A local coalition of human service nonprofits is getting the mayor involved in a school district controversy when they give out their annual awards this year, slated for a wholesome June 13 ceremony at City Hall to celebrate all things social justice.

If you'll remember, earlier this year after a family complained, Seattle Public Schools took the surprisingly forceful step of suspending a social studies curriculum at small alternative high school the Center School—a curriculum that focused on race, gender, and social justice (and that the complaining parents said made their kid uncomfortable).

While Superintendent José Banda eventually reinstated the curriculum, he forbade the use of one specific portion of the class—a set of discussions and activities called "Courageous Conversations"—saying it was intended for adults and not appropriate for a high school classroom. The class includes an AP literature credit, so its literature is expected to be at an adult level, and schools across the country have adapted the Courageous Conversations stuff for use with students; it was a dumb workaround intended to calm controversy. The teacher of the class and the teachers' union publicly opposed the move as an overreach by the district.

Now the Seattle Human Services Coalition (SHSC), a coalition of noprofits that advocates for social services in King County, is giving the school an award for "encouraging dialogue around race, gender and class," specifically calling out that now-forbidden curriculum. Not only that, but the award they're giving the school is the Mayor's Award and Proclamation—part of the award is that the mayor issues an official proclamation in celebration of the recipient. Apparently, he usually proclaims the day of the awards ceremony a city-recognized day in honor of the awardee, which could be a bit awkward since the situation has been such a bitter controversy at the school district.

SHSC director Julia Sterkovsky tells me the Mayor's Award is chosen by a different coalition member every year, this year by their Nonprofit Anti-Racism Coalition, and SHSC doesn't know who will be accepting the award on behalf of the school. The principal hasn't appeared very supportive of the curriculum or the teacher who used it, but the award is aimed at the school community, not the administration, says Sterkovsky, so it's anyone's guess who'll show up to snag that shiny lucite trophy. The award is totally in keeping with their work, Sterkovsky tells me, because "racism contributes to people not being able to meet their basic needs."

Kay Smith-Blum was elected to the Seattle School Board in 2009 with the promise of a being hard-nosed progressive—a reformer among a board that was, at the time, dominated by a bunch of Seattle Times lackeys who oversaw a multimillion dollar scandal and controversially shuttered South Seattle Schools—while using her business acumen and political skills to get things done. Smith-Blum beat incumbent Mary Bass, a progressive in her own right, who was nonetheless seen as somewhat ineffective. In the years since, Seattle Schools have tilted toward reformers and been relatively scandal-free.

But after that single term, Smith-Blum says she's ready to move on. "I simply have too much personally and businesswise to campaign this summer and I do not feel I can commit to the same level of focus for another 4 years," the co-owner of Butch Blum wrote in a letter to supporters and friends this morning.

And who can blame her?

Our anemic school district is held together with bubble gum and Popsicle sticks, and the board's low profile means that even high-profile fuck ups rarely get the scrutiny they deserve—or the scrutiny is applied years too late—and major advances in the district pass without a whisper. (WHY ANYONE WOULD WANT TO SERVE A SINGLE GODDAMN TERM ON THAT GODDAMN BOARD IS GODDAMN MYSTERY.)

Smith-Blum, who also recently withdrew her candidacy for the State Board of Education, has given blessing to Stephan Blanford as her successor. He will be running this fall and filed today. The seat on the Seattle School Board represents district 5, encompassing public schools in central Seattle. Smith-Blum's letter follows:

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At a press conference last night, the group of teachers announcing their continued boycott of Seattle Public Schools' use of the MAP standardized test encouraged parents to participate by opting their kids out of the MAP test. The spring window for testing started last week and goes through early June; parents can opt their child out of nearly any standardized test by sending written notice to a school administrator that they wish to do so.

Phil Sherburne, president of the Garfield PTSA, said that parents there "joined with staff at the school" in opposition to this test, that they made it clear to all parents that they could opt their kids out of testing, and that "an overwhelming majority of them did that." Many of the teachers who were speaking on behalf of their schools are also parents and said they had opted their own kids out of testing, urging other parents to do the same.

This boycott has gained national attention, its participants have so far not been disciplined by the district, and it's expanding to other schools—they announced last night that teachers at Ingraham High School and Thornton Creek Elementary are now participating as well, joining the staff at five other schools.

They have a clearer message at this point, too—they're telling the district to "scrap the MAP" by not renewing the test contract for next year.

But it's still unclear what the alternatives will be; a district-led task force on testing seems doomed to fail, and an independent teacher-led group is devising recommendations that likely won't have traction with the district.

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On Friday, Seattle Schools superintendent José Banda released a letter regarding the standardized-test boycott that happened this winter. Saying that "our community has engaged in a deep discussion during the last two months" about the controversial MAP test, he goes on to act like everything went just fine in the end:

I am pleased to report that every school administered the MAP assessment and met the testing deadline.

There will be no discipline of any test administrator. Those teachers who publically [sic] said they refused to administer the test either did not teach a tested subject, or they were not a test administrator.

Jesse Hagopian, a history teacher who became de facto spokesman for Garfield High School teachers when they boycotted the MAP test en masse, is completely bewildered by the letter, though he's relieved that they won't be disciplined by their district. "It's so crazy that I don't even understand how to respond to it," he tells me, "but we're happy with the end result."

The idea that no one who said they were boycotting was actually a "test administrator" is a fascinating and weird workaround for the district. "It depends on how he defines [test administrator]," says Hagopian. Since the district forced school administration to pull students out of class and give the test when the teachers who were supposed to do it refused, "I guess he can just decree that the test administrator at Garfield became the administration," and thus, those newly deputized test administrators did give the test. But in reality, "the test administrator at Garfield is Kris McBride," Hagopian says, "and she's been the most outspoken boycotter of all. This makes very little sense."

Meanwhile, the district has announced a slight relaxation of the MAP policies for the spring round of testing, which starts April 22. Teachers say they're not backing down on their boycott for spring. So it looks like everyone's strapping in for another battle to start in the next few weeks—and since the testing window goes till June 7, it could last basically untill the end of the school year.

I can't believe I missed this: The New Yorker picked up on the Garfield High School teachers' boycott of the MAP standardized test last week, and among the wordy meandering on pineapples (a former testing controversy), they come down hard:

In sum, students are taking an exam that doesn’t really count, on material that may or may not be relevant, and producing results that may have nothing to say about them or their future. If you subscribe to the notion that education is preparation for life, then these students have received their first primer on the soul-crushing routines of bureaucracy.

And:

And so the MAP brings us to the very point at which teaching and testing have diverged. When students are forced to take an exam like the MAP two or three times a year so that they can be better prepared for other, more important exams, the assessment is no longer a partner to curriculum. The assessment has become the curriculum.

Preach!

h/t Melissa Westbrook at Seattle Schools Community Forum.

When Seattle Public Schools superintendent José Banda sent out a letter last Friday that ordered the temporarily suspended race and gender curricula at the Center School to be reinstated, he offered four specific recommendations that were to be implemented "as soon as possible."

The first was to stop using a part of the curriculum called "Courageous Conversations," which had been adapted by the teacher of the class, Jon Greenberg, from a staff training. The training was convened and paid for by the district and led by Glenn Singleton, who is the author of this model for discussion and teaches it nationwide. It's not just a lesson or two, but a sort of framework for how to have difficult discussions about race, and it sets out rules to keep the discussion fair and honest and helpful. Participants are asked to agree to stay engaged with the discussion, to expect to experience some discomfort, to "speak your truth," and to expect and accept a lack of closure on such a complex and charged topic.

At the Seattle Education Association's representative assembly meeting last night, they voted "overwhelmingly," according to union president Jonathan Knapp, to encourage the district to remove that particular restriction. "Academic freedom is an important consideration," says Knapp, and teachers need to be allowed to "make professional judgments about what they should be teaching." He also said the union's position isn't actually that far from the district's—the district says this training was aimed at adults and is therefore age inappropriate. But the Center School is "not teaching it to kids, they’re teaching it to seniors," Knapp says—some of them are legal adults, some of them are just months away. They're expected to be preparing for the adult world of college and work. He says he understands "it's tough for the district" when they get a parent complaint, but that there haven't been complaints in the past, and that with any challenging curriculum, "eventually you’re gonna come up with a complaint or two."

I asked him if he thought it was funny that in the same set of recommendations, Banda said the syllabus had to be resubmitted to the College Board for AP approval—to make sure it was being taught at the college level. "We grasped that irony," laughed Knapp. The district thinks the discussions on race shouldn't be taught at an adult level, but the English lessons should be.

Greenberg, for his part, says he "objects" to the ban on lessons using the Courageous Conversations framework. "They are age-appropriate for seniors in a college-prep school," he says. Students I spoke with on Friday were of the same mind. School district spokeswoman Teresa Wippel maintains, via e-mail: "The Courageous Conversations model was intended for staff training. The specific intent of that training was not to use the model for students in the classroom."

Just got word from the school district via a letter from Superintendent José Banda that "the race and gender units of the course are to be reinstated." (Background here if you haven't been following.) In the letter, which I've posted in full below the jump, Banda says, "I cannot stress enough how much I value curriculum on race and social justice" but also that "these are subjects that must be taught in ways that are age appropriate and non-threatening." He says he encouraged the committee reviewing the curriculum to "help come up with a solution that will allow us to keep these important conversations, but will also make sure the curriculum is taught in a way that does not harm any student." They came up with a series of recommendations and the course is now set to continue.

It's easy to see this as a straight win for the teacher, Jon Greenberg, and the students who organized in support of the class—curriculum reinstated! Yay!—but here is the first of the committee recommendations Banda says he is "implementing... as soon as possible":

The race unit curriculum should be age appropriate and taught in a non-threatening manner. The class should not use the “Courageous Conversations” activities, which were intended as training for adults. The District has used this as professional development and it was not intended for use with students.

That "Courageous Conversations" framework, in which students have mediated discussions where they're encouraged to speak openly about personal experiences based on their own racial and ethnic identity, would likely be considered by the teacher and students alike to be a core component of the curriculum, and as Banda says, has been used with educators in the school district. The other recommendations—that parents be notified in advance when "classroom activities could potentially cause a high degree of emotion for students," that the AP standards the class is expected to meet be reviewed and its syllabus resubmitted to the College Board—are less threatening to the curriculum's intent. A last note that the "manner in which the course is taught must not violate" school board policies that prohibit intimidating, harassing, or discriminating against students based on race or gender, seems a little opaque. Was that happening here or not? This letter doesn't really say; it only confirms that this teacher should follow board policies, which we could assume he already thought he was.

I've contacted the teacher and student organizers for comment, and will update as soon as I hear back, but for now, a lot of students on Facebook are just all-caps yelling, "WE WON!"

UPDATE 1:34 p.m.: Just got a call from Zak Meyer, the student organizer who I spoke with at the beginning of this whole thing. He says he's read the district's decision, students have heard about it, and "everyone is glad... We got our class back, that's big." But they're still curious about "the ramifications of what [the district is] suggesting." Banda says the curriculum needs to be resubmitted to the College Board for approval, which Meyer says is confusing, since the social justice unit isn't AP, the literature part of the class is, and so there's no reason to review that. (Humanities classes are interdisciplinary classes that cover both social studies and language arts at the Center School.) Also, he wondered, "What’s gonna happen now? Is this gonna lead to more micromanaging from the district? If this happens to any teacher who teaches social justice—their curriculum is brought under constant scrutiny—what teacher is gonna want to teach this?" But for now, everyone's "excited," he says. The regular curriculum will start on Monday.

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I knew this would be a rollicking good time! At tonight's school board meeting, which was a pretty full house, a roster of people connected to the Center School signed up to speak during the public testimony portion, all in favor of the immediate reinstatement of the race and gender curriculum there. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, click here for background.) You have to sign up days in advance, so they'd all planned ahead and many had brought statements to read.

I want to transcribe much of what was said, since it was passionate and multifaceted, but there's only so much space on the internet (ha-ha! Not true), so I've put a pile of it, from students, alumni, parents, and other teachers after the jump below. All throughout, there was wild cheering when people made statements the audience agreed with and after each person's testimony.

The teacher whose curriculum has been suspended, Jon Greenberg, also spoke. When he started by mentioning the curriculum suspension, the room erupted in hisses and boos.

He said the process leading up to the suspension of the curriculum was full of "missteps and mistakes," reiterating that the investigation seemed to go no further than interviewing the complaining family and himself, and that his principal, Oksana Britsova, "never met with me to request curricular changes" before he received a letter directly from the superintendent. (She previously hasn't returned my call for comment; generally, members of the press are being referred to the district spokesperson.) He also mentioned that it seemed problematic to shut down a curriculum about race due to the complaints of one white family, who in their interactions with him have asked him "not to use racial terms" in class—in a unit on race, he said, that's "mind-boggling." He also mentioned that "the reality of the Center School is that students of color feel uncomfortable in our school on a daily basis. Who is filing a complaint for them?"

Mikayla Crawford-Harris, a former Center School student who went on to be a student teacher there with Greenberg and is now a teacher at Rainier Beach high school, said she couldn't help but think, through this controversy, of her students, and the "learning environment they're in every day: ants, rodents, holes in our walls, holes in our desks... It is the most hostile learning environment." And her students have "continually complained about it" to the district, to no avail. "I wonder what it would take for those students to be heard. What is it about the student that did complain [at Center School] that got them heard?" she wondered.

After public testimony concluded, board member Michael DeBell addressed the crowd by saying, "Good to see Center School again!" (Their activist student body has testified before.) Then the school board got refreshingly honest for a few minutes.

Board member Sharon Peaslee told the crowd her daughter attends Center School, and she knows her daughter "will benefit enormously from this class. I hope that it’s reinstated very soon." She continued: "I find it very interesting that we're being investigated as a district for racism as far as our discipline practices are concerned, and that this issue would come up at Center School at this time." (She's talking about news of a US Department of Education investigation into whether black students in Seattle Public Schools are disciplined "more frequently and more harshly" than white students.) She said the district runs the risk of "denying institutional racism"—wild applause, and I heard an amen—"and we cannot do that. We need to own our racism wherever it exists. We need to confront it. And we need to change it."

Board member Betty Patu echoed that: "There is a lot of racism that goes on in our school district," she said, after quoting Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. "There is a process that we have to go through, but I can tell you, I believe that this class should be reinstated."

During a break, I spoke with Superintendent Banda, who said nothing's changed about the process this complaint is going through, that it's still up to Shauna Heath, the executive director of curriculum and instruction at SPS. "It was a very formal complaint," he said, resulting in a review of the class to make sure "it's in line with how the curriculum should be taught," and the "suspension [of curriculum] was pending that review." He said his understanding is that the race curriculum was mostly finished and that the class wouldn't be starting the next portion, a unit on gender, for a couple weeks, and the review will be done before then.

"That's not true," Mr. Greenberg told me outside the board meeting. "It's not happening because he told me not to do it." They would have been transitioning into the gender unit now; instead they're doing "a lot of rhetoric and state government." He has not heard anything more from the district since this story got media attention.

Again, Heath's decision on the curriculum, which the district has said "cannot be appealed," is due by Thursday, March 14.

More on the board meeting after the jump.

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The US Department of Education wants to know:

African-American students are suspended from school more than three times as often as white students from elementary schools to high schools.

More than one-fourth of black middle schoolers have received short-term suspensions every year since 1996. Native Americans are disciplined more often than Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Now the U.S. Department of Education is investigating whether Seattle Public Schools discriminates against African Americans by disciplining them “more frequently and more harshly than similarly situated white students,” department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said Tuesday.

Only an investigation will answer this question. But Seattle Public Schools certainly seem to have applied double standards over the years. The district shuttered a bunch of schools in 2009 in South Seattle, which has a much larger population of people of color, despite protests from African American communities and demographic studies that showed the population would grow in those neighborhoods (now the district is in the process of re-opening some of those schools). And when teachers at Garfield High School in the Central District complained recently that the MAP standardized testing wasn't effective and performed a major boycott, the district ignored their complaints and ordered teachers to administered the test anyway. In other words, the district had little sympathy for the schools in blacker and browner neighborhoods. But holy cow, when there was one, single, tiny complaint about a racial justice program last month at the Center School—close to lily-white Queen Anne and Magnolia neighborhoods—what did the district do? They suspended the whole racial justice curriculum because talking about race in school might be creating an "intimidating educational environment." So, uh, punishing black kids more harshly and closing their schools doesn't make for an "intimidating educational environment"?

Let me be clear: These anecdotes and these suspension rates alone don't prove there's a double-standard at play, but they help explain why the Feds want to get to the bottom of this. It will be great to see what they find.

Over the weekend, I reported on a dustup over the senior humanities curriculum at public high school The Center School, where a parent recently complained about a unit on race in the seniors' Citizenship and Social Justice class. According to Seattle Public Schools spokeswoman Teresa Wippel, next Thursday, March 14, is the last day for the district's curriculum and instruction director, Shauna Heath, to hand down a final decision on whether and how the race and gender portions of the class can be taught in the future.

In the meantime, both KIRO and KOMO have picked up the story, running pieces on air last night about the controversy that focused on current students who are furiously organizing to save the curriculum. (Video for KIRO is here, and KOMO's is here.)

I've been talking to parties involved, and it sounds like tomorrow's school board meeting may be a showdown: Students, alumni, parents, and the teacher whose curriculum has been suspended are all planning to testify.

As I mentioned before, I'm a graduate of the school and took the class in question, so an entertaining part of this situation for me is knowing that this class—and the school itself—has a heavy focus on learning how to get involved in issues you care about. Students and alumni have quite a bit of practice in civic engagement—commenters on the last post pointed out that they've seen students from this class testifying at city and county budget hearings. While a core group of students continues to plan a response, what I hear from them is not just careful and well reasoned arguments in favor of retaining a beloved curriculum but also a larger sense that they believe they have a right to be involved in this discussion. It's a level of engagement that'd probably be surprising if you didn't know the school and its students' history of activism.

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WaPo:

KABUL — The two men accused of orchestrating Afghanistan’s largest banking scandal were sentenced to five-year prison terms Tuesday, more than two years after stealing more than $800 million from Kabul Bank, about 5 percent of the country’s GDP.

In 2010, the scandal threatened to destabilize Afghanistan’s fragile economy. Its adjudication has since been considered by many as a litmus test for both the feeble Afghan judiciary and the government’s efforts to reduce rampant corruption.

What the report also reveals is that the banking sector has boomed during the long war, and much of this wealth has, of course, ended up in a few hands...

The more than $500 billion invested by the United States in Afghanistan since 2001 has been a boon to Afghanistan’s banking sector... But the vast majority of bank loans, investigators would later discover, went to fewer than two dozen people or companies, many with connections to the government.

I now want you to watch this remarkable video of an experiment conducted on capuchin monkeys...

The question is this: How is it that we humans, like so many other primates, have an inherent and deep sense of fairness, and yet this fairness is rarely reflected in our societies? To answer this question you need Darwin and Marx. You need Darwin to explain, in evolutionary terms, the reason why real, biologically grounded feelings of fairness were positively selected in our species. And Marx to explain why we have failed to express these real feelings in (or why they are distorted by) the structure of our large-scale societies.

It’s not every day that we get news tips from concerned high-school students fighting a curriculum change. But I got a call yesterday from Zak Meyer, a senior at The Center School (the public high school in the Armory at the Seattle Center), wanting to know if I’d heard the rumors about the suspension of his school’s race and social justice curriculum.

Full disclosure: I’m a graduate of the school, and I’d taken the class Meyer was talking about. Rumors were, indeed, racing across social networks and among alumni that something weird was going on. I asked him to fill me in.

Seniors had come in to humanities class on Monday, Meyer told me, and when they started a student-led portion of class where they talk about what happened to them over the weekend and then connect it to what they’re learning, the teacher said he had to shift the conversation away from race or gender. That’s tough, because they’re just finishing up a curriculum unit on race and social justice. Students were baffled. The teacher, Jon Greenberg, couldn’t explain the situation until Friday, when he got an all-clear to talk.

It turns out there was a parent complaint to the district about the class, which resulted in Greenberg, the sole senior humanities teacher, receiving a letter from the superintendent of schools. The letter instructed him to stop teaching two specific units of his humanities curriculum while they were investigated by the district: the race and gender units.

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The secret to fixing bad public schools is that there is no secret. There are plenty of great public schools in the nation, and there are plenty of formerly bad public schools that have since been turned around. Take for example Union City, New Jersey, a once-struggling, mostly poor, mostly immigrant district that now boasts a high school graduation rate of 89.5 percent, ten points above the national average:

Ask school officials to explain Union City’s success and they start with prekindergarten, which enrolls almost every 3- and 4-year-old. There’s abundant research showing the lifetime benefits of early education. Here, seeing is believing.

One December morning the lesson is making latkes, the potato pancakes that are a Hanukkah staple. Everything that transpires during these 90 minutes could be called a “teachable moment” — describing the smell of an onion (“Strong or light? Strong — duro. Will it smell differently when we cook it? We’ll have to find out.”); pronouncing the “p” in pepper and pimento; getting the hang of a food processor (“When I put all the ingredients in, what will happen?”).

Cognitive and noncognitive, thinking and feeling; here, this line vanishes. The good teacher is always on the lookout for both kinds of lessons, always aiming to reach both head and heart. “My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my own children,” the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. “It’s all about exposure to concepts — wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different countries. ‘Let’s do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.’ I don’t ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 — I could teach a monkey to count.”

Union City didn't achieve its turnaround with Teach for America, charter schools, or a relentless regimen of standardized testing. Instead, the district empowered its best teachers to design a new curriculum, and it invested in high quality early learning.

We could do that here in Washington State. But we don't. Because we refuse to spend the money. Instead, we'll just continue to blame the teachers and put our faith in the market to do for K-12 education what it did for, say, the banking and housing industries.