17 June PAUSD Board Meeting Comments
4 Open Forum
The most frustrating thing in our district is that I don’t think about Palo Alto as a whole, but that I have to plan based on individual teachers and principals – especially for my disabled son. I’ve experienced both excellence and its opposite here.
But, if you look at the combination of The Promise, the ESRI program, and our School Improvement Plans, there is something potentially amazing going on. Our teachers, district team, and board are starting to actually build a “Palo Alto Way” for systematically improving our educational programs. ESRI has proven that we can manage and deliver a consistent, district-wide literacy program that has shown results faster we have had any right to expect. Similarly, the School Improvement Plans should be helping with school-level consistency and progress and, if you do things right, inter-school consistency and improvements.
There is a real foundation here that you can build on.
If I can presume to give you a summer reading suggestion, I would invite you to read “The Goal” by Eliyaho Goldratt and consider how his “Theory of Constraints” could apply to our educational programs – https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951/. For a business book, it is unusually good.
3A. Literacy
First, it is great to see the notable progress for disabled learners and other focus groups in this report.
Questions – If we are going to break out disabled students with extensive support needs in our overall reporting for the Promise, are we going to break them out in this report and others? Is that the only partition of Students With Disabilities that we are going to track?
Also, we had comparable improvements for students overall, so are we seeing results from the overall program or from efforts targeted to our focus groups and students with disabilities? I will note that this is a basic question that the “distance from standard” doesn’t address – and is a much lower threshold than we would consider acceptable for any other group.
BUT, The big question I’ve been waiting for months to ask Danae is – why aren’t we seeing similar (or directionally similar) results in the CAASP aggregate results? I’m not certain, but it may be that we are seeing good results from our students who’ve been part of the ESRI program… and extra troubling results with other students. But, if this is so, then we should be talking about accelerating our ESRI roll out to other grades – and incorporate information about ESRI participation in our CAASP data.
5. Consent Agenda
C. Question on the lack of a Board Assignment to Cubberley. The Board added this last Fall and I don’t see it listed here.
This is one of the many ways that our Cubberley students are not actually treated as part of the district. As far as I can tell, they and our students at Packard Hospital, don’t have a Site Safety Plan, a School Improvement Plan, or any other systematic reporting, visibility, or representation in our district. This is a serious shortfall and perhaps should be addressed by having these programs be integrated as a “School” with a principal – perhaps the Palo Alto Alternative Programs School.
8A. SIP Plans
The School Improvement Plans are, or should be, extremely important to the board, district, and community. This is where the “rubber hits the road” – The Promise is embodied and implemented at our schools based on these documents. I would ask that the board have the district present each school’s plan at a board meeting as previously happened with the Swift Plan.
If we look at the timeline relationship between the School Improvement Plans and The Promise, you will see that the SIPs lag the Promise by close to a year (tonight’s are based on last year’s Promise) and so it will be 2 years before changes to the Promise will begin to be seen in performance data.
This should give everyone pause.
While some timeline changes could help, it is likely that The Promise needs to be kept largely stable for at least 4 years to allow its meaningful implementation, results, and adjustments.
8B. CAASP Results
The aggregate English Language Arts data is unfortunately flat for disabled learners (though it is better for the matched cohorts), but even of larger concern should be the downward trend in the Math scores which have trended even more solidly downward in the match cohorts as is true for several other groups such as Hispanic students. I hope that the district investigates this further and shares their analysis soon.
