S2 E14 - Data Night with Dr. Hart

[00:00:00] Michelle Sarju: This school district is not going to solve poverty. That's not the job of the school district. But our job is to receive those kids, no matter their income, and essentially do right by them. And we're not doing right by them. And as I think about this, everything needs to be aligned with that.

[00:00:31] Jane Tunks Demel: Welcome to Seattle Hall Pass, a podcast with news and conversations about Seattle Public Schools. I'm Jane Tunks Demel.

[00:00:39] Christie Robertson: I'm Christie Robertson.

[00:00:41] Jasmine Pulido: I'm Jasmine Pulido. 

We have not recorded since before the election. So I think it's just important to point out that we all here on the team have been processing that. I did start looking up the public education plans for Project 2025 after the election results, and possibly we can do an episode on that in the future, but just wanted to send lots of hugs and good vibes to all of you who are in the same shoes as us, processing those results.

[00:01:15] Jane Tunks Demel: And for me in times like this, I really like to put my energy locally, and hopefully that's part of what this podcast does, that I think anybody listening probably really cares about our public schools and wants the best for them. 

[00:01:28] Jasmine Pulido: If you have thoughts about public education and next year's change in office, email us about that.

 Okay, so shall we move on?

[00:01:39] Christie Robertson: Yes, because we have a bunch to cover today. Most of which came from a school board meeting from October 23rd. But is definitely absolutely still relevant since it was basically all about the past and the future of Seattle Public Schools student outcomes.

[00:01:57] Jane Tunks Demel: And so what's happening is that the school board and superintendent are working on a new strategic plan for the next five years, which will include all new goals and guardrails. And Christie, can you explain what is the strategic plan, anyway? 

[00:02:14] Christie Robertson: Sure. So the strategic plan is developed through a collaboration between the SPS administration and the school board. And it is supposed to guide the work of the district for a five-year period. The one they're developing now would go from 2026 to 2030. 

And this will be the second strategic plan that was guided by Student Outcomes Focused Governance. So over the last set of months, the board has been simultaneously trying to deal with all this budget and closure madness and also develop their next set of goals and guardrails.

[00:02:53] Jane Tunks Demel: Christie, can you explain how the goals and guardrails work? 

[00:02:58] Christie Robertson: Currently the goals are focused on Black boys and Students of Color Furthest from Educational Justice. And they are third-grade reading test scores, seventh-grade math test scores, and college and career readiness all of which have various interim measures.

Each goal is supposed to be monitored four times a year. The superintendent brings a bunch of data, and the board asks a bunch of questions to make sure that where performance is not improving, which so far it hasn't been, that they have strategies to address that.

And then each guardrail is supposed to be monitored once a year. And the superintendent's evaluation is also based on the goals and guardrails, which was part of what has been going on in the past few months. There's been controversy about, since outcomes haven't improved, what happens with the superintendent now.

Student Needs Assessment Report

[00:03:55] Christie Robertson: So in the process of developing their strategic plan, the board decided that they wanted a comprehensive look at where students stand in Seattle Public Schools currently. So they commissioned a report from the Council of Great City Schools, giving them basically all of our student achievement data and demographics and all kinds of information. And at this meeting, they got back a rundown of the results of all of the data analysis that the Council for Great City Schools did.

This report was brought to the board by Dr. Ray Hart, who is the executive director of the Council for Great City Schools. 

[00:04:42] Jasmine Pulido: And what I thought was really interesting was that AJ Crabill, who is the SOFG coach for the school board is also part of the Council of Great City Schools. And they mentioned that the Council of Great City Schools has been around since the 1950s.

[00:04:58] Christie Robertson: Yeah, really interesting. And in this report, they compared to Seattle to three comparison groups — Portland School District, San Francisco Unified School District, and then Washington state as a whole. They chose Portland and San Francisco as comparisons because they are similar to Seattle in the level of what Dr. Hart called abject poverty.

[00:05:24] Ray Hart: We also looked at other school districts in the area. And we particularly identified two school districts to compare you to. They are Portland Public Schools, which is just just to your south. And then San Francisco Public Schools. What you'll note is we've identified here, in your district boundaries, what percentage of your families are in what we would consider more abject poverty. And that is those families that make less than $10,000 a year for the household income, those families that are $10-$15,000 for household income, and those families that are $15,000-$25,000 in household income.

So in Seattle, it's about 5.5% of your families. That’s the percentage of the families within the district boundaries. That's not necessarily the percentage of families that are actually attending Seattle Public Schools. That percentage would be higher. So as your families opt for private schools or other school options, it'll actually drive up that percentage in your buildings.

[00:06:21] Jane Tunks Demel: Let's talk about some of the major conclusions from the analysis.

[00:06:25] Christie Robertson: One of the big take-home messages was that Seattle is doing fairly well if you take kids as a whole, compared to Washington as a whole, maybe about 10 to 20 percentage points higher on all the different test score measurements that they looked at. So Dr. Hart kept saying "We're coming from a position of strength, not a position of weakness," but that things could still get better. But this report had there was like, what, 144 slides or something? 

[00:07:03] Jasmine Pulido: 148. 

[00:07:04] Christie Robertson: 148 slides that were basically — each one was a separate graph and broke down each different demographic group and then compared to the other comparison groups, which was just fascinating to see.

And what really struck me was that, while we were doing considerably better than San Francisco, Portland, and Washington overall when you looked at all students, when you broke it down into one of our lesser advantaged groups, we were not doing that much better. Which means that we have a bigger gap between our highest performing and our lowest performing students than other districts 

Which, for me, made me really think that we may want to stay focused on groups of students that are having more trouble. Because that's where we're really falling behind is giving all of our students all the skills that they need.

[00:07:59] Jane Tunks Demel: But Dr. Hart actually was suggesting that Seattle Public Schools measure students who are in poverty because it's closely aligned with race. As we all know, economics is often tied with race. We can play a clip of how he explained it.

[00:08:16] Ray Hart: When you look at your students in poverty, and we look at your academic achievement — and I'll use a black-white comparison — if you were to compare African American student performance to white student performance, and you say, look at the disparities, this is huge. It appears to be a racial disparity. It is actually not. It is an economic disparity. So what you're really looking at is the economic differences between those two groups, not the racial differences between those two groups. 

And so you'll see that 80 percent of your African American students are free and reduced price lunch compared to white, which is 11 percent. So if you're trying to compare racial groups to each other, you've got to think in the back of your mind, "This isn't really what I'm seeing. What I'm really seeing is economic differences." 

[00:08:57] Christie Robertson: Yeah, this was I think the second big take-home message. If you break it down by race, it looks like we have a racial problem, but it's actually an income problem. And I was super struck by the one table that he put up of the free and reduced lunch rates based on race. Just so stark — 11 percent of white families are free and reduced lunch and 80 percent of Black families.

[00:09:26] Jane Tunks Demel: And the other category he highlighted was — unfortunately, it's termed "other" — but it includes Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, and those groups together are 71 percent free and reduced lunch. And he was [also] talking about the multiracial category.

[00:09:44] Christie Robertson: Yeah, I thought this was so interesting. The board goals are for Black students and Students of Color Furthest from Educational Justice, which is a category that I believe they made up and one of the categories that it does include is multiracial students. And Dr. Hart pointed out that multiracial students are actually not high in free and reduced lunch. And so he was saying they shouldn't be included in that group.

[00:10:10] Jasmine Pulido:  This is Jasmine interrupting the original recording. To say that I looked up this category for SPS’s Students of Color Furthest from Educational Justice, taken from the overview of School Equity Tiers 2022/2023 doc, which is the most updated version I could find that had a clearly stated definition. And this document says, Black/African American, Native American, Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latinx, Southeast Asian, or Middle Eastern/North African, including multiracial students from these groups. Based on this definition, I wonder when Dr. Hart is talking about the group multiracial students, if he's talking about multiracial students in SPS as a whole, or if he's actually talking about multiracial students that are taken specifically from these listed racial categories. 

But maybe we can listen to Dr. Hart and see what other people think.

[00:11:23] Ray Hart: You have a category that you've called Students of Color Furthest from Educational Justice, but you'll note here that your multiracial students have a 23% poverty level, which means that they aren't quite as impoverished as some of your other groups. They're actually a little more advantaged. But they're in the group that is called Students of Color Furthest Away from Educational Justice. So what you're doing is combining race with income. And you're creating a category that really looks at the combination of the two. But income is really the driving difference. And you'll see that group that is  students of color furthest away from educational justice actually performs better academically than most of your students, but it's because it's less impoverished. 

[00:12:10] Jane Tunks Demel: I think what he's getting at is just, as we all know, a single race is not a monolith. We have all sorts of individuals who fall under those categories, and that's why he thinks that poverty is the best measure to help the students who need support.

[00:12:26] Jasmine Pulido: Maybe you can help me think through this, but when he was talking about how poverty is the greatest driver, and so even though everything is broken down by racial groups, what we're really seeing are economic differences. The next thing I thought about in my mind was "but economic differences are driven by race."

[00:12:44] Christie Robertson: True. 

[00:12:45] Jasmine Pulido: And so I was trying to figure out my mind, as Director Sarju had pointed out, we know what results that ends up with when we actually look at race and economic status taken together. And I guess the whole thing about income is generational wealth. And generational wealth has been delineated or I guess systemically encouraged based on race or discouraged based on race. He says poverty is the greatest driver. And I just don't know, I guess I'm having a chicken and egg conversation in my head about this. 

[00:13:17] Christie Robertson: Mmhmm. So you're saying it could be problematic to just switch from racial categories for targeting to income because... 

[00:13:26] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, I guess I'm just saying, what is the whole reason that we started focusing on race in the first place over economic differences? It's because we knew that a lot of the reasons that we were having economic differences is because of the way that we are treating people based on race. 

[00:13:44] Christie Robertson: Yeah, and I'm not sure where the right place is to play Director Sarju's speech, but I just thought it was really speaking to a lot of us saying look, we already knew this. Seattle really loves to study a problem. Including me, I'm so excited to have all these data. But she's like, "You knew this. You knew poverty was tied to race. You knew we were screwing over the kids that are in poverty. And that's not what I want to talk about. I don't want to keep studying the problem. Like, I want to do something about it."

[00:14:16] Jane Tunks Demel: Let's listen to what she says right now.

[00:14:19] Michelle Sarju: As I listened to his presentation, I have to say that I felt really validated that I'm not stupid. And what I mean by that is race and economics have always gone together. So when we talk about poor kids and poor Black kids, what we know... that's exactly how the system was designed.  And it's working well. It continues to work well. 

This school district is not going to solve poverty. That's not the job of the school district. But our job is to receive those kids, no matter their income, and essentially do right by them. And we're not doing right by them. And as I think about this, everything needs to be aligned with that.

I want us to take this, and let's get to work. Let's utilize what we have. And let's get to work for kids.  

[00:15:23] Jane Tunks Demel: And Jas. Do you want to talk about the 30% of students that Dr. Hart mentioned over and over again? 

[00:15:30] Jasmine Pulido: So basically in the report, they followed students in different grade levels. And one of the trends that they found is that consistently we're hitting around 65% as far as reading goals and math goals, according to test scores. 

And one thing that's really interesting that Dr Hart points out is that this 30% of students that get missed in these test scores, that 30% continues through the grade levels. Then you start to see that 30% show up in suspension rates. And then you see that 30% show up in absenteeism in high school.

[00:16:09] Christie Robertson: And so the story that they're telling through following this 30% group is that by the time they get to high school, they just are so discouraged by learning and by the system that they just don't come anymore. Yeah let's play what he says about what happens in high school, because I thought it was very insightful.

[00:16:30] Ray Hart: What's important about attendance is that attendance, particularly as you get into high school, is not an attendance problem. Yes, should you go out and try to recapture kids, knock on doors, absolutely. The school district will do that. They always will. 

If you look at 9th grade and you add up the two numbers on the right-hand side, you've got 17.7% and you've got 13.4%. That is your chronic absenteeism. That chronic absenteeism when you add those two numbers together is 31%. Does 31% sound awfully familiar? Have we gotten somewhere around 30%, 35% of our kids somewhere? All right, so as you go throughout the system, you remember we said 35% weren't preK-ready. Then we've got 35% who consistently didn't pass in 3 through 8. And then we get to 9th grade and all of a sudden, 31% of our kids are chronically absent.

It's a different set of kids, right? It's a whole new set of kids who are chronically absent than the ones who were struggling throughout, right? You shake your head no, so you see, all right. So chronic absenteeism, particularly in high school, is an academic problem. He said, "I got to high school and I wasn't prepared to do the work. And because I wasn't prepared to do the work, I couldn't get the credits I needed to move on to 10th, 11th, 12th grade. I start repeating 9th grade. I get frustrated with school, and I stop coming." You don't address attendance in high school. You can address it by knocking on doors, but the real double down is, I gotta make sure kids are prepared when they get there.

[00:18:04] Jasmine Pulido: The other thing I wanted to point out was that they didn't actually start to see differences in reading outcomes until they jumped from second grade to third grade. What I thought I heard him say is that 35% group starts to show up in 3rd grade and then that consistently plays out through the rest of school. Here's Dr. Hart.

[00:18:27] Ray Hart: If you look at those students who are in poverty, typically they aren't terribly different from their peers in first-grade reading. And typically they aren't terribly different from their peers in second-grade reading. But when they get to third-grade reading, there's a huge gap that grows. And what I often ask school districts and their staff is, why all of a sudden in third grade is there a significant gap between kids who are in poverty and kids who aren't?

Think about what happens in third grade. What do standardized tests do? What happens in third grade is that kids have to comprehend what they're reading. There's no standardized test in third grade that's measuring a kid's oral fluency. They're measuring comprehension. So when you sit down to take SBAC or MAP assessment. What they're asking kids is "Can you comprehend what you just read?" Not "can you call out the words?" 

If I ask staff then, what are the things that drive a kid's ability to comprehend? The two major drivers of comprehension are background knowledge and vocabulary.

[00:19:23] Christie Robertson: The way President Rankin put it was, there's a switch from focusing on learning to read to reading to learn.

[00:19:30] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, for Seattle versus Washington, we're actually 13 points above the state average for reading. And then when the pandemic happened, the state went down 10 points, but Seattle only went down 5 points, which wow, wonderful job, Seattle.

[00:19:50] Jane Tunks Demel: And one thing I think is interesting when we're talking about this, because the most recent data from 2022 to 2023 shows that Seattle students are doing 20% better than Washington State students as a whole, but then that rate is still 58%. So while Seattle is doing so much better than other parts of the state, for some people when they don't hear it in context, they think it's just horribly low. And that's something that Joe Mizrahi was talking about when we interviewed him, that actually when you compare Seattle to other districts, Seattle is actually doing better. There's an opportunity to celebrate that, even if when you just hear the number it sounds so low. 

[00:20:35] Christie Robertson: The pandemic recovery is another way that Seattle outperformed the state of Washington overall. Except for Black students and I believe it was...

[00:20:48] Jasmine Pulido: and homeless students. 

[00:20:49] Christie Robertson: Homeless students.Those two groups have recovered less in Seattle than in the state as a whole.

[00:20:56] Jasmine Pulido: And there was this question that was asked, and I really liked it. "What can we do so homelessness and poverty aren't factors in academic outcomes?" And they basically explain the difference between trying to solve homelessness and trying to give supports for those who are homeless so that they can still have the same academic outcomes no matter what. Which I thought was a great distinction. 

[00:21:22] Christie Robertson: Yeah, that was a story that Dr. Hart told about coaching a group of principals in a different district. And here's his story. 

[00:21:30] Ray Hart: What I'll share with you is that you are no different than the rest of the country. Everyone in the country is struggling with educating low income kids. But the challenge is, how do we take those factors and make sure those factors that influence student achievement go away? When I was in the district, homelessness was a big challenge for us as a district. And we got to a place where I analyzed our district data.  I was in a large urban district as well. We analyzed our district data. I sat in front of a group of principals like this. And I told the principals, homelessness is not a factor in student achievement in our district. 

And our principals looked at me from across the table, I'll never forget it for my whole life, and screamed and yelled at me. What do you mean homelessness is not a factor? Do you know how hard we work? We go to the homeless shelters, we're working with their families, their parents, et cetera. Do you know what we're pouring into helping our homeless kids? And I said, yes, I absolutely do. And all of that work has meant that now, kids who are homeless, and kids who are not, aren't different in their academic outcomes.

That is what you're trying to do for the student groups that you target. You're not trying to upend homelessness. So you can't change homelessness. You're not trying to upend poverty. What you're saying is, what are the resources that the district can put into place so that poverty and homelessness are no longer a factor in terms of academic outcomes?

[00:22:52] Jasmine Pulido: They talked a little bit about Native students basically falling off of the graphs in the report. And it got brought up twice in the conversation. And Dr. Hart explained that because he only had 40 minutes those graphs were done, but they're in the appendix. And so I did look through the graphs and there were a couple where American Indian was just not there. And he pointed out the ones that they were there. Did you see that too?

[00:23:19] Jane Tunks Demel: I was looking for it too, and I was actually wondering if we wanted to play a little mashup of the points that Directors Briggs and Sarju. I actually thought it was really reflective of the values of this board, and so I'd love to just play a couple minutes of the back and forth. 

[00:23:39] Christie Robertson: Here's Director Clark, Director Briggs, Director Sarju, and you'll hear Dr. Ray Hart answering.

[00:23:47] Jane Tunks Demel: And this has been edited for clarity.

[00:23:50] Sarah Clark: It would be great to carry the other race groups throughout all the data, knowing that they capture our Native students and that they are also a group that experiences poverty throughout this presentation.  Whenever we were calling out race, I noticed that group is not there.

[00:24:11] Evan Briggs: Native kids are are listed in the demographics but then they don't appear anywhere in the racial groups for all of the academic data. So we have Asian, Black, Hispanic, Multiracial, White, but we don't have Native kids broken out. And I'm just wondering how that happened. what would be the reason for not including them here? 

[00:24:37] Ray Hart: Because it couldn't all fit on one slide, so there's actually a chart that looks just like that.

[00:24:42] Evan Briggs: I just, again, I'm not trying to belabor the point, but just, were there other ethnic groups that were left off of these main slides? 

[00:24:53] Ray Hart: It's not that they're main slides. All we did was pull up slides to share a specific kind of idea.We weren't trying to exclude anyone.

[00:24:59] Evan Briggs: I'm not trying to ascribe intention at all, to be clear. I'm just trying to understand. 

It was just that we couldn't get through all hundred and some slides in forty minutes. 

[00:25:11] Evan Briggs: I also know that Native kids get undercounted in our district. Which is also a problem. 

[00:25:18] Michelle Sarju: So I can appreciate that it's in the appendix. But optically it looks like they're a footnote, and you need a magnifying glass to look at them. And again, it's not about intent, but we got a sign hanging right here.

We do the land acknowledgement. I'm thinking about some of my what I call Native siblings who might be on this call or who might watch this. It doesn't feel good. It's not about intent, right? This is about impact.

[00:25:48] Sarah Clark: I just wanted to call out also, as I'm looking, had a chance to look through some of the appendix slides, there's also a lot more detail that was gone into on students with disabilities. And I also feel that's another population of students that we really don't do justice for and don't spend enough time talking about and focusing on.

[00:26:15] Jane Tunks Demel: The other interesting part about this I thought it was great because it really showed the strengths of these members of the school board, which is always centering these groups that get overlooked and have been systemically overlooked in our culture. 

But also that they were focusing on race after Dr. Hart had given like a dozen examples of why the focus should really be on students who are living in poverty. So I think probably they're going to want to try to find a way to honor both of those data points.

[00:26:52] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, I also thought it was a really interesting demonstration, and we see this over and over again when we talked about school closures, but a really interesting demonstration of the comparison of social impact to numbers, right? And I just feel like that clash keeps happening over and over again in these conversations, because there are two different sort of value sets that are being forced to be in the same room together and contend with one another.

[00:27:22] Christie Robertson: Yeah, okay, so are we ready to move on to, what is it? The superintendent talking about the goals and guardrails? 

Before we leave Dr. Hart, I want to say just a couple of things that I thought were really great advice that he gave to the board for when they're doing their goals and guardrails and their progress monitoring. And what he said was, and I've heard AJ Crabill talk about this too, you should be focusing most of your questions on what happened in the past, so that you really understand what where the problems are coming from. And he called it root cause. So you really want to push on your staff to have deep conversations about why is this happening? Well instead of explaining it, let's just play what he says.

[00:28:06] Ray Hart: So once you've set your goals, what you want to begin to hear from the staff as the staff present to you during the monitoring sessions and they share, "Here's what we're doing, here's where we're going." What you want to push the staff to do is to have deep conversations about root cause analysis. "What's actually happening? Why is this actually occurring? What are we actually seeing in the data?" And then "what are the things that we can do about it?" 

[00:28:33] Christie Robertson: I really want to keep this in mind for when the board does their progress monitoring session next time. 

Goals

[00:28:46] Jane Tunks Demel: Alright, so let's talk about the goals. Christie, can you set us up?

[00:28:52] Christie Robertson: Yeah so, a month or two ago, the board had a retreat where they just started brainstorming their goals and guardrails. And the next step of that process is that the superintendent comes back to present what he thinks that he heard that the board wants. So that was what this is. Superintendent Jones and his staff brought their interpretation of the board's goals. 

And then, after each goal that he presented, he turned and asked the board, "Did I hear that right? Is this what you want to focus on? And did anything change based on the presentation that you just heard of all the student needs data?" 

That make sense?

[00:29:34] Jasmine Pulido: That made sense to me, yeah.

[00:29:36] Jane Tunks Demel: Let's talk about the goals that the board developed during something like a four- or five-hour board retreat that happened back at the end of August. By the end of the retreat, they had two goals. Because they wanted to keep it simple. Really, [Director] Evan [Briggs] just wanted the one goal, the life-ready goal. But then they're like, " No, we need to do an early academic goal." 

So then they tried to make it broad with English and Math. They had two goals: "Early academics, strong start in early grades." And then the second goal was "Life-ready, strong finish in high school grades." 

[00:30:10] Jasmine Pulido: I can read it. I see it right now. 

So the board draft goal is "the percentage of second graders who are proficient in English and math will increase from baseline in 2025 through 2030." 

And then the second board draft school was "the percentage of graduates who have successfully created and implemented a personalized education/career path that aligns with their interests and goals will increase from baseline in 2025 through 2030."

[00:30:42] Christie Robertson: The district's four proposed alternative goals that they came into the meeting with were third-grade ELA proficiency, fifth-grade math proficiency, seventh-grade math proficiency, and a life-ready goal they called Diploma Plus.

[00:31:00] Jane Tunks Demel: What I felt like is that the board asked for something, and then the central office staff still just did what they thought would be best.

Really, they were just fine tuning the existing goals. Which makes sense because they've already been doing it for five years and they want to continue to measure the effect.

Right now there's a third grade-reading goal, and it looks like they're going to continue with that. Right now there's a seventh-grade math goal, but it looks like they're going to tweak that to a fifth-grade math goal. And right now we have a college and career readiness goal, and now they're having a goal that they're calling Diploma Plus.

[00:31:42] Jasmine Pulido: I guess what I heard was, the two goals from the retreat... they said "go and process that and then come back to us." And then during this meeting, they gave like four goals, as alternatives.

[00:31:54] Jane Tunks Demel: Yeah.

[00:31:55] Jasmine Pulido: Is that right? 

[00:31:56] Jane Tunks Demel: That's what they did. They just they did it so that they could stick to their current goals.

Even the diploma... before we had called it the Career and College Readiness School and they just used different measures to measure it and now they're calling it Diploma Plus, but it's still basically College and Career Readiness.

Christie, your eyebrow is furrowed. 

[00:32:08] Christie Robertson: It just struck me differently, because to me, at the end of the board retreat , they were all still like, "I don't know, can we have another brainstorming session? Are these the goals we want? Let's just see. Okay, let's see what the superintendent comes back with." It didn't seem like they were like, "Superintendent, take these, go forth." 

[00:32:34] Jane Tunks Demel: But AJ Crabill said next meeting is decision time. 

[00:32:38] Christie Robertson: That's true. 

[00:32:41] Jane Tunks Demel: I think that the central office staff, they tried to take the spirit of what the school board was asking for and just put it into the framework that they are mostly already using. From my limited understanding it's very common metrics that people use to measure the success of their students: third-grade reading and seventh-grade math, or now it will be fifth-grade math. So it's just common benchmarks. And they did mention that they can use that data to compare themselves with other districts. So there's a lot of advantages to sticking with the same thing.

[00:33:16] Christie Robertson: It certainly is interesting that if you go start looking at a bunch of schools using Student Outcomes Focused Governance, they basically all have these same three goals.

[00:33:25] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, and I wonder if it's because of that reason. They're like, oh okay, then we can compare to other districts who are using the same framework. But I don't know. I don't know which comes first.

[00:33:37] Christie Robertson: After all that, what they ended up with was three goals. Not finalized yet, but a focus on literacy proficiency in third grade, a focus on math proficiency by fifth grade, and this graduation requirement proposal called Diploma Plus. 

[00:33:55] Jane Tunks Demel: That was the coolest goal. 

[00:33:56] Christie Robertson: Caleb Perkins, who is the Director of College and Career Readiness, had a really good description of Diploma Plus. And after he speaks, we'll hear an interesting note from Eric Anderson, the Director of Research and Evaluation. 

[00:34:13] Caleb Perkins: So in this Diploma Plus idea, the plus feels necessary to ensure the preparedness. Right now we are a system that relies statewide too much on waivers. We see too many students who graduate who don't go into college-level credit courses. They have to take remediation. And there's also just some CTE exposure, but not an in-depth experience.

So the plus idea is that we've identified four potential pathways in STEM; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Career and Technical Education; and Dual Language. And I just want to note that Humanities could and would include Ethnic Studies and Black Studies as one of those pieces. 

But within that, we wouldn't just have students complete coursework, but we'd get to that higher bar that we saw in Dr. Hart's presentation of actually earning the college credit in those areas, or completing a more rigorous internship in CTE, or reaching a level that does predict true preparedness.

And so we take your guidance very seriously in terms of making sure that the High School and Beyond Plan piece is there, that they know what they want to do. And this is to make sure they're actually prepared to take steps and potentially have multiple pathways that they could be prepared for.

[00:35:22] Eric Anderson: Can I just add one quick data note? Because it was interesting as we did apply some just draft criteria. And when we ran those numbers for the class of 2023, that 35% that Dr. Hart was talking about, it comes to life again. Our graduation rates don't reflect that because of waivers and other things like that. I just wanted to be mindful that this is a little bit more commensurate with the other data trends that we're seeing. 

[00:35:46] Christie Robertson: Inititally, they were going to use the High School and Beyond Plan, which is just a state requirement. Which to me seems like it would be very easy to fudge. Like "Here, fill this out before you graduate." Diploma Plus sounds definitely more robust and sounds like they're really taking the spirit of college and career readiness.

Here's Director Gina Topp making a similar point. 

[00:36:09] Gina Topp: I think the problem with the High School and Beyond Plan that we identified earlier on was that it was too easy to just check that box.

[00:36:17] Christie Robertson: And also I thought it was great that they acknowledged the problem that kids are being graduated now who are not ready for college. There are too many waivers and there are kids who have to take remedial classes even when they've done all the requirements. It was great to see them acknowledging that.

And one really big contrast from the previous set of goals was that unlike last time, they are planning universal goals on math and reading and college and career readiness. 

And Dr. Hart kept reminding them, “You made a general goal. So if you do want staff to target goals at particular students, you're going to need to say that.”

[00:36:58] Ray Hart: Just really quickly, just want to point out that keep in mind that the board wrote a general goal. So the board didn't ask the district to target specific student groups. You wrote a goal for all student groups. So just keep in mind that how the district interprets that is based on the guidance that you provided in the original goal. Your original goal didn't provide guidance for looking at individual student groups. 

[00:37:19] Christie Robertson: And they never did say that.

[00:37:23] Jasmine Pulido: They sort of mentioned it, but they never actually were like, and we want that in the next version. Yeah. 

[00:37:28] Christie Robertson: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:37:30] Jane Tunks Demel: Do we want to play some of what they were saying? Because Director Sarju did at one point say if we need to rewrite the direction to you about what goals we want, then we should just do that. There's a few interesting comments about this.

[00:37:46] Michelle Sarju: What I was thinking is, this is a draft goal, and if we need to change it, because Dr. Hart pointed out what we've put down on paper, then we need to change it.

[00:37:57] Evan Briggs: The draft goal was the percentage of second graders, so we're just saying second graders in general. So are we then thinking that we will delineate which groups we're actually targeting in the interim measurements? So basically I'm talking about the idea of universal goals and targeted strategies.

[00:38:19] Liza Rankin: From Dr. Hart's presentation, what has changed for me a little bit, maybe not changed but maybe reinforced, is seeing that 35% who is coming in not as proficient in literacy or vocabulary or whatever the case may be, that that same 35% is not demonstrating proficiency in 3rd grade. What that says to me is that some of these interim [goals] need to focus on that 35%. To Evan's point, interims along different time points make sense to me, but interims for different student populations would also make sense. Should we think about the students who are the furthest away from meeting the goal and focus our interim on measures that impact those students so that strategies are targeted. 

[00:39:12] Jane Tunks Demel: And it'll be interesting to see where they land. 

[00:39:16] Jasmine Pulido: And then we can end with AJ Crabill saying that we need to make a decision next time. 

[00:39:21] AJ Crabill: I certainly agree that you should not be in decision making mode tonight. You've just received a lot of new information. It's appropriate to take time to digest that. At the next meeting, I'd recommend that you immediately take up goals and try to get to completion on goals. To the extent that the superintendent has heard any measure of consensus this evening and wants to make any modifications to his recommendations, he's certainly welcome to do so. That would be a benefit to the board. But ultimately it is the board's call and only the board's call of what the goals will be. 

At the next meeting, then, I recommend that you pivot from an exploration pose, which is where you've been tonight, which was appropriate, and into a decision making pose. Show up with proposals of "Here is the exact language based on what we heard from the community and now what we've heard from our staff. Here is the exact language of what I recommend." Anyone who wants to share a specific language recommendation from the floor is open for that. I would not recommend having another session that is exploratory like it was this evening where it's just "Let's think through and talk about it." Tonight's generative conversation was intended to serve that purpose.

And then after you land on goals, then I'd address guardrails, but I would prioritize goals first.

[00:40:42] Jasmine Pulido: My overall impression of this particular meeting was, if you're a person who really loves data, then this is the meeting for you to listen to, because there was so much data and very robust data that I found really fascinating to get to listen to.

[00:41:00] Christie Robertson: That concludes this episode. You can find our show notes at seattlehallpass.org.

[00:41:05] Jasmine Pulido: While you're at our website, you can also click the Donate button to help us fund our costs. Contributing as little as the price of a cup of coffee once a month is so helpful to us. 

[00:41:16] Jane Tunks Demel: I'm Jane Tunks Demel.

[00:41:19] Christie Robertson: I'm Christie Robertson. 

[00:41:20] Jasmine Pulido: And I'm Jasmine Pulido. We'll see you next time on Seattle Hall Pass.