Tuesday Open Thread

King County Elections says that everyone should have received their ballots by now for the August 6th primary.  Check with them if you haven't.


Here's an idea for summer fun - abandoning your kids in a wooded area in the dark.  That's just the Dutch giving tough love to their kids.  From the NY Times.

This is the Dutch scouting tradition known as a “dropping,” in which groups of children, generally pre-teenagers, are deposited in a forest and expected to find their way back to base. It is meant to be challenging, and they often stagger in at 2 or 3 in the morning.

The Dutch — it is fair to say — do childhood differently. Children are taught not to depend too much on adults; adults are taught to allow children to solve their own problems. Droppings distill these principles into extreme form, banking on the idea that even for children who are tired, hungry and disoriented, there is a compensatory thrill to being in charge.

Important story about your kids and Facebook's Messenger Kids.  From The Verge:

Facebook’s Messenger Kids app is built around a simple premise: children shouldn’t be able to talk to users who haven’t been approved by their parents. But a design flaw allowed users to sidestep that protection through the group chat system, allowing children to enter group chats with unapproved strangers.

We recently notified some parents of Messenger Kids account users about a technical error that we detected affecting a small number of group chats,” a Facebook representative said. “We turned off the affected chats and provided parents with additional resources on Messenger Kids and online safety.”

It’s unclear how long the bug was present in the app, which launched with group features in December 2017.

The privacy flaw is particularly legally sensitive because Messenger Kids is designed for children under the age of 13, and thus subject to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Some privacy groups have already accused Messenger Kids of violating COPPA by collecting user data, and this latest privacy flaw will only heighten those concerns.

What are the true graduation rates for Washington State public high schools? Crosscut tackles that issue.

According to data released by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year, 79.4% of students in the state graduated on time during the 2016-17 school year, compared with the national average of 84.6%. That places the Washington 44th in the nation for on-time graduation.

A string of recent reports issued by the Office of the Washington State Auditor shows that at least 18 of Washington’s 295 public school districts have failed to comply with federal graduation data-reporting requirements, potentially affecting the data’s accuracy.

At issue is how students who have transferred in or out of high schools are factored into graduation-rate data. The districts in question failed to properly confirm and document such cases.

That includes Seattle SD.

Charter schools are notorious for boasting about the high grad rates but when you ask them how many 9th graders they started with and how many they finish with, crickets.

New lead general counsel for Seattle Public Schools - Greg Narver.  Mr. Narver comes via the City Attorney's office.  He graduated from Garfield High School.  This marks the second new hire from the City's employee rolls - the first was Fred Podesta who is the district's COO.

What's on your mind?