This and That, November 3, 2025

Want to see (and possibly meet) the chosen finalist for superintendent? It appears that the Wednesday, November 5th announcement meeting at the JSCEE will likely be your only chance for a long time. Details of the meeting here. The meeting will be live-streamed on SPSTV. It will be interesting to me to see how many directors actually show up in person. Personally, I think all of them should be there. 

(The two work sessions that had been scheduled for the same afternoon have now disappeared from the schedule.) 

I say this may be the only time to meet the superintendent finalist because it seems clear that this person already HAS a superintendent position elsewhere and will NOT be able to step into the role for months and probably not until late May or June. So unless this guy is going to come back a couple of times over the course of the rest of the school year to do some public engagement, we won't be seeing or hearing from him. Maybe the Board will do a smart thing and perhaps create a video of this person talking about being the SPS superintendent. 

I would assume the media will be there and will want to try to interview him. Most of these announcement meetings are not interactive with the audience. But hey, show up and, if you have the chance, walk right up and introduced yourself. 

As reader Insider says, this guy will probably meet with some of the powers that be in this city/district. The rest of us will have to wait. And wait. 

Kudos to SPS Communications for the very detailed post about "Supporting Families in Need." It is unfortunate that it has come to this but apparently, a marble bathroom and a "let them eat cake" party were more important to the Trump regime. 

If you are in PTA, ask your leaders to reprint this information in any announcement to parents at your school. 

KUOW reports that parents in the Issaquah region are worried over ICE raids that seem to be happening there. 

A series of immigration arrests has shaken an Issaquah preschool community over the past week. The arrests have also had a ripple effect throughout the city’s education system. 

To note, some residents report that they have been pulled over on exits and on-ramps of freeways by some sort of immigration endorsement. The State Patrol says it is NOT their people but the refusal by whoever these people to state who they represent is confusing to motorists.

Loftis advises people who are being pulled over by people who may or may not be law enforcement in unmarked vehicles to turn on their hazard lights and drive to a public area — like the closest fire or police station, and call 911 if they can’t figure out whether someone is actually law enforcement.

As well, the Issaquah School District has issued information:

The Issaquah School District has reported an uptick of absences because families are concerned about sending their kids to class after recent immigration enforcement, school officials said. 

 

“Some of our community members have also reached out to us, wanting to help,” wrote a spokesperson for the school district. “Such as helping other families’ students get to school.”
District administrators released an announcement to the families of high school students Tuesday saying there has been no ICE activity on their school campuses this week after concerns were raised. If there was any immigration enforcement looking for a student or employee near school grounds they told families they would ask for a copy of a court order or a warrant for an arrest and forward it to school district administrators. 

 

The announcement said that document “must be verified by our district’s Superintendent or designee and legal counsel prior to any next steps.”

The Seattle Times had an op-ed by Barbara Oakley a couple of weeks ago on math education in Washington State.

Washington has an urgent math problem. Nearly one in three students cannot demonstrate basic grade-level skills, and among low-income students it’s almost one in two. In a state that prides itself on leading the nation in technology jobs, that’s not just an education issue — it’s an economic emergency. 

 

Part of the reason is that teachers are rarely taught how the brain learns. Neuroscience shows we rely on two main systems: the declarative system, which lets us explain or describe something, and the basal ganglia system, which builds automatic skill through practice and pattern recognition. A student can sound confident explaining a process while still lacking the practice and memorization that allows them to consistently provide the correct answer.

Apparently other countries - Finland, New Zealand and Taiwan have tried the new math and seen their scores plummet.

The broader field of education research has another problem: It rarely checks its own results. A major study found that out of more than 160,000 education papers, only about one in 1,000 ever tried to repeat and confirm earlier findings. Put simply, ideas are accepted as fact without being tested again. With so little effort to test or confirm its own ideas, it’s not surprising that education has grown inward-looking — claiming special, unassailable insight into children while brushing off what neuroscience now makes plain.

What does Oakley think could help?

● First, we must be honest: Decades of well-meaning reforms have failed. Doubling down on “21st-century skills” or hopping on board ChatGPT or Gemini will not fix the problem. 

● Second, we must revise schools of pedagogy to incorporate insights from actual science of how the brain learns, not recycled theories dressed up as “science.” Other countries have begun to turn the tide by restoring structured teaching. England, for example, reversed years of decline by reintroducing knowledge-rich curricula and supporting teachers in delivering them. 

● Finally, we need a coherent, knowledge-rich math curriculum that makes clear what students should know at each grade level and insists on mastery. That means treating memory not as a dirty word but as the foundation of learning — and it means asking students to internalize mathematical knowledge so they can effortlessly call up critical facts and concepts from their own minds when solving problems. 

We are at a critical juncture. In the age of generative AI, the allure of easy answers has never been stronger. If we don’t ground students in the fundamentals, they will lean on machines to do the thinking for them, and the dismal scores of today will sink even lower.

You might want to show your children - especially if they are in high school or college - this gift article that appeared in The NY Times. The headline is "Their Professors Caught Them Cheating. They Use A.I. to Apologize."

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email. 

 

But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had, according to the professors, Karle Flanagan and Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an academic pair known to their students and social media followers as the Data Science Duo. 

 

The students got their comeuppance in a large lecture hall on Oct. 17, when the professors read aloud their identical, less-than-genuine apologies from a projector screen, video from that class showed. Busted. The professors posted about it on social media, where the gotcha moment drew widespread attention. 

 

“They said, ‘Dear Professor Flanagan, I want to sincerely apologize,’” Professor Flanagan said. “And I was like, Thank you. They’re owning up to it. They’re apologizing. And then I got another email, the second email, and then the third. And then everybody sort of sincerely apologizing, and suddenly it became a little less sincere.”

Less sincere indeed.