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Elisabeth Huffmaster May 14, 2013 at 09:17 pm
Checklists and rating scales are the easiest type of assessment; little training is required. They…Read More are a closed method, they have only one answer. Add comments to elaborate.
Rating scales are the most commonly used form of teacher evaluation:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/61527625/Sample-Evaluation-Forms-for-Teachers
Here is a rating scale for parents to evaluate a school with room for anecdotes:
http://www.njpirc.org/documents/family_friendly_walkthrough.pdf
Sample assessments should be part of interviews, the first day of school, the pre- and the post-evaluation meetings of students and teachers. Assessment is a snapshot of performance, like chasing a moving target. Design training, experiences and environment based on portfolios full of many types of assessments, ideally performing the skill under typical circumstances when it would be used.
Citing only one or two examples during a meeting, especially when viewing a form never before seen by one or both parties, leaves doubt in many minds that the assessment is valid. Further multiple parties should come to the same conclusion during the same observation if the assessment is objective.
Here are the CA standards for reference:
http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/
Go ahead; start assessing community classrooms and schools. Collect many types of evidence. Portfolios of such work make meetings that are more likely to result in positive changes because there are many forms of evidence on the table.
Elisabeth Huffmaster May 14, 2013 at 07:53 pm
I am currently taking an observation and assessment class so this article has intrigued me. A…Read More problem with assessing students and teachers is that many only use dichotomy terms: good or bad, skill present or not, etc. Maybe the issue should be discussion of how to educate the student, the staff and the public on how to observe, what are the purposes of observation, and how there are many ways to assess.
My current class is stressing the combined use of checklists, rating scales, running records, anecdotes based on ranges of development, narrative event sampling, time sampling and tally event sampling. This is not an exhaustive list of assessment methods; the purpose is to develop appropriate curriculum and environments for individual student learning, not to label them. I think the same should be used for staff and environmental development. The quality control idea of throw out the cheap widget and starting over with new material is not helpful in an educational context. Think rather of an expensive piece of satellite equipment with loads of million-dollar components for instance; you observe function, have many meetings to augment development and improve on what you have. And that is only an approximate comparison. But it sure beats the idea of throwing out a burned muffin and scrapping the oven in which you made it.
Elisabeth Huffmaster May 11, 2013 at 04:20 am
Parenting is perhaps the most important job for the future of our society with the least…Read More world-valued pay, true. Parenting is an example of the many important "unpaid" roles in society.
"Teaching - like parenting - is an individual by individual business," is what I said.
Yes, we do ask children how well their parents did when a child has to enter therapy to recover from their parenting. You may get the bill for this. We ask all the people you named when a child is abused.
Of course you leave a teacher who cannot teach or is in any way a determent to your child; that is your job as a parent. If you have to home school yourself or fight for vouchers as a number of you are doing, you find a way to keep your child(ren) developing in the most healthy way you can. A parent is the foremost advocate for their child's future, regardless of cost.
Good luck finding the teacher you want to teach your child(ren) or to teach the child who will grow up to care for you as you age with no expense incurred to you. Not even a baby's biological parent who happened to make a baby with you nor a parenting partner of an adopted child nor a spouse allows that kind of lack of participation, whether you stay together or not. If a person does raise your child while expecting no support from you, shame on them and shame on you; you no longer deserve to call yourself a parenting parent. Your child will remind you of that if no one else does.
Jacob Smit April 30, 2013 at 04:19 pm
We qualify, but one grandchild just finished at SLH, another has 3 years left; we will not be filing…Read More for an exemption!
Elisabeth Huffmaster May 12, 2013 at 02:25 am
Love this family and have followed their example as a parent so far to the best of my ability. They…Read More have gone back and forth between two countries and cultures. They are bilingual as a family. Ivy League colleges value this kind of education. I think this is a fabulous way to teach your children the value of education as well as to think meta-cognitively about how people learn and why they learn. Tutoring is reinforcing the value of education; students should be teaching each other as soon as they learn something.
The Martinez family is SO devoted to their community: PTA, tutoring, on campus, volunteering, driving their children to special events. They believe so deeply in their children. They are so educated themselves and share how to be so with everyone. Patricia came back from her full-ride to MIT and spoke at least once to my SLHS science classes. Patricia won the Great America roller coaster-building competition with Steven Luo when they were both just sophomores. Both of these students had no problem thinking and reading for themselves and yet negotiating the system as they needed. What joy it was to have them and their similarly academically motivated peers meet up with like-minded students all over the Bay Area for the yearly Science Bowl and Quiz Kids. They participated in the Bay Area Academic League as well. Their parents willingly drove multiple students anywhere for these extra-curricular events. All the best to you Martinez Family!
Kathy Goodall May 6, 2013 at 12:50 am
school district should start looking at how many out of district kids are slipping into our school…Read More system. We have 1 high school compared to the numerous high schools in Oakland. It doesn't seem fair that our school is over crowed. It is very frustrating as a parent to see our children struggling with basic reading and math when they are english learners. I started sending my son to READ on Estadillo while in elementary school to getting tutoring. I honestly believe that one on one help really helped him. Anyways my final thought is for the Martinez family...congrats to you and your children for having the drive instilled in them and the gas to keep their education alive. Sometimes the children need to want an education as much as the parents do but you only know what your taught and that is not always the case at home or in school
Ken Briggs May 4, 2013 at 04:12 pm
Kenneth Pon, how do you know ? if kids come late to school it may be a reason for it .but if…Read More thesekids are cutting school then the school shool call the care giver and let them know that day not a week later . with cell phones and otherways to get hold of parent call them that day . have parent bring the brat to school and make sure they go to that class at that time .
David March 29, 2013 at 12:50 am
Selection bias that doesn't account for the drop outs. Parents are voting with their feet. Around…Read More 1/3 of grade school kids leave the system by middle school. Another point is that the school age population has grown by 10% over the past decade yet public school enrollment hasn't budged.
Rob Rich March 29, 2013 at 12:34 am
Last June the Patch had an interesting article about post graduation plans for SL High grads.…Read More
http://sanleandro.patch.com/articles/most-san-leandro-high-grads-college-bound
I was pleasantly surprised. 72 going to one of the UCs (w/12 to Cal), 93 to CSU, 45 out of state/private (including Harvard, Stanford, NYU, & Boulder), & 280 to JCs.
Not blow your socks off, but a lot better than much of what you read.
Many kids going are through SL schools & making the most of it, in the face of some very real challenges. How do we build on that?
David March 28, 2013 at 10:06 pm
Majority of people I know get their kids out by middle school. The enrollment figures prove that, as…Read More there are far more kids in combined grade schools (3800-3900) than the middle schools (1900-2000). What would k-8 accomplish? As I wrote, san leandro would have about half the student actually going to high scoring schools, rather than maybe 1/4 of grade schoolers and none of the 6-12 graders.
David May 10, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Ok, let's assume that there's a 10% (generous, considering $1000 in school funding is really more…Read More like 6-9% of per pupil spending) improvement with more volunteering, and ignore the fact that it's a marker for more parental involvement at home too.
That's nice.
Let's look at things like the DC graduation rate for "voucher kids"--91%, compared to public schools' 60% rate.
Sure, volunteer more. But get real, if you want to really make a difference, tear down the public school monopoly.
Elisabeth Huffmaster May 10, 2013 at 07:30 pm
Tools of the Mind is a Lev Vygotsky-based philosophy. I have not yet used it nor observed it but…Read More Vygotsky, like Montessori, certainly added a great deal to scientifically-based understanding of human learning and development.
Elisabeth Huffmaster May 10, 2013 at 07:27 pm
Montessori methods were pioneered in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the industrial era. Activities…Read More on trays, top to bottom, left to right (if your culture reads the way, opposite if your language is for instance Arabic). We should use what we learned there.
Maria Montessori reminded us that play is a child's work. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the UNESCO 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child have pinpointed play as the way children learn and as a right of developing humans. Traditional Montessori leaves out dramatic play which is critical to the creativity modern culture expects. Reggio Emilia programs are a 1940s to 1950s improvement on developmental education.
Early childhood education evens out academically by age 8 baring significant developmental intervention needs. Developmentally appropriate early childhood education provides children more likely to make positive life choices. Another child education philosophy, the Perry High-Scope study, actually tracks this quality of life difference and is the 50 year study to which I believe Obama was referring in his State of the Union address this year: http://www.highscope.org/Content.asp?ContentId=282
I am concerned that people without human development training might have assumed from Obama's acknowledgement that preschool matters, that we should sit young children down and drill them earlier. That is NOT developmentally appropriate for the vast majority of children.
David April 23, 2013 at 03:53 pm
Actually, it's even worse than I thought...
Not only is there a significant exodus of students as…Read More they go from K-6 to 6-12, but there has also been a continued shift of San Leandro kids to non-public schools.
San Leandro has about 10% more school age kids as of 2010 than 2000 (compared to an overall population increase of about 5%). Yet public school enrollment is absolutely flat over those 10 years.
San Leandro has attracted families, and families living here have procreated admirably, bolstering the notion that SL has "family friendly" qualities. Yet these same families have avoided the public schools seemingly as much as possible, to the tune of essentially 100% of "new kids" are *not* public school kids...
Why might that be...?
Marga Lacabe April 23, 2013 at 02:40 am
What I find funny, though, is that Mr. Haverly calls Cathy a good leader even though she was a big…Read More proponent of those things that he doesn't want in a Superintendent: a focus on the achievement gap and on testing, testing, testing.
What I do hope is that the Board will be able to find a candidate who really can think outside the testing box and come up with other answers.
Larry Smith April 11, 2013 at 12:05 pm
This is a standard response to hard times. Graduation rates generally do climb when the only thing…Read More to do is stay in school because there aren't any jobs to fill. Now they can go out, borrow a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund an equally worthless college education and four years from now become a barrista at a local coffee shop. Latte anyone?
Jessica Gardner April 10, 2013 at 11:03 pm
Because they are sending more students to continuation school technically they are not a drop out
Fred Eiger April 6, 2013 at 11:21 am
Well, well, well, Spoken like a true liberal hypocrite Marga. No surprising at all.
First;…Read More "My conclusion is that a parent's primary responsibility is to their children and that they cannot ethically sacrifice their well being in pursuit of a greater social agenda."....This I agree with you. Welcome to thousands of years of societal tradtions and customs. Am I to assume that you disagree with some in the Obama regime that "we must stop this concept of parental ownership over children and that instead replace it with the concept that all children belong to society?"
2. Transferring your children to Roosevelt. Why wasn't Madison chosen? Was it because of the racial makeup of Madison versus the "fad" aspect of Roosevelt?
I'm not at all surprised by the action s of you and your husband. WIth your kind, it's always; "do as I demand, but don't comment on what I do".
jenifer engler April 4, 2013 at 06:32 pm
This is a great event. Tickets are still available. Contact Chad via the website or email him…Read More directly.
Michael Moore March 22, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Jerry, I have rarely agreed with you and have always been critical. But today you finally got it…Read More right. The school teachers and administration are nothing but paper tigers and they are toothless. The kids have figured it out. The rules are stupid and any sentient being, including adults, soon find that the reality of school is nothing more than a farce which they the students, the teachers and the administrators, along with the alumni, committed adults, idiot parents and stupid folk who comment in Patch are all players in a farce. Ionesco has his Rhinoceros and you have San Leandro. Meaningless and stupid. Nothing to be learned of value and those pompous folk who pontificate are nothing more than zits on the face of the adolescent...always there. Those of you with brain cells may be able to remember the inanity of high school and its lack of relevance. Those of you who remember it fondly are without understanding and living a lie. That is what the kids are telling us. If you must have rules, get some that are important. These badges are not relevant. The kids that find value in Moliere and Sartre and Ionesco and Voltaire and Behan and Synge will learn to read them. Let the others do what they like. Their silly inconsequential lives are more relevant than the teachers and administrators and parents and talking heads and Patchers.
Al March 22, 2013 at 07:09 pm
Boys and girls should be in separate class rooms. Girls distract boys and boys make girls feel…Read More inferior. Put them all in uniforms. A white shirt with tie, either blue slacks or blue skirt (ankle length), and black shoes. No gang colors, not choices. They are in school to learn read, writing, math, science, and history. They can learn to socialize at church on the weekends!
Craig Williams March 20, 2013 at 10:00 pm
www.kpfa.org/rchive/id/89900 is a good program today on sugar tax legislation and health problems…Read More related to sugar.
Marga Lacabe March 18, 2013 at 10:57 pm
Paul, you do realize we all know that you are Fred Eiger, right? Really, if you want to use an…Read More anonymous name and pretend it's not you, you should use one that you hadn't used before. That also goes for Mike Santos.
In any case, Richard is completely right. I remember one former Coca Cola worker/union steward that came to our office in Madrid. He was in exile because he had been getting death threats from death squads because of his work with the union. When he went to ask the management of the bottling facility for help, they increased his life insurance!
Here is a great documentary on Coca Cola in Colombia: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/coca-cola-case/
Fred Eiger March 18, 2013 at 10:39 pm
I'm sugar in a couple days we will have another ranting blog piece by Mellor extolling the virutes…Read More of Cesar Chavez. We haven't heard from Mellor in a while. What happened old chap? Were you in mourning for Hugo Chavez?
Kate March 18, 2013 at 08:13 pm
The author writes that he checks daily for lanyards in class, and every day about 8 or so students…Read More get caught and receive detentions. Even street-smart Oscar knew what the consequence would be and yet overreacted by claiming he would do no further homework. Oscar's attempt at punishing his teacher is, in reality, a self-inflicted punishment. Heverly asks if "extra slack" was called for - absolutely not. The kid threw a tantrum over a stupid detention.
Has this kid had a rough life? Absolutely! Many others have, too. Some people have been paralyzed in accidents, molested, raped, some have had their life savings stolen, etc. There are worse stories than Oscar's, and better ones, too. Bottom line: every one has baggage and it is up to the individual to make the best of what he/she is given. Oscar's reaction is to blame others, like the teacher, for his predicament. That is not the mindset of a successful person, so I hope for Oscar's sake he starts taking responsibility for his actions and the consequences. Otherwise, David will be right and this boy will end up doing time.
Robert Marrujo March 18, 2013 at 05:25 am
I have no idea what Harry's comment means, as it did nothing to make David's observation untrue, nor…Read More does it attempt to contradict David's view. Not liking things that others say because they're brutally honest is unconscionable; sometimes the truth is inconvenient. What's the point of passing kids like Oscar just to be "nice"? It's a foolish approach that only sets the boy up for a lifetime of failure.
David March 17, 2013 at 12:48 pm
As I was putting together some genealogy info for my relatively new inlaws, it struck me how only…Read More one of my 8 great-grandparents graduated from high school (with 7 of the 8 stopping school at the 8th or 9th grade), yet all of them could read, write and "do math."
Here we are, 100+ years later, and we have a near-complete illiterate who will likely graduate from high school, with a much higher price tag, even inflation adjusted.
Over a century of declining productivity and waste, the characteristics of our government-run schools. Not even operating at last century's standard.
Stephen Krashen March 16, 2013 at 02:43 am
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness…Read More in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
John W. Gardner
Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (165-1968), founder of Common Cause, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
Fred Eiger March 11, 2013 at 01:48 am
We need more, not less teachers like Jerry. In fact, he needs to be promoted to Principal or even a…Read More counselor.
Fred Eiger March 11, 2013 at 01:47 am
David, what about Las Vegas Go-Go Dancers???? They seem to make a boatload of money, yet I doubt…Read More Leah would complain.
pineda March 5, 2013 at 04:58 am
A Charter may not be a bad idea. They seem to be able to hold students accountable and at the same…Read More time challenge them in a way that public schools can't. Placing students in a grade level according to their knowledge, sets the foundation for better learning and success in the future. I will be open to San Leandro high becoming a charter school. San Leandro high has some great teachers that may be able to do even greater things in a charter environment. It is a matter of researching which charter will be best for our city.
Shawn English March 4, 2013 at 08:05 pm
What does that even mean Jessica? Make a clear argument please.
Leah Hall February 26, 2013 at 08:59 pm
Speaking on blind spots and no brainers, thought some would be interested in checking out Great…Read More Oakland Public Schools Leadership Center website. Go Oakland is a charitable organization that provides education, advocacy, and leadership within the Oakland community so that all Oakland students have the opportunity to attend quality public schools.
The GO Leadership Center supports a coalition of Oakland families, students, teachers, principals, community, and civic leaders united around a positive, student-oriented vision for public education in Oakland.
http://www.goleadershipcenter.org/impact/
David February 26, 2013 at 06:28 pm
Rob, I'm not interested in higher revenue schools that are better than average because, shockingly…Read More enough, they tend to be in districts with the attributes pointed out above.
What I'm interested in are schools that do well in districts without the attributes pointed to above, i.e. schools that educate socioeconomic strata that in aggregate do quite poorly.
These schools are often:
1) Charter schools
2) Catholic schools
3) Private schools
4) not "traditional" public schools.
As I've posted before, there are these schools *literally* down the street from failing public schools, educating kids from the same backgrounds. It wouldn't take much to walk down the street and try to figure out what SLUSD could do.
As for cloaking in a political agenda, Brown's agenda is apolitical? Get off your horse, rodeo clown.
Marga Lacabe February 19, 2013 at 11:56 pm
The electronic sign there - which is on property leased by the city - is no longer functional.
The…Read More company that makes the electronic signs will be responsible for /all/ the costs of erecting and maintaining the sign and assures the School District a minimum revenue of $8500 or 1/3 of their revenue from the sign, whichever is greater. So basically, the district will get those $8500 no matter what and will not have to spend a cent.
I wonder how much rent the city is getting for the property where the non-operational sign is - my bet not much.
SLHS Teachers Upset Over Rap Song Played During Lunchtime
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