Seattle Schools Community Forum: If I had a million dollars

Seattle Schools Community Forum: If I had a million dollars:

If I had a million dollars

 The recent $1.5 Billion prize in the PowerBall lottery made a lot of news. A lot of people who don't normally buy lottery tickets bought some for that drawing. I didn't because, as my brother succinctly told me, buying a ticket does not significantly improve your odds of winning. Needless to say, I didn't win the big prize.


I didn't think about what I would do with the money if I won. That's what you buy when you buy a lottery ticket, right? You buy the license to dream. I didn't buy a ticket so I didn't have license to think about how I would spend the money and I certainly didn't presume that I would win and start spending the money before the drawing. That would be crazy, right?

Yet that's what Seattle Public Schools does on a regular basis. They draw up all of these initiatives - Targeted Universalism is the latest one - which, I suppose, are all very high-minded and well-intentioned, but are predicated on one or more fantasies.


With Targeted Universalism they rely on about four of these fantasies.

First, they assume that they can implement a consistent Tier 1 curriculum across all classrooms and schools. They can't. They have been trying to do this ever since they introduced Standards-based Learning over fifteen years ago, but they have never been able to do it. Not only have they repeatedly and utterly failed in this, they have never admitted it so they have never learned from the failure. Instead, they chose to declare victory and move on. Since they claimed success, they could never figure out what kept them from succeeding and, worse, they persist in the delusion that they can do it.

It could that the JSCEE just doesn't know that standardization has not been implemented in the schools, it could be that they know but they have been lying to the Board about it, it could be that they do know, but they are lying to themselves about it, it could be that the schools have lied to the JSCEE about it to get the bureaucrats off their backs, or it could be some other possibility. But no matter who is misrepresenting the facts - knowingly or unknowingly - there is no consistent implementation of curriculum in Seattle Public Schools. Not across schools - not even across classrooms within schools.

When I think of this I am haunted by the emails that came after the Board's adoption of Math In Focus in which the Executive Directors of Schools Seattle Schools Community Forum: If I had a million dollars: