Tuesday Open Thread
FirstThursday Seattle, an advocacy group for black and small businesses, is having a Town Hall meeting on charter schools on Thursday, March 1st at noon. (I know, that's not an easy time to make if you are working.)
It's at the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club, 4520 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. Bring your own brown bag lunch. There will be drinks made available by the FirstThursday Board of Director.
RSVP at: info@firstThursdayseattle.org. For more information go to the FirstThursday Seattle web site: www.firstthursdayseattle.org or call the FirstThursday Seattle office: (206) 280-9941.
What's on your mind?
It's at the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls Club, 4520 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. Bring your own brown bag lunch. There will be drinks made available by the FirstThursday Board of Director.
RSVP at: info@firstThursdayseattle.org. For more information go to the FirstThursday Seattle web site: www.firstthursdayseattle.org or call the FirstThursday Seattle office: (206) 280-9941.
What's on your mind?
Comments
From the article: "Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools, financed with public money and operating in 40 states, are often worse than traditional schools, the state and local organizations that issue charters and oversee the schools are too hesitant to shut them down. That has to change if the movement is to maintain its credibility."
Cheshire Cat
I have no idea in whose "favor" it will come out. My experience is that when an investigation takes this long that it is fairly serious.
All we have to go on is that he remains at his job and Nancy Coogan, the Executive Director, says he will remain principal at Lowell.
He did attempt to leave Lowell in the middle of a school year and now he says he is very happy to be back at Lowell. That must be confusing to parents and students.
Duncan is the worst mistake Obama made.
Agreed. I can't find a teacher willing to campaign for him in term 2. It's that bad.
Sign this petition. Share with friends.
http://dumpduncan.org/
SavvyVoter
Last year they placed in the top 20. The top 15 nationwide are the finalists. Come see them at the Hot Java/Cool Jazz show at the Paramount next month.
--I usually post as Lisa but am not logged in at the moment
Can anyone tell me how advanced math works at eckstein, hamilton, and whitman? Are students able to test into classes that are one and two years ahead? If you've had a student in these classes, have you/they been happy with them? Also, if a student has taken advanced math in middle, do they test out of what they've taken in middle into the next step in their first year of high school or are they automatically placed in the next level after completing the class? Finally, if a high school student takes a math class over the summer, are they given credit for that or do they have to take a test to move on to the next level? Thanks!
math curious
David, it seems like once an idea has been propagandized as much as charter schools have, there is little chance of changing beliefs that they are better. We are seeing that in every area of our democracy. Haven't you noticed? :)
It is scary. Historical drama replaces history. Fiction replaces non-fiction. We are no longer an educated citizenry.
n...
As far as being happy with the class...? It's acceptable. Could be better, could be worse. Of course, the class size has a big impact.
-middle school mom
n...
--Lisa
See Publicola http://publicola.com/2012/02/21/news-tribune-applauds-ed-reform-bill/
n...
Janet
p.s. I agree with Patrick - it seems like the captcha inmages have become more difficult to read.
This is what the Alliance and DeBell and Chris Korsmo's snippy Friday updates for LEV have accomplished since the election. Tearing the board apart and giving it a bad rep. This is the fault of those "helping" the system. I hope they will now stop it with the public attacks and the whisper campaigns. These paragons of Civic Virtue are hurting our district.
EdVoter
And boy, what a newsy bunch! Thanks for all the updates.
"...internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a "global warming curriculum" for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as "a major scientific controversy"...".*
Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks.
"Funding fake scientists to write fake reports…"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvT4VTgf_bY
-JC.
Check it out.
Dora
Melissa, thank you so very much for being the Fact-Checker at the Charter Schools Forum at Arbor Heights on the 16th. You did a fantastic job - thanks!
North Meeting
Tuesday, March 13, 6:30-8:30 pm.
Ballard HS
Central Meeting
Saturday, March 17, 1-3 p.m.
Garfield HS
Southeast Meeting
Monday, March 19, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
South Shore K-8
Southwest Meeting
Thursday, March 29, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Chief Sealth International HS
Youth Meeting
Saturday, March 31, 1-3 p.m.
Meany Building
RSVP:arts-ed.eventbrite.com
There was an Arts Education Forum last week with the Mayor McGinn, Wendy London of SPS Curriculum and Instruction and some youth as panelists. Did anyone attend? Thoughts?
mom15
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fseattleducation2010.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F02%2F21%2Fleague-of-education-voters-to-apologize-to-rainier-beach-high-school%2F&h=HAQGGCh9fAQGYGujIDKdXyaB4V1D9g_Jy3dY8hAs49Mz3gA
re: that King 5 poll. Now I think I know what's going on. Could it be that the business roundtable powers-that-be in this town who are trying to run our school district, are attempting to discredit the school board in order to make the case for doing away with it entirely and going to mayoral control?
After all, that is the corporate ed reformites' preferred setup -- no pesky, democratically elected school board members to offer due diligence and get in the way of their privatizing, union-busting, online learning agenda or their Broad or Gates-backed superintendent.
(But as cities like New York under Bloomberg have demonstrated, mayoral control of a school district is bad news.)
I once had a chat with Tim Burgess about mayoral control of the school district and he said it all depends on who the mayor is.
What if the mayor is him? Is that what he and the corporate ed reformers would push for if he got elected next year?
If so, demonizing the school board, with a major public assist from school board president Michael DeBell, fits right into that scheme.
Which leads to another thought. If elected mayor, Burgess will be able to appoint someone to fill out the remainder of his term on city council, right?
That could be an appealing next step for DeBell, whose time on the school board is almost up as well, and appears to have a less than collegial view of most of his board colleagues anyway.
Is it possible that board policy that DeBell mysteriously drew up over the winter break which weakens the board, and his disparaging insinuations to the media about his colleagues on the board are part of some kind of quid pro quo that might land him in higher office?
Or are the corporate ed reformers in this town simply having one big fit about the fact that two grassroots candidates who aren't in thrall to their agenda got elected to the board, and two other members actually think for themselves, and their Broad supt. got run out of town and their TFA cheerleader supt. has essentially quit?
Or might it be option D: All of the above?
Dora
Interesting reading.
:-)
For kids who are 3 or more years ahead the situation is less clear. Many years there is a group doing Int.3/alg2. But some years there is not. Staff changes, class size, number of kids can affect that. and some years there are kids working further ahead that that doing independent study in some other math class. That is something worked out by teacher/parent.
There are mostly really good math teachers at Eckstein, many of them depart from CMP. Not seeing that so much with disovery, just lots of graphing calculators.
I do not know about getting credit, but I am not sure why bother. If they are mathies, they'll still want 4 years of high school math anyway.
As of couple of years ago, kids who took correspondence or UW summer classes just took the same placement test when they arrived back at school in the fall. If they passed, they moved up. Not sure if that is still true, but you could ask.
Moving to Roosevelt, middle school math teachers did the placements so they also moved kids up or down there.
Summer before high school some kids also took math, not sure of the process for placement though.
Still with cmp & discovery math , you need to make sure they are getting the basics at home.
eckstein parent