[rooseveltubc] Re: SF Community school is NOT using the universal screener (fwd)
- From: Susie <susie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: rooseveltubc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 09:11:21 -0800 (PST)
Pretty impressive what SF Community School has done. Susie (:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:21:54 -0800
From: Andrew Libson <andrewlibson@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Adrienne Johnstone <adrienne.johnstone@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: EDU- Educators for a Democratic Union
<EducatorsDemocraticUnion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: SF Community school is NOT using the universal screener
Mission High School is also NOT doing Universal Screener assessment for ALL
the reasons that SF Community listed.
Our staff felt that the direction the district was going was subjective and
racist. There was no parent involvement in a test that has teachers who are
NOT qualified to make assessments like these labeling their children with
all sorts of terms from 'defiant' to 'bullies' to 'depressed'.
It's nonsense and I think other schools should feel empowered to push back
on the Universal Screener as well.
Andy.
On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 9:00 PM, Adrienne Johnstone
<adrienne.johnstone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello all,
I wanted to spread the word that the staff of our K-8 SF Community
School decided unanimously today to refuse to use the Universal
Screener the district is using for behavioral-RTI across the district.
After a pretty impassioned staff meeting (with our principal absent),
we worked out a brief statement for our principal and anyone else who
is interested. I walked into the meeting thinking I might be the only
one who was seriously pissed about this thing. How wrong I was! We
worked together to clarify our concerns (none of which were addressed
by the union's side letter agreements about paying per diem for extra
work) and are not using this gross thing. I'm excited for our staff
taking a stand. Draft statement is below.....
AJ
At a meeting on January 27, the staff of SFC unanimously voted to not
use the Universal Screener for Behavioral-RTI at our school. There are
a number of concerns that have gone unaddressed for our staff and lead
us to opt not to use this tool.
We support the goals and approach of behavioral-RTI and are eager to
craft a vision for San Francisco Community School while designing
tools that meet the needs of our community. We believe that a
different screener could be a useful tool for our school.
We do not all equally share all of the below concerns, but we all
share some of these concerns, enough to prevent us from moving forward
with this tool.
*
The tool was acquired from Pearson. We have no assurances that the
data will only be stored and available here at the site. There are
also no assurances that data will not be shared with other sites,
with the district, etc.
*
Parents have neither been informed nor given consent for this
screening to take place.
*
We believe a teacher-created tool that will help us make more
informed decisions for effective interventions should be created
at the school, for our community and with family input.
*
The language of Universal Screener raises numerous concerns about
bias, about implicit values and about racism
*
The first externalizing item, a ranking on "defiance," is
particularly jarring. We recognize that our students live in an
unjust world. We listen to defiance and recognize "passive
defiance" as a symptom of an alienating school culture and will
not rate on students on such a metric.
*
This universal screener is a purely quantitative tool that
devalues other kinds of data. Behind the education jargon about
“data driven” decision making is a devaluing of other kinds of
observation and data collection and a general mistrust of teachers
as knowledgeable decision makers.
Signed,
the teaching and counseling staff of SF Community School
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