Tomorrow night the Board will meet as a Committee of the Whole (where we meet and discuss issues on the agenda but don’t take action). The agenda includes an update on the district’s controversial math policy, including what I am told will be a discussion of possible other options to allow students to take Calculus by senior year (currently the only officially recommended route is taking a challenging Precalculus/Algebra II compression course in the 11th grade; to avoid the course, some parents are paying for a costly online CCSS Algebra course before 9th grade, or having their students “double up” in CCSS Algebra and CCSS Geometry in 9th grade).
The Board will also discuss the timeline and process for hiring a new Superintendent with our new search firm, Leadership Associates.
The meeting starts at 6 p.m. in the Board room at 555 Franklin Street. It will not be telecast or broadcast online, but recordings should be available within 48 hours of the meeting.
Rachel Norton 
Rachel, given the reshuffling of the school board, will the neighborhood school assigment issue be revived in the near term? Seems like you may have the necessary votes now.
At the candidate forum, I heard Jill Wynns say that a recent study showed our 8th graders are doing better in math than other districts. I would like to make sure that you and the rest of the BOE all understand that this is false. The SRI study doesn’t demonstrate anything. They used a self-selected convenience sample of SFUSD 8th graders, had them perform a task that is not part of the standard, and then compared the results to a specially selected comparison group who tested under normal testing conditions. As best I can tell, they didn’t demographically match the comparison group, either.
No statistician would draw any valid inference from this study. You have to have a random sample of the population you are testing, and a demographically matched control, and the study has to be performed under comparable conditions. None of those requirements were met. Self-selected convenience sample is a known way to deliberately skew the data. The SFUSD Math Department should be ashamed of themselves for announcing that any probabilistic inference of any kind can be drawn from this study.
No BOE member should accept the conclusion that the SRI study demonstrates anything about how our 8th graders are performing in comparison to other Districts. Instead, the BOE should be asking how it is that our Math Department could issue such an embarrassing press release on behalf of our School District.