual accountability, and responsiveness, and being transparent about how we're doing things and why we're doing things, even if people disagree with it.

but we think that if we're aligned and Superintendent Schuldner has been very explicit with us that our board goals should be aligned to what's happening in the buildings and so what you're seeing in this slide is our comprehensive or continuous I should say, continuous school improvement plans, those are called CSIPS that are supposed to be at every single building that every single building is aligned to those goals that I just previously mentioned.

And so that alignment is meant to connect district goals with measurable outcomes, identify student groups specifically where there are opportunity gaps, what are the building's specific plans and strategies of how they're going to address those gaps.

and to name more specifically what are the adult actions that are going to be happening to do something significant for students and so I think what you'll hear tonight is a common theme about what the adults are doing and what the adults are doing is should always be in service of what's happening for our students So with that, as I started off talking about student achievement, so tonight we're gonna keep students at the center.

The things that we're gonna be talking about are the adult actions that we're doing in service of our students.

and one of the things I think is important about this specific slide that Ben has shared a number of times is in this bottom left hand corner it just says a theory of action.

It's how are we going to organize our work around the conditions that schools must create for student success.

and so what you'll hear from Cashel and Caleb are specifically what are some of the conditions that have already happened over the summer and this school year to help change things, our behaviors as adults and as a system that are aligned to our third grade reading, eighth grade math and grad plus goals.

so tonight we'll be focusing on some of the school data outcomes and eventually what will be important for us as we're moving along is that yes we will always include student family and staff surveys to gauge how we're doing we'll begin this process of school quality reviews but what we're talking about tonight is this yellow part is the school outcome data and what we're doing to to support our educators in moving some significant things for our students.

Mike, if you don't mind.

Please.

Sorry.

Yeah, if you could just go back to that puzzle piece thing.

Again, I don't want to belabor this point, but I guess I will, is in order for us to have great schools, there really are three huge pieces.

One is to understand from our students, from our family, from our staff, what's going well, what's not.

I want to give a big shout out to Dr. Eric Anderson, we have been working really, really closely on a survey tool.

We are hoping to unveil it before Thanksgiving, where our students, I think we're going to start at third grade.

Families and staff will be able to take it.

Data, of course, will be made public.

We will share.

That'll really drive how our families and our community are thinking.

Then there's the school quality review, which is piloting this year.

We're going to pilot 21 schools.

It's going to be three for each of your executive directors.

and what that is is a one to two day basically interview where you go to the school with a rubric and you look at classes, you talk to parents, you talk to kids, you talk to teachers and then they're going to get a review from that.

And then the third piece is of course our school data and that's what so much I think the district has been wanting to do and the community wants to know about, but we haven't been as clear and as explicit around that.

And so this ISS is gonna be one of many over the course of the time that I'm superintendent that you will see where this goes.

So Mike, thank you so much for highlighting this.

This three kind of legs of the stool, this is how we're gonna move the district.

Ben, I have a question.

This is Vivian.

The school quality review, that's something that I haven't heard about previously, so it's very interesting to me.

What kind of information do you think we'll get out of doing the review?

It sounds like the outcome data is very quantitative, but maybe the quality review will be more qualitative.

That's exactly right.

And, you know, so this picture, you know, you'll see probably as much as you'll see the framework for grade schools.

That's exactly right.

The school quality review process is kind of a qualitative process, but there is data there.

But what happens in this, and I'll go into much more detail when we're actually doing it, is that the The executive director, the principal coach, and then another senior leader will go into the school for two days, it's about a day and a half, two days, go into classrooms, and then also have parent meetings and student meetings, talk to the principal, also look at data, and then use a rubric that's very aligned to kind of the Danielson and AWSP and all that.

that then will give us a kind of narrative around how the school is doing.

And so surveys, plus the quality review, plus the data, that will give us hopefully a true vision of a school as well as move us forward.

Okay, so moving forward, one of the things that we just want to make sure that we're always coming back to is our balanced assessment system about how we are choosing what data that we're looking at systemically at the building level, at the district level regionally by level includes our summative assessments for SBA, benchmark assessments for MAP.

Our students who are here, I'm sure this is bringing up some good memories and our screeners for DIBELS, our curriculum embedded assessments and finally there's the plethora of things that are happening on the day to day, week to week with our teachers around formative classroom assessments.

So with that, I'd like to just remind folks about some of the people that we represent here.

We represent curriculum assessment and instruction.

That would be our coaches who are out in buildings supporting our teachers, who are getting the curriculum that you'll hear in very much detail out to our educators, providing professional development to our educators.

That includes our directors, our program managers, Also, we represent the executive directors of schools in partnership, even though they're not aligned with us in our organization, but they are very much aligned now with our work that we're doing together.

So one of the things I hope you'll hear and you'll see tonight is that curriculum assessment and instruction is now in formal partnership with our executive directors of schools, and our curriculum coaches in supporting what's actually happening out in schools to provide alignment, to provide some mutual accountability in ways maybe in years past that hasn't always been the case.

So we're excited about that and I'd like to turn it over to Cashel who's gonna share with us some of the things that we've been doing around third grade reading in a very short amount of time.

Before we switch sections, any questions in sort of that first section from board directors?

Does that mean that within your org you have realigned so that you're in direct partnership or people remaining in their existing roles?

So we've realigned some of our assignments about how people are organized around the work and so you'll see something specifically where you'll have our five executive directors who are aligned with curriculum assessment instruction and with them there you'll have our literacy coaches and So we've realigned and reprioritized our work streams to make sure that they're vertically aligned.

And you'll see some good visuals that I think demonstrate that.

I have a question as well, and this is probably more for the superintendent.

On slide eight, when it was talking about CSIPs, there's a legal requirement for us to have those and submit them to the state.

Some of the time, I know in the past, schools have used them really impactfully, and I believe I've heard that there's other schools that view it as just a paperwork step that they need to take.

So how, if we're basing some of this on this, how are we making sure that these schools are accountable to what is in their CSIPs as well as who is kind of held accountable for those actions?

Is it the teachers?

Is it the principals?

Is it, you know, ourselves?

Like at what level does that accountability look like and is it shared?

Sure.

So, I mean, I would say all of the above, right?

I mean, you know, a CSIP is a legal document.

Now, you know, I think you might have even heard this story.

When I started the job, I had a meeting with the OSPI representative who were going through our CSIPs and they were going through some of the work we were doing with what are called tier three schools.

So these are the schools that have like been on the naughty list and they were telling us how, you know, we didn't have a math goal.

And I said, no, no, no, you mean we didn't hit our math goal, right?

And they said, no, no, no, you don't even have a math goal in these CSIPs.

I was like, well, that's got to change.

So what the first step is to make sure that all of the CSIPs are actually aligned with the district goals around ELA, math, graduation, et cetera, et cetera.

Because these legal documents actually hold some weight, and certainly we can use them to then think about staffing, think about budgets, et cetera.

Now, that doesn't preclude CSIPs to include other things as well, and I think that some schools, to your point, were doing very well with them, but as a baseline, we needed to make sure that all of 106 schools were following what our district goals were.

And then what's nice is those CSIPs are built on the actual school data in which they have.

So this year, we've redone all of our CSIPs, and I'm happy to have Mr. Howard do a presentation about that, where they're now much more aligned to our goals.

Now in terms of who's supposed to do it, we all are.

and so it starts from the spectrum level and then the principal and then the executive director and then ultimately me.

And I think what you'll see is when we continue to share the school data, you'll know if the CSIPs are being met or not because our proficiency rates will go up or they won't, our attendance rates will go up or that they won't, et cetera, et cetera, graduation rates, et cetera.

So I think that the good news here is we're finally having alignment between some of these things, which, yeah, you know, they're sort of paperwork, but they don't have to be, right?

Let's use the tool if we have to do it anyway to really align with our data.

So that's where we are.

Again, I'm happy to share some more of the work that the CSIP team has been doing, but really this is about you put it on paper, it's part of our goals, it's part of our expectations, and now we're hoping to support these schools to make those goals.

I've got one more quick one.

At some point in time, can you get the board some more information on the five essentials framework from Chicago?

I know we've talked about it before, and I'm sure we'll talk about it again, but I'd love to have some documentation in writing at some point if that can be provided.

Absolutely, and just very briefly, it's the first five circles, right?

Effective school leadership and the strong family community ties, which are the school-based ones, and then the rigorous instruction, supportive environment, and collaborative teachers, those are the classroom-based ones.

but I'm happy to send you whatever you need around all this.

The good news is much smarter people than I have been doing this work for like 20 years and there's a lot of good stuff written about it.

Thank you.

You bet.

Director Rankin?

Director Rankin?

Director Rankin?

Sorry, did you just call my name?

Yes.

It got really quiet for some reason for me.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay, great.

I just want to express appreciation.

Having the CSIPs tied to the goals is something that feels pretty basic.

That's something that I've been asking to see since, I don't know, probably 10 years before I was on the board.

and I'm very excited to see this very sensible alignment towards goals and to sort of answer Jen's question a little bit.

What we need to do as a board now that we've set our goals and we're having this baseline tonight is now work with the superintendent on when we when we monitor when we look at updates of data and that because in this baseline there's already not only by different student groups, but by school, we've approved as a board that every school has a CSIP, which is our legal requirement.

And then what we'll be seeing through monitoring the data is exactly what the superintendent just said, which is where things are.

And if there are outliers, we should then be able to look in a CSIP and say, Wow, they made a lot of progress on this area.

Oh, they have that as a focus in their CSIP.

That's so great.

How can other schools learn from that?

Or we can see where schools may not have set something.

But there are those layers of administration also.

But our job is to make sure that we're coming back to this same data and monitoring on a regular basis.

So we'll have to set that calendar.

Okay, that was a great discussion and now we're gonna shift over to the taking a good look at third grade literacy.

I'm Cashel Toner, Executive Director for Curriculum Assessment and Instruction.

We're gonna need to work together around timing because I could talk about this all day long.

This is like my favorite thing to think about Helping kids, specifically third grade kids, learn to read with confidence.

Students at the table, you know, think back to how you learn to read.

Once you've figured that out, it's like all yours, and you can do whatever you want with that, right?

That's our goal, and parents and families, that's our goal, is to have strong, confident readers at third grade.

And how we get there is our responsibility, because the students are perfectly capable.

They're brilliant.

They have an abundance of capacity.

It's our job to think about how do we create the systems and structures and give all the kids the opportunity to reach their full potential.

So we're going to dive deep into some data.

We're going to take a hard look at where we are and then we're going to talk about what's our plan to build those systems and structures so that all kids can read with confidence and do whatever it is they'd like to do when they grow up, right?

Alright, so like Superintendent said, we need to know where we are, where we're going, and how we're going to get there.

So let's take an honest look at our data so that we have a shared understanding about where we are right now, and then talk about what's our plan for improvement.

So some of these data slides I know you all have seen before and it's really helpful to have a common data set to come back to so that we have a shared understanding about how are we doing as a system and then how are we going to make incremental steps to get better.

So, on this slide you'll see that Seattle is right now, you know, this is for all students, we're 62.6%, so we're ranked eighth amongst other districts that we're comparing ourselves to right now.

But then when you look across that slide, you're gonna see some of our subgroups of kids where we have some pretty big gaps, and so clearly we need to accelerate the systems and structures so that those kiddos can grow as much as possible over the next several years.

so that we have more of an even distribution of achievement across all of our subgroups of kids.

So our goal is to have some serious growth, right?

Let's look at this next slide.

I like this one because on one slide it shows you by subgroup where we are right now, like a snapshot in time, and then it shows us by subgroup where do we need to grow and by what percentage, right?

So that's a really nice kind of systems view of what's going on for third grade literacy.

This next view might be new to you, so I'm gonna try to explain it the best I can.

OSPI has changed their, the way they calculate achievement, right?

So, we're at one, let's see, so the top line shows how OSPI will be measuring proficiency from 2025 and beyond, right?

and so we tracked that back to say, okay, if we applied that methodology, what would our data have looked like over the past several years?

And this slide actually shows pre-COVID and post-COVID, that's that gap in the middle, we didn't have data for the COVID times, right?

So when you look at that methodology that OSPI is going to use from now into the future, that's what our achievement looks like, right?

If you use the previous methodology, you will see that's the bottom line there, that our data, you know, there's a little gap there, but it's, The big takeaway here is we've been hovering around 60% proficiency for third grade literacy for a very long time, right?

Pre-COVID was about 67%, depends on how you have that methodology, maybe 65%.

And now coming out of COVID, we've been holding sort of hovering, I'd say, around that 60%, and I don't like that 60%.

I know we can do much better than that, right?

And our kids deserve for us to do much, much better.

So, Cashel, if you don't mind, I just want to reiterate a little bit here.

So, just for clarity's sake, as Cashel said, the state had two ways of looking at data.

One was the kids who took the test, did they pass or not?

The other way was the kids who should have taken the test.

did they pass or not?

So one of the weird things about that is that you could have an actual passing rate of let's say here 63.7 because that's the kids who took the test but because there were some kids who might have been sick or decided they didn't want to take the test or whatever the old methodology by the state was actually to hold us accountable to everybody who was rostered who was supposed to take the test now I could argue both ways but I will say that the state has now moved towards what is a more common idea, which is how many kids passed the test that took the test.

Pretty simple.

But we wanted to be clear that why we're showing this is that our old goals were built on the old methodology, because that was the methodology the state was using.

Now, with the new methodology, you're going to see a little bit of a jump by about a point and change that's due to the new way of thinking.

I don't want anybody to think that we're juicing the books.

I don't want anybody to think that we're somehow, like, making stuff up.

We want to be very, very transparent that there was an old way of the state doing things, and this year they changed it, and it's now instead of the denominator being all kids who should have taken, the denominator is all kids who did take.

But to Cashel's point, the district in and of itself has been in the mid-60s forever anyway.

You know, maybe there's a differential of two or three points, but that is the clarity.

That's why you see two lines rather than one.

In the future, we're only going to use the state numbers because those are the numbers we want to use.

But in this presentation, I wanted to make sure that the board understood that that's why we're having these two lines.

Thank you, Superintendent Schuldner.

That's a comprehensive explanation.

Thanks for the assist.

Okay, so the next one here is just looking at, you know, zooming in post-COVID, right?

So as Superintendent Schuldner just said, we've been hovering there around 60%.

You know, the different methodologies are represented there, and I know we can do better.

So let's talk about that.

Oh, another important way to look at this data is sometimes when you look at Seattle schools, you'll say, 60 to 65%, that's okay, you're outperforming the state.

But then when we take a deeper look across each one of our schools, and this is just for illustrative purposes to say that there's a pretty wide variability across the different schools and achievement rates, right?

So that's not to put judgment on schools, that's to take a hard look at where we are as a system.

to say that we probably need some more consistency and some more predictability so that it's not quite so dependent about which school you go to and outcomes and we owe it to our various schools to make sure that we provide the resources and curriculum that folks need to be able to have steady outcomes for kids.

This cut of the data shows students eligible for free and reduced priced meals and the variability across schools as well and that's something we need to accelerate growth, stabilize and accelerate growth, right, for subgroups of kids.

So how, oh, Director Rankin, well I'm not sure, are we?

I have a technical question, yeah, it's a technical question about the last slide.

Can you go back?

Let's just do a technical question and then we'll try to do each section, I think.

Okay.

So the gray, does that mean that there's fewer than 10 students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch at all of those schools?

Correct.

Okay.

Thanks.

That's surprising to me.

And that's a very important question, and I'm glad that you asked that.

So anytime anybody sees anything that's a gray, it means that there's less than 10 students who would be eligible to be in that section.

So we do have many schools, as you can see, that do not have more than 10 students who are free and reduced lunch eligible in the third grade who are taking the test.

Wow.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so a theory of action oftentimes provides a clear direction and it guides decision making.

It helps us measure progress and improve outcomes.

What I think is helpful to think about with this theory of action is that it includes lots of different groups of people, right?

This isn't going to be like a singular effort.

If we just do this one thing, then we'll improve outcomes for kids.

This is going to take a whole system-wide effort to change the systems and structures I've been talking about.

So it has a principal component and it says, if principals lead improvement of third grade ELA instruction, and then it talks about if teachers implement high quality instructional materials with fidelity and purpose, It also talks about the coaching component, if coaches support and build educator capacity, align our practices and support teachers.

It also has a part here for if the district sustains a coherent curriculum implementation process with clear roles, feedback and professional learning.

Then what will happen for students?

And it's really framed in the student experience, right?

So then students will experience consistent, engaging and rigorous third grade instruction.

We'll strengthen their literacy skills and we'll help develop foundational knowledge and proficiency.

That's great.

Resulting in improved third grade literacy outcomes and increased reading proficiency.

So that's sort of what we want to do.

Let's talk about how are we going to do it.

Well, this is one of my favorite slides.

If you all don't remember anything else from this third grade section, this is a thing that I would hope that you would remember, right?

These are the four big shifts that we're making as a district.

This is how we're going to change those systems and structures to improve outcomes for kids.

So the first big thing we're going to talk about tonight is consistent scheduling across all of our elementary schools.

The second thing we're going to talk about is implementation of high quality science of reading aligned instructional materials.

The third thing, district-wide coaching support.

I'm really proud of that and someone asked me, Kishel, talk about what you're proud of.

Talk about what's different from years before.

That's very different for Seattle schools.

and then the fourth thing we're gonna talk about is the ongoing professional development in order to help us achieve our goals.

But not one of these things, if we just did one thing, it probably wouldn't have an impact on student outcomes.

We sort of need all of these things working together to make sure that we have a really, our best effort and our best try to change outcomes for kids.

And this is big work.

This is really big work.

And so we're gonna talk about each one of these four things as we move across the presentation, okay?

But these are the four things I really, really hope that you, if someone asks you in the grocery store, what's Seattle schools doing to improve third grade literacy?

you would say, you know, we're working on implementing a new curriculum.

We are working to have consistent scheduling across elementary schools.

We have new coaching strategy in Seattle schools and we have professional development.

Okay, so let's do the first one.

Huge thanks to Superintendent Scholdiner for helping us be more clear and communicative about our instructional minutes and our expectations across schools.

We've been giving out guidance for years and years and years about that, and frankly, the guidance hasn't changed all that much.

What's different is that we have clear messaging and clear expectations from our superintendent to our executive directors of schools, to our principals, and to our school community about what our expectations are.

Our job is teaching and learning.

Like, that's what school is for, right?

It's also for making friends and other things.

But really, our job is to teach reading, writing, science, math, and make sure that we have the instructional schedule to support those responsibilities.

So, here's just a quick snapshot of the elementary instructional schedule.

This is too small to see on the slide, but it helps you understand the precision that we've been able to get to and be able to communicate to various stakeholders, schools, families, others about the requirements of instruction.

So you'll see there 120 minutes of ELA.

That's actually not new this year.

That's been the expectation for a long time.

What's different is many, many more people know about that now and we can then work toward that shared expectation.

I'm not going to spend too much time here.

Some people say to me, hey, Cashel, what does the schedule look like on Wednesday?

That's why I put this slide in here for you.

On Wednesdays, we still teach things and this is an illustrative schedule of what the time can look like on Wednesdays.

So there you go.

But that's been a big system shift, and I really just thank Superintendent Schuldiner for his clarity around helping us communicate that out to schools in a different way than we've been able to do before.

So that's the first big shift we've made as a district.

The second one is, and I talk about this one carefully, right?

So I'm framing this as high-quality instructional materials.

That's really important because we went through a really long process with community engagement, board approval and such to make the decision around adopting our new material called Emerge.

And so now what we need to do is because the community has weighed in on that decision, the board's weighed in on that decision, now it's our job to implement that the best we possibly can.

Now, that is a shift from our previous practice of how we used to teach reading in Seattle schools.

The last time we did an adoption was 2017, and things have really changed.

We talked about this through the adoption process, but just in a nutshell, Emerge is aligned to science of reading, and it's also what's called a structured literacy approach, which is different than what we've had in the past.

And so one of the big shifts in that is that you'll see knowledge building as a component of our instruction and knowledge building then gives us the opportunity to teach components of social studies and science through ELA, which is great because then kids build knowledge, which is of course what we want them to do.

Emerge also happens to have a very strong foundational skills component which is something that we were missing before.

So we really needed to make that shift with our tier one instruction so that all classrooms have access to that high quality instruction so that kids have instruction that's aligned to all the research around how kids actually learn to read.

It's a big deal.

you might be wondering, what does that implementation look like right now?

So I thought, okay, let's do a snapshot of that.

All right, six weeks into eMERGE implementation, here's what we've done so far.

Well, we've had about over a thousand educators have been trained, including general education teachers, special ed teachers, multilingual teachers, substitutes, instructional assistants, and others.

And that's a huge systems push, so I'm very, very proud of that.

We've also...

had about 24,000 hours of professional learning.

that's almost remarkable.

I kind of can't even believe we've done that, but we have.

And that training's really important because it supports the teachers to make some of those big instructional shifts.

We've delivered thousands of resources out to schools.

Kid resources, teacher resources, and all of those things.

And I'd say I'm very, very proud of the bottom bullet here, which is we've had about 3,000 hours of school-based coaching.

So not only have we had professional development, which is like maybe a workshop or something like that, like learn how to use the new thing, there have also been coaches out in schools working alongside teachers to help them with the day-to-day problem solving of learning something new.

Alright, I'm gonna keep moving here.

Oh, I also want you all to know that we are approaching this as at least a three year commitment to change because this is a huge deal.

This is actually probably one of the biggest things we'll ask our system to do which is change how we teach reading.

at the elementary level because there's just a lot wrapped up in it.

So our first year, we're really thinking about launching and learning.

Our second year, we're thinking about deepening and developing our practice.

And our third year, sustaining and scaling our impact.

We do have three years of professional development budgeted and planned to support this change.

This is a slide that talks about some of the major shifts inside of that structured literacy approach that I was talking to you all about.

Whole group phonics is a big shift and that aligns with the research around science of reading.

So that's a huge shift for our district.

And then the second one is grade level text complexity for all kids.

Our previous practice was really to say, okay, this is your just right book level, right?

So you're gonna read at level J, right?

And then you stay there for quite a long time.

The new practices, okay this is third grade reading level.

Everybody in third grade needs to have access to third grade reading and our job as the teachers is to think about who might need a little acceleration because they're reading a little bit above grade level and then who needs a little support to be able to access that third grade reading instruction.

So that sounds, I describe that pretty simply but it's pretty different from what we've done in the past.

I thought you might be interested if you would like to dig into the nuts and bolts of how are we implementing, but one of our first expectations of implementing eMERGE this year is to use eMERGE as the core ELA material.

Sounds basic, but it's a big deal, because we've got a lot of teachers who have been using the things that they've you know, trusted and used over many years.

We're asking them to let go of those things and to really take on teaching the new instructional material.

So what might that look like for right now in the school year?

The educator moves to support that and then principal moves to support using Emerge as the core instructional material.

All right, that's a lot from me.

I thought at this moment in the presentation you all might want to wonder, okay, what are school leaders saying about this change?

So you can read some of those little quotes from them.

I'll just highlight a couple of things.

One school leader said, we are working on pacing through the lessons.

Emerge pacing is really different than what we've been teaching in the past.

It's pretty fast paced for teachers and for kids and it keeps going.

So that pacing is something that we really need to practice and get better at.

Another one is a school leader said to me, I monitor teacher schedules to ensure the literacy block follows the eMERGE lesson planner.

That's a big deal.

Another school leader said, I ensure each class provides 120 minutes of uninterrupted ELA time.

So those are some of the, you can hear and some of the system's expectations being mirrored back there from the principal's perspective.

Okay, we've made it through the first two buckets of things I was hoping we could talk about.

We've got two more to go.

So the next one I want to talk to you tonight about is coaching.

doesn't make sense to implement a new instructional material without support for teachers right there along the way.

So this is a really big deal.

Seattle Schools is investing in coaching, which we haven't done at a system-wide level in a very, very long time.

So I'm very, very proud of this work.

I'm gonna talk to you real quickly about the coaching model and then coaching assignments.

So here we are.

We have now 15 literacy coaches assigned to five schools that they support and they support each school one day a week.

So if you do the math on that, that's about 74 schools and that means, yeah, we need 15 coaches.

So you can see Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Let's get to the next slide that I like the best.

Okay, this one is about the coaching assignments aligned to the executive directors of schools.

So, Dr. Strotsky was saying that we've intentionally shifted our way of organizing our staff in service of the larger system shifts, right?

So, Superintendent Schildener shifted the way executive directors are assigned to support schools, right?

Where once we were a regional model, now we are a level model, right?

So, we have elementary folks, K-8, and so forth.

I thought, well, we could assign the coaches regionally or in pathways.

There's all kinds of different methodologies you could use for that, but we chose to go with the executive directors because it lends itself to more capacity building and tightens up our feedback loops, which is something we need to work on.

so you can see here kind of how that shakes out and then I thought well this slide is for the directors because if you're thinking where are my schools and how do they fit into all of that you can find that information on this chart right there and you can figure out who the executive directors are and who the coaches are so that slide's just for you.

Now, then you might think, well, Cashel, that's a nice theory, but how does that actually work?

What are you focusing on with the coaches and the educators and the school leaders, and how does that all work together?

So I'm giving you a little snapshot here of the trimester one way I'm thinking about that.

So September, October, November, across the month, and then you'll see the coach instructional focus, the educator PLC focus, and the PLN, let me just tell you what those things mean.

PLC is a professional learning community that's like a group of second grade teachers that would get together and talk about their practice and then a PLN is similar to that and that is how the executive directors of schools have organized their principals so that's a principal learning network so it's sort of similar to what that PLC is but if we have a through line from what the coaches are thinking about what the PLC is thinking about and what the PLN is thinking about then you have a opportunity for aligning our practice.

Here are some quotes from what the coaches are talking about and how are they feeling about the work and talking about the work.

So you can read those.

I really like this one that says, my schools are making progress each week.

I just want to pause for a minute and say how proud I am of our educators to make this shift because it's a very big deal to change how you teach reading, especially if that's something you've done for 15 or 20 years in a certain kind of way and then we're asking you to change your practice, right?

I'm very, very proud of our educators taking on this big shift Same goes with our coaches and our school leaders.

All right, so the power of partnership.

We're gonna advance literacy together, right?

So this isn't something that I can do by myself.

I could get so far by myself, but we can get so much farther together in the partnership with the executive directors, school leaders, literacy coaches, and curriculum and assessment and instruction.

So I'll just tell you one little story about that.

I've visited 10 schools so far to go out and see what's going on with the literacy blocks and I purposely scheduled those site visits on the day when the coach is there so that I can talk with the coach and the school leader, right?

So I've done that.

And then I got invited to go to Dunlap Elementary actually where one of the executive directors of schools was having a PLN.

So she had a little cluster of principals there.

We also invited the coach to come and we were able to talk about what's going well at your school or your school or your school all with the same coach at the school talking about eMERGE implementation and literacy instruction.

So it's nice.

The other thing is yesterday, actually in this room, we got to have what's called school leader engagement session and that's when we get our principals together once a month.

I got to talk with the principals for about an hour and a half about eMERGE implementation, but here's what we got to actually do.

I had four principals go up on the dais and they got to talk about something that they have been grappling with with eMERGE implementation and then how did they work through it.

then we talked about sort of things that the school leaders would need to know about for upcoming implementation things and then our coaches were here also so all of the tables were set up in the PLN structure and the coaches were there and they got to do some action planning so those are some of the opportunities when we have that kind of alignment that we can really move forward together.

All right, here's the last bucket that we're going to talk about.

Remember, there are four things that I wanted you to learn about.

Here's the last one.

This is professional development.

If you give people a new thing and say do it, they're probably not going to do that unless they understand why and how, right?

So we've had lots of opportunity for professional development so far this year, and like I said, that's planned for the next upcoming three years.

I'm proud of our system for being a little bit more strategic about utilizing our resources and I'm just going to give you an example of that.

We had a district-wide professional development day the other day and that's an expensive day when kids stay home and teachers get to do some professional development.

Well, guess what?

Academics got about four hours of time to work with the system and so we got to do a system-wide science of reading and emerge professional development for all of our educators at the same time.

So K2 had a session and 3-5 had a session and that's a really cool use of resources because that day's already paid for and we could use that time in service of one of our district-wide goals.

So I'm sure we could improve because it was, you know, a virtual session and, you know, there are always kinks to work out in the future, but it's a promising practice to shift us a little bit to have time on that day because it's great use of resource and it's aligned to our district-wide goals.

All right.

Those are the four things I wanted to talk to you about.

Oh, and here it is.

The professional development at a glance, if you want to take a deeper dive into what that looks like.

We do have a strand of learning for substitutes, for instructional assistants, for multilingual teachers.

You know, it's a pretty comprehensive look there.

And of course, educators, school leaders, interventionists and reading specialists and so forth.

I did name at the bottom of the slide year two and year three.

I have the contours of those plans, you know, resourced and things, but I don't know exactly what that'll look like because this year we don't, we need to learn from our implementation and we need to learn what we need to improve in those out years.

So there you go.

Okay.

I think that's a lot to digest and learn about, but I hope it gives you an idea of, you know, the data section about where we are, you know, 60-ish percent right now, achievement overall, and where we're going over the next five years, and then our plan about how we're going to get there.

Director Mizoraki.

Yeah, great.

Really great presentation and super helpful.

Two questions.

One, I know with past curriculum implementation, we've struggled with the fidelity of that implementation.

And I guess this is maybe a little speculative, but if we were to walk into a random elementary school classroom, what percent right now would you say is actually doing the eMERGE curriculum?

Whatever that number is, I assume the goal is 100%, but where do you think we are right now?

I'd say most of our teachers are doing their very best to implement Emerge right now.

I don't want to underestimate the change management, though, because there is a lot wrapped up.

Sometimes elementary school teachers become an elementary teacher to teach reading.

and they have an idea about how to do that and we're asking them to do something very new.

The strength though is to think about why.

So there's the how of what we're teaching but if we all agree on kind of the why, like the science of reading part, then that other component comes a little easier.

But I would say most of our teachers are teaching Emerge, giving it their very best try.

Now, the pacing is something that I know we're going to need to work on because the pace of the instruction is fast.

And so we need to get better at that.

That would be like trying to go run a mile and you've only been, you know, you haven't been training for that, right?

So we just need to train up a little bit and then we'll be able to do it.

are, we're taking a stance right now of, you know, this is the expectation, teaching the curriculum, you know, is the expectation, to be very, very clear.

With support, though, right?

So our coaching support, and each one of our schools is in each one of our classrooms in a little different place.

Yeah, I mean, you know, again, it's super speculative, but I would say, and you know, I try to visit a school every day, and I don't always tell them I'm coming.

I know if the superintendent shows up, like, you know, there's sometimes a dog and pony show.

I would say that between 75 and 85 percent of our teachers are attempting, in a thoughtful manner, to emerge.

I really do see it.

I think that, you know, I get a lot of reports.

I'm trying or from the principal, look, I've been doing my walkthroughs and everybody's really trying.

So I think that there's, you know, anywhere between 75% and 85% on any given day are really actually doing it.

Then the question is, to what fidelity?

Are they doing 120 minutes?

Are they doing 100 minutes?

Are they doing all things?

And then the other question, as Kishel pointed out, maybe they are doing 120 minutes, but maybe it's not at the same pace.

And look, we understand that this is quicker than normal.

We have to be quicker than normal because we know our children can be proficient and yet almost 40% of them are not.

And we also know that there's huge disparities between who is proficient and who is not.

And if we have our children for many, many years, we want to make sure because we know they can do it.

We have data to say our children can be proficient.

But I would say that the staff, really to their credit, is trying really hard, as Cashel is saying, to do it.

And I think on any given day, you'd see a great majority of our folks really doing it.

How many are hitting the pacing?

I would say that's still what we're working on.

And then how many of them are doing to full fidelity, we're working on that too.

But I mean, I certainly don't want to put numbers in your mouth, Giselle.

You know, you're out there as well.

We have a ton of coaches that are reporting back to us on a daily basis.

But that's kind of my gut feel right now.

No, I would agree.

I would agree.

Okay, now I have an even more speculative question.

What does this, when would we see and what does it look like if this is working and if it's not working in the data?

And not talking specifically about third grade, but just generally, would we see at the end of the year, would we see numbers move?

Is that too soon?

When do we get back and we say, wow, this is going well?

I would think by the end of the year.

I really do think that if we do what we're doing and we're keeping on pace, I would like to believe that we would see a jump in SBA scores.

I think we can also be looking at MAP.

and I think we could also certainly be looking at kind of just proficiency levels in general.

But it is quick to think that you could get one year of growth to be pretty tangible would be quick.

But from what I'm seeing, I actually think that we could get there.

So, you know, my hope is that when we get our SBA results, you know, whenever they come, you know, after the kids take it, I think you should see something, but we'll see.

You know, usually people say it takes three years in a school district to really show something, but I've been so impressed by our teachers and by our principals and really by our kids.

You know, I got a report about a child who was taking an assessment and was really unhappy, was kind of, you know, struggling and they went to the teacher and the teacher kind of went to the principal and they kind of got back to me.

And I said, well, what was happening?

And they said, well, you know, every time the kid was taking the question, it got harder.

And I said, well, did anybody explain to the child that it's because they kept getting it right?

So we're actually showing students are moving forward.

I think we're still not used to really understanding the support of a child when taking exams and while also doing really hard work.

I've gotten reports definitely from families who are saying my kids coming back saying it's hard, it's difficult.

But good struggle is good struggle.

It shouldn't be bad struggle.

But I think one of the things that's been missing in Seattle for a long time is productive struggle.

And I think what you're gonna see with Emerge is productive struggle.

I wanted to ask about curriculum embedded assessments.

How are curriculum embedded assessments different with this curriculum versus what they were in the previous curriculum, and what are we using the curriculum embedded assessments for, like at the teacher level, principal level, and maybe kind of higher level?

Sure.

Okay, so when we started our curriculum embedded assessments a couple years ago, they're exactly what they say.

They're curriculum embedded, right?

So we looked at the curriculum and we thought, well, where would be some good stopping points or some points to kind of spotlight particular skills?

And so in the K2 space, it made a lot of sense to have that be focused on foundational skills to make sure that we could kind of shine the light right there and see how kids were doing.

a couple of times across the year, right?

Then in the 3-5, we thought, okay, inside of the curriculum, where would it make the most sense to give the kids practice to do what they're going to need to be able to do at various points?

And in third grade, that really means that's our first time with SBA, so where were there times in the curriculum, it would be kind of a similar experience to that, right?

And where does it make sense?

That was in our previous curriculum.

Then we thought, all right, we're making a big system shift here, and that thinking was pretty solid, so let's see if we can do something similar inside of Emerge, which is exactly what we've done.

So the K-2 are foundational skills assessments that are within the progression of the units, and then the 3-5 is the same thing, where the kids have a writing prompt and then they need to respond to that prompt.

Now in Emerge, there's a process of revising your writing and revising and revising and that happens at the end of the unit, like culminating experience.

But we pulled the curriculum embedded assessment at like mid-unit because when you're having a sort of on-demand write for maybe like an SBA experience, you don't really have the opportunity to revise and revise and revise in real time.

So we selected more of a mid-unit, but that's okay.

And so the kids respond to the prompt and then have an opportunity to demonstrate their writing.

In this first assessment though, specifically for third grade because there's a lot at play there, kids can either type in or they can write because they haven't had a lot of experience with that sometimes in third grade.

Now, you also asked what are we doing with them?

So I just talked about what is great for kids and their learning trajectory, right?

Now, for teachers, it also helps us sort of have a common something to talk about in the PLC, right?

So now because we have our common curriculum assessment, Like when a third grade team gets together, they can all bring those and say, gosh, you know, what did that look like for you?

And what did that look like for your students?

And how did that, how is it different in my classroom?

Gives us a common way to think about that.

And then for a principal, you know, when I was a principal and we had similar assessment opportunities, it gave me a view into, okay, how's my third grade team doing?

Is Vivian, what does her classroom look like?

What does Gina's classroom look like?

And then we can have collaborative conversations like that.

District view, it helps me understand, do we have the pacing?

How are we doing with that?

We looked at the scope and sequence against a calendar and thought, I think it will be about this time and I'm trying to balance several things, right?

I know family conferences are coming up.

I know that the elementary progress report is coming up and I want to make sure that there's common data across the system that folks can have opportunities to, you know, feed into those various mechanisms.

It also, like I said about pacing, do we need to make an adjustment?

Do we need to change those windows forward back by grade?

What's going on for kindergarten?

What do I see for fourth grade, right?

So it helps me, it helps us get make adjustments and improve, I'd say.

Director Lavallee.

I have a number of questions, so I'll ask two and then pass them on and loop back at a later point.

Looking at slide, I think this is 16, paired with slide 17, I was wondering, within the context of all of this, when we're looking at these numbers and that we're at 34% baseline for free and reduced lunch, you know almost just shy of 40% for students with disabilities and if we can remove the acronym soup at some point that would be wonderful so that other people can read these slides too that'd be great.

28% for English language learners and then we're at you know 30% for our black students in our district which those numbers are atrocious and we need to do better and we're all aware of that and that's one of the things that we're driving to with this.

but did we do any analysis of where we're missing the mark initially because all of these strategies are being kind of universally brought out to schools and if we're doing the same thing universally hopefully we still will see an impact at every school but as we need to drive certain numbers up higher Is there strategies that are being devised to really benefit these students in particular that we've been failing?

And did we do any sort of analysis on what our misses have been in the past so that we can do better as we move forward?

yeah it's a great question and I would say our first move is to shift the way we deliver ELA instruction across the board because it's not working for our subgroups of kids right and I know that because our district Our past practice has been sort of an intervention first model, right?

Kiddos that are below grade level need intervention, so we have to have you come out of your Tier 1 instructional time and come and have your intervention.

That was the best we could do at the time because our Tier 1 instructional approach was not making enough gains for kids, especially our subgroups of kids.

troubling about that is that it's very confusing for kids who need probably the most consistent systemic instruction to say, Jen, come over here, and you're gonna have this instruction over here, but then you're gonna bounce back into the tier one time or the ELA block, but you have no idea maybe what was going on the 20 minutes while you were gone for kids that were bouncing in and out, in and out.

So what we've done is made our first big move which is changing from an intervention first model to tier one strong first.

It would be like doing arm curls as your strategy for getting in total ready to run a marathon.

You need your core really strong to be able to do that.

You're not going to get there with arm curls.

You're just not.

and so we've shifted into, okay, we have to get our core strong first and that's our tier one.

So Emerge inside of that curriculum has tier one differentiation opportunities in a completely different way than we've had access to before and they're systemic over time, right?

So that's, I'd say, our first move.

We need to then think about how do we align our tier two and tier three instruction so that it's not confusing because you can learn in Tier 1 and then you can actually get an additional dose of instruction.

So we've done some pretty heavy work cross-departmentally with our special ed team, our multilingual team to align those Tier 2 resources.

So that's a long one.

tracking at the schools that have higher populations of those and seeing specifically what teachers in those classrooms, if their struggles have been significantly different in some way than schools and classrooms that follow a little bit more of Seattle's norms.

I think it might be too soon to tell.

I think that what I do know is that with a 60% proficiency rate over many, many years means that we need to have a significant shift in our pedagogy, right?

Our input needs to be very, very different.

then we need to think about what does the data show us for subgroups of kids and then do our interventions match like are we able to grow outcomes fast enough right because just making one year of growth in a year is a lot of work and for kiddos that have you know need to accelerate that growth that means that we really need to be tight around making sure that they have access to resources that we will be able to do that

All right, and then on that same kind of section before I pass it on, within we were kind of talking at one point around slide 17, 18, 19 time frame about that, you know, there's the difference between the students who took the test and those who didn't.

Are we, and I get the kind of why both things are important.

Are we tracking, and don't have to share it, but are you guys tracking as a team, kind of looking and making sure that there's not a school that has a huge gap of, oh, you know, all the students with disabilities were excluded from testing for some reason?

to make sure that we're not having this huge data gap.

Is that something that we're looking at?

Yeah, so the answer's absolutely.

So the good news is we've been pretty consistent having a 95% or higher kind of testing taking, which is good, but we definitely have some schools that have pockets of families that don't believe in or want to do standardized tests.

but that's not typically about let's say special education or something else.

It's about the type of schooling that certain families believe in.

But Dr. Jackson, who is really kind of the expert on this, has run analyses so that if any schools are kind of dipping below 95, or if there's certain subpopulations, we'll certainly try to have conversations with the families.

But, you know, sometimes this is just family saying, I don't want my kid to take a standardized test.

And that is their prerogative, right?

But a lot of it has to do with, you know, For instance, there's a couple of schools that families tend to cluster around with that belief, but certainly we haven't seen the kind of really naughty stuff that some school districts have done where they ask certain kids to not take the test.

That's really not and how it works in Seattle.

Again, our standardized kind of test-taking percentage is way above, is around the 95%, way above 90%.

So when you're testing 95% of your kids, that really is the right and accurate answer.

I mean, I do have a kid that has significant anxiety around testing, so I very much get that.

I'm just trying to make sure that we're not ignoring gaps within that.

No, no, but we do analyze it, and if we did see a certain gap at, let's say, a school or a certain population, we would want to have a conversation with the families about that, or the school.

and then I did on I think it's slide 19 or 20 when we're looking at the breakdown of schools and we were specifically at the time looking for students eligible for free and reduced price meals across schools and there was a comment about something about some of the schools that were lower performing and I just really wanted to caveat that just because you know, one of those schools is lower performing in the scores.

It doesn't mean that it's a, you know, school that your kid won't get a great education at for many different reasons.

So there was, I've forgotten the wording of exactly what was said because I'm not fascinated at writing, but as someone who has kids at one of these schools, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is a failing school that will fail your child.

So I wanted to caveat that for anyone listening as well.

Yeah, no, no, that's a really important point.

And I think, again, in terms of the data accumulation and how are we learning to get better, yes, I believe in our schools, right?

And I think that, you know, each and every one of our schools is a place where children can learn and can get supported and do well.

But what's good about looking at the district writ large is we will want to learn from the schools that are able to get higher proficiency rates.

And then we would want to see what structures are happening at some of our schools that need more support.

Again, and you've heard me say this a bunch.

This isn't meant to be punitive in nature.

This is about to be honest and see where we as a district need to support our schools.

I mean, I look at some of these schools with their proficiency rates.

I've walked those halls.

I've been in those classrooms.

They're very good.

But the question is, what are we doing in order to make sure that all of our children are learning, not some of our children?

All right, I just have one, well, two questions, but one quick clarifying question.

I know this was addressed earlier, but for the SPA ELA performance for the free and reduced lunch graph, just clarifying, the gray means less than 10 students, not less than 10 percent?

Correct.

Okay, that's interesting.

Okay, thank you.

And then just a quick comment.

Two years ago, my sophomore year, I interned at John Muir Elementary, which is one of those schools where, for free and reduced lunch, they're at 15.4% performance rate, which is, you know, saddening.

I hope that improves.

But just to go off of Director Lavallee's comment, it's an amazing school.

And I met so many lovely teachers.

And I specifically worked in a kindergarten class during their ELA time.

So I'm really excited.

So the students are now in second grade.

So I'm really excited to see next year in third grade when they're part of this graph, what that looks like with the new curriculum.

and then I did have one more question about on the slide about instructional shifts on the eMERGE curriculum.

I was just looking at the grade level text complexity for all.

I know that I worked with students who were struggling with that kind of grade level text or I've worked with students who were reading chapter books in kindergarten.

So I was just kind of curious like what that implementation looks like for teachers and kind of is that like, does that make instruction easier or more difficult for teachers?

I think it's a great question and thank you for volunteering at our schools that's awesome I love to hear that and I think that I would talk about that through the instructional routines right so teachers and kids are learning about let's say we're reading a third grade text together right let's say that some of the kids in the class aren't quite there yet some are are right there and some are above.

Okay, so inside of Emerge, there's a routine that the first time we access that text together, it's probably the teacher reading it out loud, right?

And everyone just listens, and that's okay.

And then the next time through, maybe it's next day, maybe it's something called a choral read, where everyone reads it together.

What we're doing there is helping the kids that are at grade level, they're reading out loud, that's awesome, and then the kiddos who aren't quite at grade level are listening or maybe reading some of the words, but everyone can access with a choral read.

Now we've practiced it at least two times, so that means that you know the vocabulary words a little bit more, you know the flow of it, and then maybe as the week goes on, there's a little bit of differentiation there.

Maybe the kiddos who are above grade level, they know that text already they don't need to practice it anymore they could have a text on the same topic but at a different reading level okay and then the kiddos that are just at grade level maybe they're practicing independently doing like a whisper read where they're reading out loud you've seen kids you know with those little whisper phones and stuff they could be whisper reading to themselves that text and practicing it.

And then the kiddos that aren't quite at grade level, maybe they're coming together with a teacher in a thing called a focus group where it's like, okay, if you would like to read this text with me, come join me on the carpet, right?

So then you've got that access to grade level text in so many different ways that the whole class can have that experience.

And like I said, our previous practice was to kind of get kids in their level, and you kind of stayed there, right?

So there's a little example.

Yeah, no, that's great, Cashel, thank you.

And I wanted to kind of talk about something that, Josie, that was your question about John Muir?

Oh, yes.

okay cool so one thing that again to strengthen what you said and what you know Jen said is when you look at Muir their overall rate is 51% and they're about 12 schools off of the mean but their rate for free and reduced lunch students is 15% and they're 28th off the mean.

So the question we would have isn't, hey, Muir's actually awesome, as you well know, you've seen it, right?

And their overall scores are at 51%.

Well, why is it that a certain subset of our students are not learning at proficiency at the same rate, and why is it the rate at that school is so very different than other schools, right?

And so, you know, a student can get a great education at Muir.

It is a lovely school.

I've been there.

But we have to ask our question, why is it that this category of child, this wonderful, lovely child who we know can learn, why are they at 15% when the average of the school is at 51% and that disparity is huge and when you look at all of our schools collectively in the third grade Muir is 12 off the mean below in overall but they're 28th off the mean in free and reduced lunch.

So those are the kinds of questions we need to ask, and that's why we have to look at the data, not at just an overall percentage, but in all of these different categories.

Because when you start to look more finely at that, more stories emerge.

And again, it's about support not being punitive, but we have to see where we are struggling as a district.

Yeah, real quick, just to kind of respond to that.

I definitely agree with your point.

That's kind of why I was pointing out specifically the free and reduced lunch graph.

But yeah, you know, I was in a classroom where in six months that I was, or actually less than six months that I was, about five months that I was there, I think like two or three students, you know, abruptly moved, or there were many students who didn't speak English, and many students who I know were, there were a lot of students who were part of that free and reduced lunch.

And then I look at the elementary school that I went to, I went to Genesee Hill, previously Schmitz Park Elementary School, and we're one of those schools that has less than 10 students eligible for free or reduced lunch.

And I didn't have any of those experiences in my elementary school classrooms that the students that I love and taught did.

So yeah, thank you for bringing that up.

Thank you.

Yeah, and also thank you for answering my question.

You're welcome.

Okay, I have two questions.

And the first, I just want to acknowledge change is scary, change is hard.

For this change with Emerge, we need a new curriculum that is being adopted and it's a lot of work.

And part of that, I think it's come up a bit that the pacing is a lot faster than usual.

And so I feel like that does kind of bring up the fear that if the pacing is so fast, will kids get left behind and will get lost and not have that chance to catch up and engage with the material?

And my hope is that you have an answer that's going to say, well, it's designed so that with the fast pace there are different ways to keep kids engaged, and I think that it would be really reassuring to hear about any of that.

Yep, so you got it.

So yes, the pace, they call it a pretty perky pace, right?

Which is kind of funny, but in the training, the emergent authors are straightforward about that, right?

Because it helps with engagement.

and also the curriculum is designed to come back around again, around again, around again.

So it's not like you get one chance to learn something, you get several chances.

And it's not just in the grade level, they call that a spiraling curriculum.

It's also aligned vertically.

So you could learn about one topic in kindergarten, you might visit that topic again in second grade.

a little bit more complex.

But that's kind of interesting that it's designed both ways.

Let's get a real example about that.

I was observing in a kindergarten class the other day.

I used to teach kindergarten.

I thought, wow, they're already on letter Y at this time in the school year, and this is so soon.

But the thing is, guess what?

They revisit the letters and letter formation three times across the year.

So it's not like you get one chance.

to learn the sound or the, you know, letter formation or whatever, it comes back around, comes back around and around and around.

So I also feel like because it's, this is our first year of implementation, teachers have said kindergarten is actually going all right because the kids haven't had this instruction before.

So they're like, oh, we don't really know any different.

First grade, they're like, well, we had last year and that was a little different, but it's not that different this year.

Second grade is the grade that that I'm hearing is like, whoa, this is a big shift because the curriculum assumes that you've had kindergarten and first grade, so that's a little bit trickier this year.

And then third, fourth, and fifth isn't so intense because most kids are reading Generally speaking, they can read to learn, right?

So you're not necessarily working on those foundational skills, but that's interesting to me that second grade.

So as we're learning across the year, then I think to myself, okay, what professional development, what adjustments might we need to make as we learn together?

And it won't be perfect.

It will not be.

We will learn things that we need to shift and change and say, whoa, that was interesting.

I don't know what the what is yet, but it'll be something that we need to adjust for.

Thank you.

And so my second question is on slides 29 and also 31, we've got the year one, expect a temporary drop in teacher comfort and initial friction.

Yes.

I have heard a little bit about that, but this is a difficult change.

There's work, there's discomfort.

And then also with the slide 31, the practice that says instruction using only emerged materials and I've gotten the sense that generally for the district we kind of welcome additions to the curriculum and so I just kind of want some clarity around that that for this first year it's kind of like stick with only the base curriculum which makes sense as we're making a big shift in learning it, but how does that change over the years and how do we support teachers bringing in different enrichments or things in the long term?

That's a great question.

So for the first year, and I was guilty of this when I taught kindergarten and first grade.

I had the things that I knew and I trusted and I didn't really want to let go of those to try something new, right?

But in this first year, we really do need to let go of those things, other things, because the instruction is designed to be comprehensive and if you take in parts and leave out parts, then we won't know what the impact can be, right?

Because it's not really implemented as it was designed or intended.

As we learn, there could be gaps.

There could be things that we say, hmm, I don't know yet because we haven't learned it, so I'll just kind of make it up.

But we might want to add some supplementary things, right?

School districts do that often.

What's important about that, though, is we do that learning together and we make those decisions as a district because where we get into trouble is schools resourcing their own things That's an equity issue and then it's also a professional development challenge because it's very difficult to support that across the larger school district when we have so much fragmentation.

So for our first year, we really are encouraging to teach the material as intended.

Now, this is also the floor, right?

This is the baseline of what we expect.

There could be some classrooms that are doing things in other times of the day that are literacy-esque that are happening.

But inside of the ELA instructional block, we're really asking folks to implement as intended.

yeah I mean to that point we already know that it's at a pretty perky pace we know that this is faster than we're used to and we know that people are struggling what we don't want to say is well if you get through it really quick we'll let you do other stuff right so I think we want to have one of the principles called it radical fidelity which I really appreciate but That is during the ELA time.

We know, because we've already approved a bunch of waivers, we know that there's other time in the day where, as Cashel said, we teach literacy-esque.

So, you know, I think there's a lot of very thoughtful ways that teachers can continue to be the wonderful professionals that they are to incorporate all sorts of things.

But if we're going to try to do something new and different and a faster pace and kind of harder for folks.

What we don't want to do is short shrift it.

If anything, we want to support it.

So that's kind of the way that I read the instruction use is emerge.

But again, that's the floor.

If a school wants to add a novel of the month that everybody reads, that would be amazing.

If in social studies they want to read, you know, a novel, a short story, whatever, great.

But we want to make sure that at least this first year the teachers are teaching emerge to fidelity.

I see Director Rankin's hand.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

Sorry, was that me or somebody else?

Hold on, Director Rankin.

Okay, I couldn't hear.

Okay, so my question was, Learning how to read when English isn't your first language is so, so difficult.

And I'm just wondering with how quickly this curriculum is being implemented, how are you guys going to make sure that multilingual students aren't swept under the rug?

I love it.

So one of my favorite things about this instructional material is it's designed intentionally to have some of what we would have done previously as added in supports for specific kind of kids is right there in the instructional material.

So there's literally in the teacher guide on the side of the lesson it would say multilingual support right there and the teacher can just build that right into their instruction.

So not only is the core lesson designed to support lots of kids, there are specific call-outs for multilingual learners, different kinds of supports that are just right there in the curriculum.

So it's designed with multilingual kiddos in mind.

Also, when the teachers are doing a, let's just make this up, doing an activity, like listen to the story and then write about it.

I don't know if that's a real lesson.

I just made that up.

But it would have, you know, on the printable that the kiddos would use, it could have a sentence starter, right?

And the teacher has an opportunity to print different levels of scaffold or support.

It could be a blank page.

It could have smaller print area if the kiddos find motors is great or bigger if they need more space.

Or it could have, like I said, a sentence starter that says, you know, in this story I remember.

just to have that built-in support.

But that's what one of those multilingual supports might look like.

The other thing is when we're teaching foundational skills, we've done some professional development for teachers because if you're a multilingual learner, first of all, that's a huge strength.

because you're going to have lots of dynamics in your language.

But the progression of learning English is a little bit different.

It's not like a stair step.

It might be just a little different depending on what is your home language.

And so we've done some specific professional development for teachers about making those connections.

Thank you so much.

That's awesome.

Director Rankin.

Thanks.

I wanted to kind of point out when we think about pacing I think we as non-K-12 educators are thinking about it really or what I'm hearing is thinking about it linearly is that it's a forward motion and if you don't learn the thing too bad because we're not going backwards but that's not really what it means and that I would I wonder how else we could talk about that because pacing does sound like, well man, you don't get it the first time and too bad, it's past you.

But actually, the previous way of having things be at the just right level was actually was leaving kids behind because instead of assuming kids can and should and will be given access and opportunity to learn at grade level, it was meeting kids where they're at, which sounds good, but really means that if you're in third grade and you're reading at a kindergarten level, you're having the opportunity to learn and read more at a kindergarten level and not a third grade level.

And so that the acceleration of learning is not keeping up with actually the capability of the child and is stagnating them.

So I don't know how else we could talk about that, but I would strongly argue that the way we have been doing things by design left kids behind and this hopefully by design keeps kids moving together in alignment with their ability or other language or disability needs and doesn't plan for them to be behind.

I mean everybody can quote all sorts of research, but the research I know and have seen in reality is there's a big difference between acceleration and remediation.

And when we continue to focus on remediation and remediation, the kids actually regress.

And it's the same thing that Cashel was talking about in terms of the pullout versus the push in, right, is that if you are being taken out of core instruction, you actually tend to go below where you're supposed to go to.

That plus, and this is why Emerge is a really strong curriculum, because it's not just scaffolded, but it's braided in the sense that you've got a repetition that continues to grow, so you get introduced to something and then you get introduced to it again and then you get introduced to it again and that's actually really helpful for folks if they are not, let's say, at grade level or if English is not their home language and they're not as fluent in English as they are in another language.

So the strength here is that we're spiraling it and we're scaffolding it and we have supports in place, right?

And so again, you know, I don't want to overstep it, Joe, but I think that if we could see growth this year, I wouldn't be shocked.

Yeah, I anticipate.

Yeah, I wouldn't be either.

And then to kind of like looking at the breakdown of different demographics, what I will be looking at in future kind of data, because I'm thinking of this, this is our baseline, the amount of growth needed over five years for some of these groups is is actually a huge amount of growth.

So, for example, our target for...

Well, so the baseline for Black African-American is right now 30.9, which again is too low.

The benchmark is 50, which is still too low.

However, the amount of growth that will be needed to make for that group and this is about our our system growing not that not the kids the kids are capable our system needs to make adjustments to better serve those students but that's a 20 point difference in growth which is actually huge and so that's when we keep looking at this what that's what I will wonder and with EL students too is is are we is this theory playing out and is this instead of instead of the just right level looking at grade level and looking at supports we'll know if that's working because those investments will pay off and that that exponential growth for those groups is what we will need to be looking at and hopefully we'll see that this really strong tier one supports all students and then we can continue to refine.

So I'm actually excited for like a year from now, five years from now to see to see all of what we do between now and then.

All right.

I think we're going to move on to the next section.

We've had about an hour and 40 minutes on this section and we have three other sections.

And so I want to look at board directors real fast to see if they want a five minute break.

We want to keep plugging along.

I'm not getting any feedback.

All right, five minutes?

All right, we will take a five minute break.

We'll be back here in five minutes.

All right, I think we are back together.

We're going to continue on to middle school math.

So I'll give it over to Dr. Swarovski.

And actually, if I can interrupt.

So I appreciate we've already been at this for a long time.

You will see a kind of similar refrain to the information.

So if you guys want to go through it, with alacrity, I think it'd be OK.

I think we'll definitely do that.

But one of the things that, just to go from a previous theme from the last section that we just did, is the spiraling that you'll see that it's kind of a staircase, the replication.

As you can see the replication here, this is just good modeling of some really complex data that you're going to see why that looks exactly like what Kishow just previously presented.

It's intentional.

So with that, what we want to make sure is that in these two very important subjects for eighth grade math and grad plus is that you do get our full presentation for the ideas for some of it we'll probably accelerate a little bit through, but not out of fear of time, it's just you've heard this and we wanna make sure that we're engaging everyone as we go through it.

So with that, Dr. Perkins is gonna start us off with eighth grade math.

Thank you very much.

Middle school math at a pretty perky pace.

So I am grateful to be able to follow Cashel because she did such a great job of laying the groundwork and really hitting some of the same themes.

Middle school math, like elementary literacy, is critical for so many things.

We know it's predictive of on-time graduation, of access to advanced coursework, of college access, as well as STEM pathways.

so I'm thrilled that we have this goal and I'm thrilled to be able to talk to you and I'm going to really emphasize things that feel different and things where we're making real progress.

This is not my first time coming before the board and talking about math and so I really would like to stress, I bet if I were in your position, what's different and what progress are we making?

So we have a particularly ambitious goal to go from 50% to 66%.

That is no small feat.

And we embrace that goal because 50 is way too low for our overall district with the achievement levels.

And in particular, What I want to stress, these are slides not only that you've seen, but we've shared with our school leaders in my many, many conversations with K-8 middle school leaders over the last few weeks.

They know this data.

They think about this data in terms of how are we serving our low-income students who are towards the bottom of the comparative districts that we have, and what do we do about that?

And that's where Director Rankin was pointing out these really large jumps we need to make in literacy.

Well, they're even larger in math.

And we think of, just to highlight two, Asian and black African-American students, we're talking over a 20% gain that we need to see.

We have great work to do.

And I think of Director Lavallee's question about, well, what are we doing?

We're focusing on the students that need the most support because that's where we need to see the most growth.

So I am so grateful that Cashel had the task of explaining this somewhat complex slide about where we are with expected value versus overall tested.

But I wanted to share this in two slides for math for two reasons.

And I'm just really gonna hit the main takeaway.

One, you can see that even though our proficiency rate before COVID wasn't that great, it wasn't at the very top, we dropped a lot during COVID and students missed out on a lot.

And so that's one message I just wanted to share.

It's a sobering look at how much progress we need to make.

And to not leave you with just pessimism, the optimism is if we look over the last few years where we've been systematically investing in coaching and really trying to support our students, you'll see that we are starting to see some progress.

We're starting to see gains in proficiency.

And I would attribute that, assuming you'd want to hear is that one is because we had a K-5 adoption and we made that choice during the middle of a pandemic, very rare to do adoption during a pandemic, and had that be really a strong foundation for our students who are now in middle school.

And we've had systematic coaching aligned to instructional materials, very similar to what is going on with literacy.

So I just want to highlight this progress.

This is the progress we're trying to build on and learn from.

and one of the differences is that we're really trying to study our data much more carefully and understand what we're seeing.

So this slide is actually straight from the August School Leader Institute that we did with our school leaders.

We are talking to them.

We're showing our data in much more transparent ways, even sometimes when it leads to challenging conversations about why is there such a range.

I know we talked about this with literacy, but again, I just want to call it out.

it's really empowering to think about not only at the school level but the classroom level, what differences are we seeing and what can we learn from those differences.

So that gets to our theory of action.

And I'm not going to read every word, but it's similar to what Cashel shared.

This is the overall approach.

What do we think is going to work?

What are we going to do differently to actually address this big gap that we have to close and this significant increase we have to reach?

One, we're going to learn from our strongest teachers, who really are great at helping students maintain the cognitive demand of their work.

make students do the thinking in their classroom and really center discourse and sense making in classrooms and that's really what we're seeing serving all students, particularly students who need to make the most growth.

The other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna be so much more aligned and this is one of the things that I, you know, this is my 10th year in Seattle Public Schools and I am so excited about how much more aligned we are and how much clearer it is that we're working on this together and I'd love to highlight that in some of the work that we're doing.

Of course, the result of all this work will be better student experiences in terms of rigorous grade-level math instruction and more engaging instruction as well as discourse.

So like Cashel, I want to really linger on this slide for a second.

There are also four key moves we're making, and you might notice that they're very similar to the ones we're doing in literacy.

That's not by accident.

We are focusing on key instructional shifts, the shifts that we're seeing in the math classrooms where we see the biggest growth and the highest rates of proficiency.

What are they doing in their classrooms?

How can we make that more the norm?

How can we implement upgraded math instructional materials?

And that's something that Superintendent Schildner has been incredibly helpful with, that question about fidelity.

Are we up to 75%, 85%?

Well, all I know is the percentage has increased since the start of the school year because of how closely aligned we are with the executive directors and the other work that we're doing.

We now have district-wide coaching support.

Not just a few schools, but all of our K-8s and middle schools are receiving math coaching.

and ongoing professional development is also the key element.

So I'm just gonna touch on these so that we can have more time for conversation, but I will stress that the things that I heard you talk about literacy, support for multilingual learners, support for students who are typically struggling, those are the things that are also coming up for us.

So what instructional practices are we focusing on?

What we're seeing, again, in classrooms where we're seeing the highest growth and the highest levels of proficiency, there is grade level rigor.

We're not lowering expectations.

We're not remediating.

Just as we were saying, we're trying our best not only to reach grade level but accelerate when students need that extra challenge.

Students are doing the work.

We're working on something specifically called building thinking classrooms, where students are much more the center of the math classrooms, and it's not I do, you do, we do, kind of, you know, wrote a traditional instruction.

And then there's also many times for students to actually make sense through discourse and sense making, which we see also connecting to higher levels of efficiency.

So that's, in some ways, some of the similar work that we've been doing, some of the encouraging work we've seen with coaching.

Here is what's exciting about the difference.

We have now put together this, just like Cashel has done with literacy, with our executive directors, so big shout out to Katrina Hunt and Justin Hendrickson, who helped develop these look-fors and walkthrough tools, and we have already engaged in many walkthroughs.

I don't know if we've quite reached every K-8 in middle school, but it will be soon.

There's four this week, there's four next week, we've done 11 already, and we're giving consistent feedback to our eighth grade teachers in particular on these areas.

How are they maintaining grade level rigor?

How are they making sure that students are getting adequate challenge?

And if I could borrow that phrase from the literature discussion, how can they engage in productive struggle?

And that's the key.

So, again, following from literacy, we have organized our coaches around the schools that work with our executive directors.

You can see, again, which schools that we're pairing with which coaches.

And we're excited that they're able to get to each of those schools nearly every week.

And that's another key shift.

We're serving all of our K-8s and all of our middle schools.

So, you know, what we're proud of is what we've already been able to accomplish, you know, paralleling what Cashel shared about the number of hours of professional development, how many materials have been distributed, all the things that we've done.

We did upgrade our Envision materials in particular to the question about multilingual learners to make them even more supportive of multilingual learners.

and again we are so proud that we've already had a number of walkthroughs including with our own Superintendent Schildner who joined our walkthrough at Whitman Middle School last year, sorry, last week and it was incredible that we're getting that much feedback to our teachers already just six weeks into school.

So following the literacy approach, this is not just a one-year or a six-week effort.

It's going to be a three-year plan.

We're following a very similar arc that literacy developed and really thinking about what leaders are doing, what teachers are doing, and what we at the central office are doing around promoting these same shifts.

So that should look familiar.

And as Dr. Strauski shared at the beginning, we're trying to turn all of this work into clear, concrete, 90-day plans.

That's another shift.

So I just want to again stress what is different and what are we proud of?

It's different is the alignment the amount of data-driven work that we're doing and the amount of clarity that we have Thanks to I think the clear direction from Superintendent Sheldner and the executive directors.

So with that I'm gonna pause After math and take your questions

I feel like I've seen this data before but just made this realization that where we were in spring of 2018 is kind of where we're trying to get back to.

And I kind of understand the theory of change on the literacy side where a lot of it is around this new curriculum.

We've had this curriculum since 2018. so that's not necessarily the real theory or change per se although I guess the curriculum changed in elementary school but do we know what happened between 2019 and 2022 and is this what happened here consistent with other what other school districts have seen or do we feel like it's less or more why I mean obviously COVID but what was it about COVID and how can what do we feel like not only did a new curriculum in K through five and six through eight, is there anything else that has helped kind of moved us upward?

Absolutely.

So there's been a fair amount of analysis of how big a drop did we have, and I can't quote quite the numbers off the top of my head, but generally speaking we dropped a little bit less than other districts, and we've come back a little bit more slowly.

That was true up until the last two years, which you see that we're actually seeing some bigger gains.

And again, I would attribute that to two main things.

One is that we actually upgraded the K-5 materials.

We did not have standards-aligned material up until, what is it, 2021, 22. So those students are just completing elementary school and getting into middle school, so we have that advantage.

and for the last four years we have been doing more systematic coaching at our middle school level.

Again, it's hard to say exactly what's starting to move the needle, but the fact that we have those two elements.

And the final thing I'll share is that the clarity that we're expecting the instructional materials to be used with fidelity, I don't know if it's quite radical fidelity yet, but it's that all of those things are helping and I think it's why we're seeing the progress.

But you're right, we're still trying to get back to something that we haven't reached with 2018 levels.

Do you think that this curriculum does the same sort of spiraling with our students?

Because I kind of took a look ahead to see the high school, and I saw the chart on grades.

I was like, what is going on with geometry?

And so there are chances for our students to kind of pick up foundational skills in math that they may have missed previously.

I know that in previous iterations of our focus on math, that some of the students were taking two math classes.

Are we still doing that?

We are.

And is that effective?

Yeah, so that is one of the examples of how we've had something called math empowerment at a number of our schools for students who get sort of an extra period.

I think what we've been trying to do much more consistently and I think with the superintendent's help and the executive director's help, it's been much more implemented with more fidelity to what the true purpose of math empowerment is, which is to to provide that support without any kind of the detriment of remediation.

So that is happening.

And that's something that, again, a number of our schools use to provide that extra support.

I mean, I think there's also so I mean, I appreciate, you know, Caleb Bright is right in a sense that I think that we're getting better because we're being a little bit more focused.

But with eighth grade math, I think there's a couple of other things.

One is, in some respects, it's just a reversion to the mean.

If the school district was kind of hovering in the 60s and we dropped all the way to the low 50s, high 40s, you're just kind of getting back to normal which in some respects is that reversion to the mean.

I think the other thing that we would want to really look at is the number of students that left the district for middle school.

So when you are looking at just straight proficiency levels, you know, 64% or 61% in 2019, how many students went from 2019 who were in middle school to now how many kids left the district and the kids that tend to go to private school tend to have higher proficiency rates.

And I would actually do a little bit of a deeper dive into it.

I haven't done that straight analysis, but my gut says that we lost a bunch of kids in middle school and the kids that we did probably were proficient.

So I think that is probably a little bit more of an issue than in the elementary schools where we don't really lose that many kids and haven't historically.

And I think that the time during COVID was a pretty big time for families to leave to go to private school.

And I think that you're seeing that in this data.

But again, these are kind of gut assumptions based on some reality, but I'm happy to run that analysis.

Director Lavallee.

On slide 52, when you're talking about the instructional practices, it talks about maintaining grade level rigor.

And I really appreciate that, as all of our students need to have that.

I have heard a lot of, depending on the school that you're talking about, lack of having advanced coursework as well and more advanced classes, that it's inconsistent in which middle schools are offering more advanced math classes and will let students move up to levels that they need to.

And so I've heard concern from parents that kids are being kind of held back at a certain level and then checking out a little bit because if you are holding a middle schooler back, they tend to check out a little bit more than you would see in some other grades.

So as much as I appreciate maintaining grade level rigor overall, what are we doing to make sure that we're also pushing and offering more within our middle school or for our middle schoolers?

Well, I definitely appreciate that conversation.

It's one that I've had with the superintendent a few times as well as the executive directors.

I think what's been helpful about recent clarity is that we are going to provide more opportunities for acceleration.

Exactly how we figure that out, there obviously was the effort to help rising sixth graders this past year to be able to accelerate to math seven, eight, so they can take algebra in seventh grade and so forth.

There are more geometry sections in eighth grade.

And there's really healthy conversations around what does a map RIT score that is just so astronomically high say about a student in terms of how do we challenge them?

So all those conversations are happening.

I think this is a parallel set of work.

totally disconnected, but I think in fact, in going from 50% to 66%, in making those 27 percentage point gains for black African American students, that is another body of work, right?

And I think that's where we're trying to do both.

We can do both, we have to do both, and so I appreciate that we're talking about both.

I've got one more small one.

I know when Director Song was asking her question, you mentioned math empowerment.

And I've gotten a few parents talking to me being like, I think the definition switched, and I didn't know what to sign my kid up for.

And so just as a mention with some of the switches that are being made, I've heard some parent confusion as they were signing up their kids for classes this year, being like, no, no, no, my kid shouldn't be in that.

So I think some more information to the parents as this is happening would be appreciated.

That's great feedback.

Director Smith?

OK, I have two comments.

The first, so following Cashel's presentation, I mean, there was a lot of depth on the curriculum, and we just went through that adoption.

So I think that was very appropriate that the board has been following that, and it was really good and useful information.

And so I was kind of expecting to say, so what can we have that compares to that for math?

I actually, I really like the classroom look-fors and the focus on the sense-making and productive struggle, so I actually, that's not the question I'm going to ask, so thank you for your presentation.

Instead, the question I want to ask which kind of ties into Director Song's concerns around the impacts of COVID and as we look at a student who is now in eighth grade who missed some learning during COVID, at this point the learning that they missed was in elementary school and we're still seeing impacts from that and so I think this is a long-term question, not a question to be like, oh, well, we're going to solve it this year.

But the middle school math goal, the outcome is in middle school, but the opportunity for the instructional rigor and improvement is a K-8 opportunity.

So I don't know.

I have a first grader.

I'm a mathematician, so I'm very invested in this.

and I feel similar with a seventh grader and a ninth grader.

But I think the important points to note are the things that we talked about with literacy we don't want to lose sight of.

We need to make sure students get access to rigorous tier one instruction.

So they're all in the classroom getting that grade level content, at least if not accelerated, if they're ready for that.

and that's where we often, to just borrow some of what Cashel shared, is that we too quickly move to Tier 2. That said, we do need to be thoughtful about Tier 2. We do actually have a Tier 2 research, it's called Success Maker.

There are a number of supplemental tools and we are getting better at sort of, especially under Superintendent Schrodinger, to kind of rein in what are the best tools that they should be using for those kind of Tier 2 supports.

Coupled with better communications about math empowerment, I think there's a number of tools in our toolbox.

And I just want to make sure that we don't undercut the main thing that will help the most amount of students would be improving tier one instruction and really doing the things we're doing about following through on the three shifts that we talked about.

Are there plans and looking ahead for also doing any of those at the elementary level?

Like right now, I love how you've got the under Director Hunt and Hendrickson that covers K-8s and middle schools, but I would love to see a future movement where we have the similar coaching and instruction at the elementary level as well.

I was going to say if you've met Cashel Toner you know she has an indefatigable energy that not only applies to literacy but also to math and so yes we are engaging those conversations.

Yeah, and one of the things to point out is, you know, the district has the goals of the third grade ELA and the eighth grade math, but the individual schools have their own goals, and we're looking at English and math throughout the K-8 years, and so clearly we're going to want to hold ourselves accountable.

And I will say that I do, I hope I am here when we go through another big curriculum adoption, this time K-8 math.

You know, there are some The current curriculum we use I think is fine but there is some pretty spectacular stuff that's out there and I think that it's definitely time for us to think kind of holistically K-8 and then 9-12 around some different ways of doing math but I will say that the point was very well taken that we do have some students that are to use a very scientific phrase bored out of their mind in some of their math classes.

And I think that we have to do a good job in allowing them to proceed to the level of math and rigor that they're at currently and then help to expedite their growth as well.

So, you know, I'm glad to see the numbers, you know, over 4-year stint, raising by 7-ish, well, a little less than 7%, is pretty significant.

I know that we like to think in terms of large jumps, but 51.8 to 58.3 is pretty significant, and certainly a one-year jump of 54.4 to 48.3 is pretty good, but again, we're not even back anywhere close to where we were pre-COVID, and I think we really just need to address that, and that it goes back to what we've talked about since we started this, is highlighting the places that are working, the places where the children are not necessarily moving with alacrity and proficiency, and then learning from those and really focusing on giving support where is needed.

In a pinpointed, very in a very thoughtful way.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

This is more of a comment.

I am interested in future monitoring sessions to think about math related to access to highly capable and our geographic equity guardrail.

I, Caleb, I think you know, I don't love the taking two math classes at once as a way for making up of maybe an opportunity that wasn't there sooner for a student.

But I am curious about that.

How do we make sure that students, no matter what school they're at, do have the same opportunities so when they get to middle school, they're enrolled in the course that they're ready for?

As opposed to, well, you came from a school that taught fifth grade math to fifth graders, you have to take sixth grade math.

I'm just kind of interested in how we're thinking about those things together.

highly capable, the access, and then, you know, the kids that are born out of their minds, as our superintendent said in technical terms.

Yeah, you weren't asking for a response, but I can't help myself.

I'll just share that what I think is the good news in that front, I think we're having just as many conversations about how to get acceleration right as we are about how do we reach this ambitious goal for eighth grade math.

And again, that's been a point of clarity from our new superintendent, just that we need to work on both at the same time and make progress on both soon.

Thank you.

I'm just really excited that we're talking about all of these things.

Director Mizrahi.

Yeah, I just wanted to echo Director Smith's question about, yes, we have an eighth grade math goal, but how much that starts in elementary school?

And I'd be curious to see on slide, I don't know the slide number, the one that has each of the schools and where they are in terms of performance.

It'd be interesting to see what the sixth grade math SBA performance looks like at those schools.

Is it an exact match?

Are kids coming in behind?

And that's why they're still behind in eighth grade.

And then even looking at the feeder schools for these middle schools, what the fifth grade numbers look like, fourth grade numbers, because I'd be really curious when that intervention needs to start if you want to boost the eighth grade numbers.

Obviously, we want to do a lot in middle school, but we need to do a lot before that too.

other than seconding what Director Mizrahi says, said, I do want to ask the superintendent brought up the curriculum as well.

And I'd love some more information about when that does expire and how much longer we have.

Wait until section four.

Wait until section four.

All right.

I don't have a question.

I'm going to wait until section four.

And I want to acknowledge that, Director Smith, you're sort of showing some curiosity in, OK, what exactly did the curriculum look like parallel to Emerge?

And happy to provide more information on how we're trying to, for example, encourage more math discourse, more engagement with rigorous tasks.

Your fellow director, Song, had the exact same question.

So section four kind of starts to answer some questions.

Yeah, I would say whatever you do, do not look at slide 76. Save that one.

Alright, can we move on?

I know we've got graduation plus, right?

Yes.

Alright.

Alright, Graduation Plus again is our third goal and while it is a different goal, there are also parallel structures and once again I would like to stress the things that are different and the things that we're proud of, the progress that we've made.

So the difference of course, and I'm just going to say this a bit for the community that's watching because you all probably know this well, that there's two parts to this goal.

There's graduation, which is a critical component.

We need to make sure our students graduate.

It's an important baseline.

and I know I'm talking to a number of high school students here who are thinking about this, as well as the plus, which is the idea that there needs to be some clear evidence of readiness for post-secondary success.

And I'm just gonna unpack that a bit.

Both have ambitious goals, as you can see.

but just to unpack it a bit on the left hand side you'll see a summary and a reminder of our graduation requirements which I won't go into but just to linger a little bit on the plus idea that yes of course we want students to graduate on time that is a critical indicator of students' ability to succeed after they graduate, but at the same time, even more powerful is to have demonstrated some degree of readiness through passing an AP test with a three or above, an IB test with a four or above, passing a specific college in the high school course correlated with readiness in college, work-based learning experiences that have been externally validated, and the seal of biliteracy from the state.

Those are five powerful levers that you've talked about with the superintendent previously and I know in some cases you've shaped those.

We appreciate that and I think it's been a helpful source of clarity for our high school leaders and what we're trying to ensure.

So just wanted to linger on that just a bit because it is a more complex goal.

But as the superintendent has shared multiple times, we're nowhere where we need to be when it comes to graduation rate.

And it is one of those areas that we could be doing a better job.

And as I'll share in a moment, we feel like we're already making progress as early as it is.

We're already making progress and thinking about ways to improve upon that.

So we've set ambitious goals, just as with literacy and math, on the two levels from grad rate.

You can see, just to point out how much work we have to do if you look at Hispanic Latino students, that we're talking about an 18-point gain that we're looking to make over the next five years.

And then if you look at grad plus, similarly, there's a number of jumps that we have to make in order to reach our target of 10 points overall.

A lot of work to do and I'd love to highlight the way this is where we are and now how are we going to get to where we want to go.

One final point that I will share a little bit more on.

This is the graduation rate that has been flat for the last few years.

I want to note that for those who have been tracking it over the last 10 years we've had a significant increase as have most urban districts and then it's been flat really since the removal of some of the state waivers related to COVID.

One thing I'm going to share preliminarily tonight is that we have confirmed that our graduation rate will be 88.2% for the class of 2026. That just came out this week.

Say it again.

88.2% for the class of 2026, which is a 2.1% increase.

Small, but meaningful.

And partly related to the work that we're already trying to do to be more intentional about meeting the Grad Plus goal.

So I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment.

As with everything, we are looking across our schools.

There is a clear range of experiences students have related to graduating on time, as you can see from this breakout of our high schools.

And we're trying to learn again from best practices by learning where high schools are having more success.

So the theory of action is also pretty simple, which is that we know there are things that work at the high school level.

And one thing that we have not done enough in Seattle Public Schools, certainly in my time, is work together and work in an alignment across our 19 high schools to really try to reach some common targets.

So once again, the blue back slide, which I think is really critical for us to linger on.

What our executive directors, Chris Carter and Lynn Herink, have done in collaboration with academics is to identify key practices that we're going to be implementing across our high schools, across these 19 different settings, to ensure that we're going to make progress on Grad Plus.

I won't talk about each of them.

That would take way too much time, but I just want to highlight that it connects to instruction, to common assessments, to expanding college credit earning, and really getting more opportunities for acceleration, work-based learning, attendance, as well as the two things I do want to stress, grade and grad reviews and school links implementation.

I know there's some people on the board who are particularly interested in how that's going, and I just wanted to take a moment.

So I'm going to highlight those two in bold, And again, the thing that's different is that we're working much more in tandem across our high schools with the help of Executive Director Carter and Executive Director Herring to try to work together on reaching grad plus.

So let's talk about these grad reviews.

If you study those other districts that are way ahead of us on grad rate, one of the things that they've been doing better than we have is more systematically reviewing their data.

understanding where their students are in much more detail.

Seems like a simple task, but it's something across our 19 high schools we have not done as well and need to do in a more coordinated way.

And just in this fall, just in the first start of the school year, we did a new report called Unresolved Exits where we had all of our registrars look through that data, have conversations with families, have conversations with school leadership, and that is part of why our graduation rate actually increased this year because we understand our data better and we're better able to understand where our students were.

So I just want to again applaud the lots of hard work that's going on in our high school educators to really understand how to support students better.

So that's one thing we're doing in tandem across our 19 high schools.

The other thing that we're doing in tandem is more systematically reviewing grade data.

Grades aren't perfect, but they are still a key indicator.

They are still important.

I'm sure some of our student board members could speak to that.

And it's important to understand where students are struggling.

And so one of the things that Executive Director Carter in particular, this is a slide directly from his presentation to our school leaders, is asking all school leaders to regularly study where are we seeing students not succeeding in classes and what is the next step?

Is it an individual teacher?

Is it a particular subject area?

Is it a department?

Is it something, is it a practice?

This is something that has been already, I think, making progress at our high schools in terms of conversations around supporting students.

So grade and grad reviews, that's one thing that we're proud that's already implemented just in the first six weeks of this new school year.

The other piece, School Links, the new tool is another thing that's different.

It's a new approach to high school and beyond planning.

I'm tempted to quiz our student board members, but I will not, whether they've had any experience with it.

But we are seeing already some encouraging things going on.

Much more interest and engagement compared to Naviance that we were using previously.

and the question is how can we build off the momentum?

So what's the momentum we're seeing?

Already, just six weeks into school, we already have 36% of all 6th through 12th graders who completed their first task.

That's way ahead of where we've been in the past.

I'll point out that Over 9,000, actually I think it's over 12,000 now, this is now old data.

College applications have been connected to school links which makes the process easier according to our counselors and many families that have reached out.

And we have a majority of all of our 12th graders who are engaged.

We're really prioritizing our 12th graders because it's a new tool and they need all the support they can get on college applications and making sure they graduate.

And, of course, we've trained hundreds of educators.

Really excited about that.

And to follow up with what Cashel shared, there's some interesting quotes.

We've heard Rainier Beach has said they're going to use the School Links tool.

They've used it for their back-to-school night.

They're using it for their student-led conferences.

It's just a much more user-friendly tool, helpful tool than we've had in the past.

and just excited to share that.

I want to give a huge shout out to the counselors out there who are doing a lot of the work in lifting this.

They deserve a lot of the credit for how smoothly and how helpfully it's going for students.

So with that, I'm going to just conclude by sharing our commitment along with Executive Directors Carter and Herring is to keep coming back to our 19 school leaders each month, looking at data together and asking the question, what can we do together to reach our targets for graduation, and for graduation plus.

And with that, I will pause for questions.

Director Mengelson.

All right, so just to comment on school links, as a senior at West Seattle High School, I will say that it's definitely better than Naviance, and I think it's pretty easy to navigate, and so I definitely like it.

I think the user interface is not as complicated or confusing, and it's clear what tasks are needed and what isn't, and just kind of where you should go to find all the things you need to.

And I've submitted some of my college applications, and I've been able to talk to my counselors about the different things that are on School Links.

I will say that in the very first couple weeks of school, I know that myself and some of my friends, we were kind of like, we want to get going on our college applications now, because it's only going to get harder as school with AP classes.

and whatnot gets more demanding.

And so I know that we were talking about like, how do we do this?

And it was brand new and the counselors were still learning.

And so I think maybe something that would be helpful.

Start earlier.

Yeah, start earlier.

We didn't get a formal introduction to school links.

I will say like we didn't have a meeting or anything and I know the counselors did When we asked questions, we got answers.

But there was no, I remember logging in through Clever the first time, and I was like, what am I looking at right now?

But it's really easy.

It connects with your Common App.

You can request your letters of recommendation.

You can do all of that.

So it's been pretty good.

So yeah, I'm happy to answer more questions about schooling because of my feelings.

But overall, also, I don't think I touched Naviance at all since like eighth grade.

So, School Links, I think having that be just like a center for all of those things, kind of more like Naviance, it was like this weird thing that I had to technically do for graduation and it was like once a year maybe they were like do this thing on Naviance and then no one did it and so I think School Links is definitely It's definitely easier in that sense.

But, yeah, if you have any more questions for me, I can answer them later.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Vice President Briggs.

Hi.

Yeah, so I guess my question is just around when we talk about graduation rates and grades and all that stuff, what are we doing to make sure that we're not passing kids through who didn't master the material?

Because I have seen that happen a lot, and I'm just wondering, do we ever have kids repeat?

I mean, I've seen, speaking from experience, a kid of mine failed the class and was still put in the next sequential class.

So I'm just curious if we ever have kids repeat a class if they didn't master the concepts.

Do we have them do summer school?

I have just never heard of a kid having to actually repeat a class that they failed.

So I'm just wondering how we're approaching that.

Because again, it's awesome to have graduation rates, but if the kids are being graduated and they don't have the skill set that they need and they haven't mastered the concepts, then we're not actually doing them any favors.

So yeah, just curious what your thoughts are on that.

Well, I strongly agree with that push, that there absolutely has to be a balance.

And if you see the first core practice we're pushing with our high school leaders is improving instruction and ensuring, because it is, for what it's worth, Director Briggs, yes, a lot of students fail classes and have to repeat them.

We are also trying to improve how we do credit recovery, so it's a meaningful experience.

because I do agree that there are too many students who are just graduating with the bare minimum.

And that's partly why I'm excited about the plus option and ensuring that all students are getting that extra kind of push to reach something that is about readiness.

But at the same time, yes, just like with literacy in elementary grades and math with middle school grades, we need to improve instruction so that students are getting the standards that they need to succeed after they graduate.

Yeah, I mean, just to add on, there are definitely kids that repeat classes, mainly in high school.

I think the district still has, you know, kind of a social promotion bias when it comes to K-8, which is, I think, something that we really do need to address.

I think the biggest concern, and this is a little bit off topic, is really making sure the kids are ready for high school.

You know, there's I don't think you do a kid any service by saying, well, you failed all of eighth grade, but now welcome to high school.

Congratulations.

But in a high school, there is definitely a tendency to repeat or, as Caleb talked about, kind of doing some sort of credit recovery.

Now, I will say what you highlighted about the discrepancy between proficiency and graduation rates is probably the kind of largest mark on American education in general.

So when you look at American districts, they tend to graduate between 85% to 94% of their children and very few districts are above 60% proficiency.

So it's sort of a it's part of the deal in the sense that proficiency doesn't always equal passing, because being on grade level, there's a lot there, but I think that that's why I feel so strongly and why I'm happy we invented this idea of grad plus, right?

So if you actually have your graduation rates, and we really should be at 95%, when you look at all the other districts around us, and again, graduation is a statewide thing, so some states have different ways to graduate than others, But if you compare us to every other district in Washington, we should absolutely be at about 94-95%.

But where we really should be focusing on is can we get 75% for grad plus?

Because our definition of grad plus is like actual college credit, college-level work.

And that, in my mind, is proficiency, right?

So I'm glad you brought it up, but it is kind of this mark on American education that I've been struggling with really since I've become part of the firmament that is American education.

Yeah, no, totally.

I know you're 100% right about that, and I struggle a lot with that, too.

And also just, like, for the record, the class that I was talking about, my kid was failed and went into the—was a high school class, actually, which has caused problems for him down the road, which we're addressing now.

But, yeah, I appreciate that, and I do think— I do think taking college level classes is about as good of an indication as we can get that kids have mastered the concepts that they need in order to succeed in further college classes.

So yeah that makes sense and thank you for that explanation.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

Can we go back to the slide on the grade reviews?

Yes, thank you.

So I am wondering, since you mentioned something about looking at credit recovery, similar to the question that Evan had, but what I would really like to see and I'm curious about is what do we do when we see the opportunity gaps, the D's and E's, what's the expected response?

And what do we as a central system have to offer to buildings, to offer to students?

I had a similar experience where there was questions about passing a class and it wasn't until two weeks before the end of the semester that, oh, you might not pass this class.

And it's like, I don't know what you're supposed to do with two weeks left in the semester.

As you're doing these grade reviews, I think looking at, well, I guess I'll just stop there.

What is the response to these reviews and what are the strategies that we're using to bring those grades, well, not bring the grades up, but improve the learning?

Great question and I think one of the basics is to think about grading practices and what is actually, what supports are students getting?

So while we have a long way to go to get to the level of consistency and high quality grading practices, implemented across our high schools, we have made some progress.

So just on the example of retakes.

When do students get retakes?

How should they get the retakes?

Do some teachers not offer them?

Well, generally speaking, because of the reform we implemented during COVID, Nearly all classes do offer retakes, and there is some opportunity, and so that's one conversation that a school leader might have with teachers that, you know, might have a large number of students who are at risk of failing.

The other practice that we implemented district-wide was to say, you have to let students and families know at least every two weeks if they're at risk of failing.

Now, is that being perfectly implemented?

Probably not.

But is it something that, you know, we've identified as the problem that I think you're also identifying?

Yes.

And so this is another effort to say, you know, where there's no data.

If there's this classroom with no data and it's mid-quarter, and this is something directly from Executive Director Carter, that's not okay.

There needs to be data.

We need to be able to help families and students take action early in the semester.

So lots of A lot more progress that we need to make, but I think we're trying to go where you're articulating.

Thank you.

And I'll say too, you know, we want families to be involved in conversations with their students, but our students are not always the most reliable reporters about what's actually going on.

And so I think we can really support, we as a system can support parents and guardians in understanding what's happening with their child and not make it contingent upon the child saying, hey, I really want to sit with you and look at Schoology, because that's just, you know, that's probably not going to happen.

But the opportunity for families to get involved, but also for us as a system to say, hey, we're noticing these things and we need to respond.

Going maybe a little bit further down the line, I will be interested as we continue to hear about school-based strategies that maybe we implement and see what's working, what's not working.

Offering retakes is great, but if you didn't learn the content, taking the test again without opportunity to get some more instruction or get some support, just the opportunity to the retake without the opportunity to access the instruction is not necessarily going to change the outcome for that.

If I didn't learn it, already and taking the test again is not going to help me if I still don't learn it.

So I'd be curious about maybe tutoring or other school day interventions that I'm hoping to see us implement that come before we say, well, you can just do summer school.

Because that's honestly not an option for everybody.

But yeah, thank you.

On the slide, the 25 largest district slide, I don't know the number.

It's interesting.

Relative to the math and ELA, we're sort of pretty stable across all areas, right?

So we're about 15th.

If I were a Bellevue board director, I'd be looking at the huge gap between being 25th in terms of low income and whatever, 10th for all students.

But it does look like the one area where we have a bit of a larger gap is the ELL.

So I'm just wondering if we've interrogated that.

Have we identified potential causes for that and what we're doing to address it?

Well, I can share that just yesterday, Principal Clark brought it up at our school leader engagement session among high schools.

So I think one of the things that we need to do better, I think that we've identified, is helping make sure students' recent arrivals are put in classes that are going to be most helpful to them.

Sometimes that doesn't happen.

Sometimes they get put into classes that are sort of warm-up classes or foundational classes.

and we don't have a clear plan for them to get into the classes they need to graduate.

That's one thing that we've uncovered as we're working with Franklin and other places.

But I think, you know, in summary, we agree it's an issue and it's something that we need to learn a lot more about.

I don't know which way I'm going.

So on the high school core practices with the grade reviews, with geometry and biology, Those were really hard classes for me.

At my school we have something where Tuesdays and Thursdays you can get study help after school and I specifically remember it was really helpful for these two classes because they're really difficult and specifically with geometry, I don't know if this is a correlation, it might not be, but my geometry and biology classes were both the most rowdy where kids would be the loudest because I think we were just bored with what we were learning.

It didn't feel very engaging, especially because it was also difficult.

Sometimes you would have to read a lot of text.

And prior to then, I feel like a lot of us didn't really have to do that.

It wasn't something that we were used to.

And geometry, I don't know, geometry is just hard.

And I also wanted to talk about, on the grade reviews, it also mentions how the opportunity gaps, it's in the same repeated student groups with black, Hispanic, multilingual learners, etc.

That's repeated in the third grade literacy and the eighth grade mathematics tests.

and something I was thinking about as a student I feel like when you repeatedly fail at something and you repeatedly like the feedback you get is oh you're not good at this or oh you're failing at this by the time you get to high school sometimes it just feels like school isn't for me I'm not good at school if I'm failing geometry class it's just because I'm not good at school and maybe I just won't be able to learn this and I think a lot of students start to feel that, I don't know, school isn't for them and what's the point in trying anymore?

So I feel like with the numbers and the data, I feel like it's also really important to stress to educators and school staff that motivating a student means so much.

Making sure they know that they are able to do the work, that they can do it, is also really important other than just what's the content and the curriculum and how are the teachers teaching it.

Being there emotionally for the students is also really important.

That's incredibly well said.

I don't have a profound answer, but I'll just say that the conversations around advisory and what role advisory can play and how do we make that more of a regular experience for students so they have that support outside of just content is one of the ways we're trying to think about how to make that support more consistent.

Please.

So something that made me think of, last year, I don't know exactly what his role as staff was, but he was kind of like an advisory position or support staff.

So he would work specifically with students who were failing in classes.

And I feel like something that was really specific about his job was from his background, he could connect with students.

And I think for a lot of students, especially students that come from a background where their student group is continuously below average.

He was just a role model for a lot of students, but he was cut, so he's not at my school anymore, and a lot of people would, like, we could physically feel like, oh, he's not here anymore.

And I feel like having support staff like that is just really important.

I know that we're not doing great in funding, but I kind of just hope that they can be more prioritized because his job was considered not not as necessary as other teachers' jobs, but yeah.

Well, to quote our superintendent, you know, there's a few things that connect to success.

One is high-quality curriculum, which we've talked a lot about, and the other is mentoring and tutoring and mentoring, and so I do think that's work that we need to do.

It seems to be what you're speaking to in terms of this role, and how do we make that more of a consistent presence, so appreciate the comment.

Alright, you want to add on to this one?

Director Mangelson, and we'll go try to figure out who put their card up first.

Just a really quick addition, talking about advisory specifically.

Also, I very much agree with you.

But I know that last year I go to West Seattle High School, and last year we had one advisory period per week we had on Fridays.

and it was long, it was I believe like an hour and a half.

And then it ended up with that time, it was divided, you kind of had to make a choice between am I gonna go get test help, am I gonna go to a club, am I going to do whatever I need to do, am I gonna go skip and sit in my car or whatever.

And so it was kind of like a lot of people had to, to make a choice with that advisory time.

But this year they changed it so that now on Wednesdays we have designated a club time or we also have college help, college application help.

Or I think next week we have a senior meeting about graduation outfits or whatever, things like that.

And then on Fridays we have designated academic time.

And so that's when you can use it as a study hall or go to go take a retake or do whatever you need to do.

And already in the first six weeks, I will say I'm taking a lot of hard classes and that's been so helpful.

And to be doing homework during school time, have that opportunity to ask my teachers for help with what would otherwise be asynchronous work.

So I think I know that the district is focusing a lot on consistency across schools.

So maybe I know that other schools don't even have advisory at all.

So I will say like firsthand, having advisory has been so helpful.

And maybe considering that as something to increase that consistency would be a good idea.

Agreed.

All right, Director Stone.

I have a, the question I have is about the grades again.

How many of these students are D and E in multiple classes and do we think attendance is a issue and how much of an issue and what are strategies around attendance?

I know that it's one of the operational goals that we have set for ourselves but we haven't been talking about attendance yet.

Yeah, so I will say that, first, this is a snapshot, and it's one of the many different ways that we look at D's and E's.

One of the other reports that we have all principals look at is everything broken down by teacher, by class, so that it's more granular than this slide might indicate.

But absolutely, attendance actually is one of the goals, and it's something that our high school leaders, when we put together these core practices, they said, attendance has got to be up there at the top.

So I think, you know, what I can't speak to is this is exactly, they've been all asked to do a number of things from our central team around improving attendance taking and understanding it better, but I think there's a lot of interest.

Just yesterday, some high school leaders were saying, could there be a district-wide campaign of some kind around attendance?

And so all I know is that it's on people's mind, and I don't know if there's others.

Director Lavallee.

I want to go, but I want to make sure that we get our student representatives first, if that's alright.

Sure.

I wanted to add on to Eliana on students feeling comfortable about or around like specific teachers that previously got cut because I grew up around like a lot of students who are now choosing not to pursue second education or college or university because they either started slipping in school usually around junior year and I think a lot of it revolves around the fact that a lot of teachers at my school who like had a huge connection with the students are being cut and I know like the school district is having issues with funding but I noticed that it's just been an issue that's been really I guess severe in my school but I also wanted to add on to Josephine on advisory because my school we didn't have advisory last year and a lot of our clubs had issues like finding time to communicate and work so we were meeting during lunch which was also an issue because we had one lunch only on Wednesdays and it would cut into our lunch time so a lot of students didn't get to eat lunch.

This year we do have advisory on Tuesdays and Thursdays but it's been getting better but I know a lot of students who choose to either skip or just scroll on their phones which has also been an issue because there aren't really I guess using their advisory time wisely I agree that more schools should have advisory because it was really helpful and just having that time to sit down and sort out your work was really important and valuable to our students and that's just one I want to add

I want to address advisory just in general.

This summer when we were doing negotiations with the teachers' union, one of the things that they brought up for a problem that we want to solve is advisory.

It just didn't work out in this particular negotiation cycle, but I do know that it's one of the first times that SAA has brought it to us proactively to problem solve together.

So I think that's something that we need to hear more from our students is the impact that it has and the power of it and the intentionality behind it for all the issues that all of you have brought up.

So probably more to come on that as we try to get clearer about what the student experience we want all of our students to have, regardless of which high school you happen to go to, is that if advisory is good at one school, it should be great at all of our schools.

And so I believe SEA is interested very much in trying to negotiate about how we could do that.

Alright, I heard just a little bit ago in one of the previous questions I think from Director Mizrahi when we were talking about the four year graduation rate rankings on the 25 largest districts in Washington State and there was a mention that our Latino students and our English language learners have a bigger dip in the data.

And there was something that was said that made that kind of a correlation.

And I wanted to check if that is actually true in the data.

Are our Latino students newcomers in high school?

Or is there something else going on there?

And I don't expect an answer to that right now.

But I would love to know, because there was that kind of assumption made there.

But I'm not sure it carries out in the other data that I've seen in the past.

So moving on to on-time graduation.

And I do want to apologize for these next two questions, as I had something in my eye.

And so I had to step out for a second.

And so I missed what you were saying about that.

Before you go to the next question, I just want to make sure that we're not conflating Latino-Hispanic with recent arrival.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There had just been a mention of the two things.

And I was like, are we conflating those with each other under a certain degree?

Yes, we may be, but we are low in both groups.

Yes, we are low in both groups.

There was something that was said that I was like, did those conflate into one another in a way that was not correct from the data, because they're not necessarily the same thing.

Of course.

Thank you.

I mean, it might be, but from what I'm aware of, it's not necessarily.

So going on to the 2025 on-time graduations, I can see a pattern here.

And again, apologies, because I might have missed you discuss this.

where some of the schools that are feeding from schools that were performing with really low rates in math and reading in middle school and elementary school have much higher graduation rates than I would necessarily expect to see based on how kids were doing in third grade and in eighth grade.

and obviously these are kids in third grade today and eighth grade today and so it's a slightly different set of students.

But I'd love to hear a little bit about why we're seeing something different there.

And then I've got one more after that and I don't know if you want me to.

I'll just jump in.

One real basic difference across our high schools is the number of credit earning opportunities.

So it doesn't explain everything, but it's not surprising that Cleveland has one of the highest graduation rates.

You get 32 credit earning opportunities in four years as opposed to 24.

That's also our only option high school.

So that's a different beast altogether.

Fair enough.

And then Rainier Beach has 28, or has historically had 28 creditoring opportunities when, again, most others have 24. So there are definitely other factors, which again, is things to learn from and things to share across other high schools.

Yeah, and especially if we're seeing a rise there, if we're seeing kids struggle going through the schools that are underneath that feeder school, and then all of a sudden we see them being really successful in high school, that would be something of huge note.

But it's just a little bit, because it's something that I wouldn't expect to see, I'm just very curious about the detail there.

Going on to the high school core practices grade reviews, where we have got the yellow box on the right-hand side there, and we're looking at the number of D and E grades.

I'd also be very curious to see kind of, I know there's the note there that there's opportunity gaps are concentrated in these same courses.

I'd love to either see this data kind of broken up by those those different metrics or broken down by these different schools, potentially both.

Because I think that would also be really informative as to where we're seeing gaps and for who we're seeing gaps for.

Some of my colleagues in academics would agree with that.

They were concerned this slide is, again, meant to be illustrative more than the definitive statement about where D's and E's are happening.

So I appreciate your push for more clarity.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, I'm gonna move on to the last section I think.

Do you have a question?

Nope, last section.

So I think this last section is actually a great way to end this evening, is because it truly is about high-quality instructional materials.

It's kind of an overall theme, and I think Director Lavallee and Director Song, you kind of walked us right into it.

seems like curriculum's really important.

The support for curriculum in our teachers is really important.

The alignment is really important.

The accountability is really important.

So when you look at the process for curriculum adoptions in Seattle Public Schools, It's slide, let's see here, this one here, it just basically says, you know, this is how long it takes.

It's an 18 month period for us to start the process to where it's fully implemented.

And so if you look for Emerge, our most recent adoption, it took us 18 months, actually further back, almost two years ago, for us to get to this spot here in September.

of 26. So when you're looking at this next slide, there's a lot of things that go into when we consider a curriculum adoption.

One of it is time.

When was the last time that we did a curriculum adoption is one question to ask.

When does it expire is another thing to ask, but when you ask when does it expire, Here's what makes this kind of a complicated slide, this 76 here, is because when we say something expires is traditionally in school districts we used to buy say like a biology book.

You buy a biology book, it sits in the classroom, and you say, what's our district-adopted curriculum?

It's this biology book.

And it's in the classroom, and it can stay there forever.

And when we need more of that particular book, we just replace them, or we just buy more of them.

What's different now with our curriculum adoptions is our curriculum adoptions have an electronic component to them.

They're electronic.

And so they're not like a book.

Even though there's hard materials with Emerge, there's hard materials for Emerge.

There's also an electronic component that allows us to use capital dollars to be able to pay for these adoptions.

So what also is a part of this really interesting process for curriculum adoptions is, how are you going to pay for it?

Money is an issue.

And historically, school boards and superintendents and leadership have had to make really difficult decisions about budgets for any number of reasons.

And historically, one of the places that got pushed off was curriculum.

because it is expensive to do.

You look, seven to nine million dollars that we did just for Emerge.

So when you look at this list here, it's not meant to say this is the conveyor belt of curriculum adoptions and the next one up.

What we're saying is we need to be planning and thinking thoughtfully as an entire system, curriculum assessment and instruction, think about what we should be predicting.

Because if you look at K-5 math and middle school math, I think one of the questions that we were kind of leading ourselves to is like, is there an opportunity for us just to align them, just do a K-8 math curriculum?

Yes, there's that opportunity, but in order for those to sync up is a, yes, it's a math problem, no pun intended.

It is a math problem, but it's an expensive one because we might have to, on one end for the K-5, extend it.

which will cost us dollars and on the other end for the middle school we might want to end it early which also costs us dollars and we want to do the curriculum adoption.

So all of those things when you start to think about what looks like an easily solvable problem is it's very complicated.

So what we want to put out tonight is This is a general idea about when the last time some of these areas were adopted.

So it's good to know.

It's not meant to be an exhaustive list.

And then also a projected, if we were just to say, well, when is the expiration date on this particular curriculum?

What would we anticipate that we would need to do to make a new curriculum adoption process?

That's kind of what you're seeing here.

What influences this in addition to money is district priorities.

And so we've heard Superintendent Scholdner speak a lot about K-5 social studies or social studies in general.

that might be through discussion, responsiveness to community, teachers, staff, students, community, that we might prioritize that one.

But if we were to do that right now with Emerge happening at K-5, we would it wouldn't be advisable with our teaching staff.

We don't want to overwhelm them.

So that also goes into some of the things that we think about.

So I think this is worthy of a future conversation to talk more about.

Me and my team are more than happy to give you the other 24 lines that are buried under here so you can see it.

But we wanted to bring this because it ended on this night.

is because high-quality instruction materials are important, and we should be being consistent about what we can afford, when we can do it, and how it's aligned to our district priorities.

Okay.

Start, it looks like, with Director Rankin.

She has her hand up.

Yes, I do.

Thank you.

I am wondering about when I look at policy 2015 it is the guidance to the district on selection and adoption of instructional materials and it I don't know when the last time it was updated was but it talks about some very technical things about you know what's in the RCW some definitions and then the requirements of the adoption committee but there's no guidance on expectations from the board or from any other entity about how often instructional material should be adopted and to you know echo what you said Mike that It was my experience prior to joining the board and hearing from board members and community members that have been around longer than I have that exactly what you said happened was that when decisions had to be made, people kind of put off curriculum, you know, because it is so expensive.

Like, oh, we'll just do that one more year, one more year, one more year.

Well, high school world in U.S. history last being adopted when my younger son was born and he's now in high school, you know, that's a problem.

So I'm wondering what if there's other examples or if there's something that maybe your department could recommend about what we might want to put into our policy so that future boards and staff have some guidance or there's some other kind of safeguards around as staff changes, as boards change, safeguards around when things get when things should get adopted.

Yeah, Director, it's a perfect spot for us to go to the policy committee.

Myself and our team would love to come and talk that through.

And I think that would be a great place for us to have that discussion, 100%.

Wonderful because I was going to also say another place could be for the board to provide the direction to the superintendent in the academic programs delegation policy or maybe both but that would be yeah make a note Joe that would be like a great conversation around just how do we get that direction and policy about the expectation of timing and then one thing that's missing is in any curriculum adoption is or distinct program and bridges and sometimes multilingual students.

Those are students for whom the standard curriculum doesn't account.

And most students with disabilities should be receiving specially designed instruction by an educator using the general curriculum but we have small numbers of students who do need different curricular support and it has been my experience that we as a district have not provided that.

So I'm also wondering how we can add those specific groups into our curriculum adoptions to make sure that we have expectations and materials for all of our students.

Yes, we concur 100%, and one of the things that I think resulted in the adoption of Emerge was some of the things that you were bringing up here, Director Rankin, specifically around students who are specialized populations that it's embedded in the curriculum, but that's one of the things that was screening criteria for the committees, but something that we can make sure that we're always calling out intentionally on the front end.

And we can work together on that in policy for sure.

Sounds good.

Thanks.

Director Smith.

I'd just like to note this snapshot, you gave a good overview of looking at projected years of new adoptions and the finances, but something that I would also like to see would be sort of an analysis of where we need updated curricula because of how our students are being served.

and I think like when we were talking about the eighth grade math, Superintendent Schildinger was saying it would be a great thing to support our district goals to update the K-8 math curriculum.

Sounds very reasonable.

I know you did address some of the concerns, but just look at that needs based.

Where are the curricula failing our kids that might be more urgently in need of attention?

I think you just spoke to what makes this more complicated because it isn't just who's next in terms of the year, it's what's the most critical.

Sorry, Superintendent Schildner, I don't know if you wanted to weigh in.

Yeah, I mean, look, I appreciate the work that had been done previously.

I know that a lot of teachers and central office and folks had to say about it.

I really think that a 10-year adoption is way too long to begin with.

And I'm worried about something like pre-calculus, calculus, and statistics that it's 20 years, but hey, you know.

And I think that sometimes at some cost and we still have to do right by kids.

So, you know, Mike and the team know that I've asked them to really consider where we need to move on curriculum adoption, even if it hasn't to finish its production year because, you know, things have changed just like how science of reading is really important and we know that it's working and that's, I'm thrilled that we were able to get a new ELA curriculum.

I know that there's been a lot of concerns around our 6-8 ELA curriculum, which is something that we should probably talk about as well.

And certainly, you know, with math you know I think there are some very good K-8 math programs so rather than have these splits I mean one of the things that I don't quite understand is why we continue to have all these different curriculas if there are good curriculums out there that are kind of sequential in nature, that would actually be really helpful for students, especially in the conversation we had, I don't know, two hours ago that was about, you know, students kind of being bored out of their minds.

So, you know, I think we're going to try to work on this and I look forward to moving forward with some adoptions in the near future.

I'm going to go Director Song.

Two questions.

Looking at this timeline, a lot there are for 28-29.

Is this just driven based on contracts expiring?

Yes.

I just wanted to confirm that.

I'm not an educator.

Can you help me understand what is the role of standards from OSPI and how we should be thinking about them with curriculum adoptions.

I know OSPI is doing some work on updating social studies standards.

And what is the relationship with OSPI's learning standards in Common Core and the testing?

Maybe that's a really big question to ask.

It's a big question and a hot potato that I'd like to give to these two over here.

So OSPI provides the guidance.

And when we're trying to adopt or in the process of adopting a curriculum, we want to make sure that it's vetted, it's aligned, it's aligned to standards.

that meet both the national standards and local standards in the state of Washington.

So it's a complicated process, but that's why it's such a long process, is because of all the things that we have to go from the guidance of the state of Washington.

But we can choose anything.

but it's a very difficult process just to get anything through and so as Ben came in last spring as we were through the EMERGE or the ELA adoption, his questions about us as an entire system were very much based on what's the research, what are we basing this on, and then why this one at this time right now.

And so he's asking those exact same hard questions.

But it's something that's wrapped up in the actual curriculum adoption committee process.

So we have to follow it.

And we can come back and speak to more details on that.

I'm going to hand over the microphone to Director Song.

I have to get home to child care, so I will dial in, but she's going to lead the rest of this conversation.

I also have a hard stop to pick up a child at eight.

Did you want to say something?

No, I just appreciate the question because it's not cut and dry, I think, in terms of when the state changes standards.

We have a number of considerations in terms of when's the test going to change, how useful is it for students and families.

For example, we have an eighth grade math goal, but if they're going to change the math standards but not the test for a number of years, It doesn't make sense for us to do whole new things when we're going to want to be held accountable to the current test.

So you're right to raise it, because they are changing some of the standards.

So in theory, when they change a standard, they should be changing the test.

Which they do.

It's a lag.

It's a significant lag, multi-year.

So we have to take that into account, I think, as a group, as a leadership group, to figure out how best we respond.

It's one of the things that we have to anticipate.

I mean, there's any number of issues, but that issue is one of them, the lag that happens.

around policy implementation and policy creation and how it plays itself out.

Unintended consequences.

And going back to the list here, how will your team be thinking about how to prioritize these?

Because it is a very long, complicated process.

You couldn't possibly do all of these all at the same time, but they're all kind of projected very similarly.

Yeah, no, what we wanted to try to highlight for us internally, but also for the public as well, to see, yeah, we have to have some type of staggered implementation here, just because there's only so much change we can afford.

and only so much change that can actually be implemented at the building level.

So we want to have this as a highlight and be able to say, well, as long as we have a plan, we can start to work that plan.

But we want the public and directors to be able to see this is what it looks like currently.

So we've gotten a lot of feedback on, for example, sixth through eighth grade ELA.

Once we've adopted a curriculum, what is a reasonable amount of adjustment we can make, and what kind of system do we have in place to react to, like, oh, this wasn't exactly what we had planned for, and we're going to adjust?

I think one thing to keep in mind with that particular adoption was the time that content area hadn't been attended to because what happens then is teachers get into a practice of doing they're you know doing the best they can but then we're asking folks to come over and do something else so that change management component is really important and I think that that when was the last time that adoption 1998 1998 right so that's too long we need to learn from our implementation and some of it is the actual material sure but the other component we probably shouldn't underestimate is the change management in 1998 is that's we can all agree that's way too long to because when you do an implementation you can address other things, right?

Common pedagogy, professional development, common assessments and so there's a lot at play there.

Representative Mangelson?

I just have one really quick question.

I know it's not on the chart, and I know you said that you'd be happy to provide an extended chart, but I'm just curious, was the high school like algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, it was pretty recently updated.

Yes.

Right?

OK.

Two years ago.

Yes.

OK.

I remember because I was asking my friends, I was like, can you help me on algebra 2?

And they were like, no, I can't.

This is completely different.

So that was my only question.

Thank you.

I was just going to say for 6th grade to 8th grade math, when you guys are, I'm assuming you're going to adopt, does this mean you're adopting a new curriculum in 2029?

That's the projected, yes.

It's the time that we may move that direction.

Okay.

I was just thinking in relation to COVID, like when COVID happened, I was in 4th and 5th grade.

Honestly, I remember, like I just wouldn't do math classes.

It was online.

I just wouldn't pay attention to it.

I think a lot of students did the same thing.

So I didn't really get that foundational math in fifth and fourth grade.

And I'm sure other grades of students had that as well.

And I just remember coming into sixth grade in person, I was like, what the heck is going on?

I don't understand math.

I don't know what I'm doing.

So I was just thinking to maybe help with the eighth grade math proficiency.

seeing a rise in the percentage, maybe considering looking more deeply into the specific effects of COVID on specific grade levels and maybe doing reviews in sixth to eighth grade math.

I don't know if that's possible, but I feel like that would have been helpful to me in sixth grade.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I just also wanted to add on, during COVID, I also had a lot of issues when it came to staying focused, especially since we adopted computers and Zoom and online meetings.

I just think it was really easy to get distracted and play games and do whatnot.

But yeah, I also agree that maybe we could see the effects of COVID on those grade levels and maybe modify or help if you see something's up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Before we adjourn, I just had one point to address Director Lavallee, just at least for the transcript, if that's OK.

So she pointed out a mistake that I made where Director Mizrahi brought up the difference between the graduation rate for multilingual learners.

And I was assuming he was talking about the next slide, which is about Hispanic Latino students.

So I just want to correct that she was correct that I misheard and so responded incorrectly.

Just wanted to put that in the record.

So thank you.

So we just wanted to, again, it went, you know, a couple minutes over than we were planning for, but we wanted to just thank, you know, again, for the opportunity and for, you know, Superintendent Schulzner's leadership that, you know, we're really talking about a condensed amount of time from, say, you know, June of last year or this year to right now about what we're doing.

And that's how we're always going to come back to the board is just like what are the actions the adults are doing and what is it resulting in for students and be focused on that.

So thank you for the opportunity.

There's no further business on the agenda.

The meeting stands adjourned at 7.48 PM.

Thank you.

Good night, everybody.

Thank you so much.

past midnight for them