Education News Roundup

Local

Hey, there's a math museum in Kent, the Seattle Universal Math Museum (SUMM).  From The Spiral Notebook:

The museum staff will do outreach programs at schools, has an extensive array of math toys, and it even has a very cool collection of math stuff on its website, with factoids and articles that are very compelling for adults and big kids, like “Math in … Probabilistic Fallacies” and “Math in … Fraud Detection.”

The author, Jillian O'Connor, brings up a good point on math learning and I'll put that up in a separate post for discussion.

 

For the 31st year, elementary students throughout the district participated in the Global Reading Challenge. From The Seattle Times:

The beloved competition has been hosted by Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Public Library for 31 years. This year, about 3,700 fourth- and fifth-grade students participated, discovering books they may not have read, learning how to pay attention to hyperspecific details, curating team-building and organizational skills, and fostering a love of reading while having fun with their classmates.

The first round of competition happened earlier this year at each individual school. The winning team from each school advanced to the March semifinals at the Downtown Library, facing other SPS elementary teams. This year, there were 10 semifinal events to whittle down 71 teams competing; the winning team from each semifinal advanced to Tuesday’s finals.

What I love is that teams were able to challenge a judge's call on a question.

Kai Tang, director of library experience and engagement at the Seattle Public Library, was struck by the raw enthusiasm the challenge evokes.

“I have never heard people literally scream for reading like they do here,” Tang said.

The winners?

The “Global Banananana Pancake Group,” the name of the winning team of six John Stanford fourth graders, had been reading and re-reading eight books and quizzing each other with trivia questions about plots and characters since last November.

Congrats to ALL the participants in SPS.

 

 

Superintendent Ben Shuldiner completed his community engagement tour with the last in-person meeting in West Seattle. From the West Seattle Blog:

Around 140 attendees were at the meeting, representing students and families from all schools across West Seattle, as well as members of West Seattle Elementary and general SPS staff.

Much of the time was spent on small-group discussions at tables of approximately eight people each, with three simple questions: 1. What is going well? [for the district], 2. What is not going well?, and 3. What can SPS do to make things better? The audience was given 30 minutes to discuss, with around 10 minutes for each question, and then they were asked to choose a leader from their table to report back their consensus on each question to the whole of the audience.

On the side of the good, many in the audience highlighted the strength of teaching at schools throughout the district. “We have excellent teaching, and when the teaching is fantastic – it’s really fantastic.” said one of the communiry discussion leaders. Others pointed to the district having strengths in diversity and culture, especially in terms of access to dual language instruction programs. Many also said they were happy with the quality of after-school programs.

The negative side of things was more varied. The most consistent theme was the possibility of further funding cuts for the district, and how they could impact schools, as well as how they’ve impacted schools in the past. 

There was this interesting comment/observation based on a phrase that Shuldiner used in an email to parents - “the soft bigotry of low expectations” referring to systemic issues BIPOC students encounter in the schools.

That “soft bigotry” phrase was first coined by speech writers for George W. Bush, and has become a bit of a cliche. It’s not often heard in Seattle, for good reason. It’s very insulting to staff, and not really accurate from anything I have seen. I was surprised to see it in Shuldiner’s weekend email, even with the qualifier “pervading some places.” He was obviously taking a veiled shot at someone, but because it was veiled, it could be perceived as a shot at everyone. 

 

One of Shuldiner’s quirks is that his list of favorite cliches is very different from Seattle’s, and it could get him in trouble. The lady at the meeting really laid into him, and I think he deserved it.

But there was also this comment:

The new Superintendent’s approach to community engagement is sincere, honest and a refreshing change from the previous SPS leaders. Overheard from other parents at the meeting: At the last Superintendent meeting about school closures [Fall of 2024, under Supt. Brent Jones] they [SPS] asked us to write down comments but when it was time to share, they cherry picked only the positive ones and ignored the vast majority of the comments that were against school closures. I wasn’t at the school closure meetings from 2024 but this one did NOT seem like that. 

 

As Mr. Shuldiner said to the audience, “don’t sugarcoat anything.”

 

State

A very useful link at OSPI - Understanding Public School Funding. It covers funding, McCleary, allocation, "basic education" funding (and what it does and doesn't cover) and how has school funding changed in the years since the McCleary decision. 

 

From a South Puget Sound activist on charter schools following previous reporting that the touted Russell Wilson funded charter school, Why Not You, has closed. 

The charter sector is shrinking, not growing. Summit Olympus closed in June 2025 and Why Not You Academy will close in June 2026, both due in part to financial pressure. That leaves 15 schools serving roughly 4,800 students in 2026–27 — and the legislature still has not reopened the authorization window that closed in April 2021 (pp. 5, 7, 23-24), leaving an estimated 1,200 wait-listed families with no new options according to the 2024 Charter School Report (pp. 10 and 57).

I am quite surprised to learn that Summit has closed one of its high schools because it is generally regarded as a good charter group.

And, as noted, the Legislature has not reopened authorization of new schools, despite a waitlist for some schools. I would think that is because, mostly, Washington State families are voting with their feet and the Legislature doesn't see the need. 

Danny Westneat's column in The Seattle Times - 

The WA response to phones in schools? Another study

So it was this past month, when state lawmakers in Olympia created an exhaustive years long review on a topic that has already been driving parents and teachers bonkers for at least the past decade: smartphones in schools.

Thirty-nine states now have laws limiting these widgets of mass distraction from the classroom. The first, in Florida, was passed three years ago. Most of them require kids to lock the phones away for the school day.

It’s been a remarkable, society-wide acknowledgment, in states MAGA to progressive, that we’re in a war of wills with our dopamine-release rectangles. And that when it comes to kids, the devices straight up interfere with learning.

The general testimony to Washington state lawmakers about this was: Duh.

As one person pointed out, if 25% of every school day is lost to phones, that’s $5 billion a year in education spending squandered. It could be one cause of the riddle of Washington’s public schools, which is that they’re doing worse even as spending has soared.

Despite bipartisan sponsorship of the bill, lawmakers couldn’t rustle up the votes to restrict phone use. They punted to a study. The bill that passed, Senate Bill 5346, sets up a review with an eye toward possibly taking action by … 2030.

I’m sorry but by 2030 we’re all going to have AI chips implanted in our skulls. We’ll just then be dealing with the phones?

To note, there are several developments on the issue of tech in classrooms as well as court rulings against Meta and Google for their crafting of algorithms to grab younger users. I'll be posting separately on those. 

Nationally

A great story out of New Jersey where a high school kid wanted to make some money and found a good way to do it, learning empathy along the way. From the New York Times:

On an icy afternoon, a 17-year-old named Michael Haskell parked his battered Hyundai outside a cavernous storage facility on Staten Island, New York. Then he fetched a hand truck and wheeled it through a maze of hundreds of identical units, its squeaking wheels echoing through the labyrinth.

“Any of these could be a gold mine,” he said.

His adventures have brought him to CubeSmart, Extra Space Storage and Manhattan Mini Storage facilities in and around New York. He sells his scavenged goods through his eBay store, “Mike’s Unique Treasures,” to earn over $7,000 a month, a figure backed by the financial records he showed me.

It was so simple at the start. When Michael got into the game of flipping used goods, he just wanted to make some money. But the business of dealing in people’s abandoned possessions, it turns out, can be fraught. Two years into his pursuit, he knows all too well that every locker tells a story, many of them bleak.

 

A story out of Boston on their graduation rates and what they might mean with the question being - are credit recovery programs prioritizing graduation over actual learning? From The City Journal:

Graduation rates used to be a reasonable proxy for students’ academic standards. But they are slowly losing their meaning as schools across the country inflate grades, making students appear more academically prepared than they really are.

Standardized test scores offer a more objective picture. BPS’s scores on the reading and math portions of the SAT, for example, have remained flat as graduation rates have soared. The average BPS student’s SAT scores hover around the College Board’s college and career readiness benchmarks. Many students score below these thresholds.

State exams, administered through the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), tell a similar story. Only about 40 percent of Boston’s tenth-graders meet expectations in reading and math, both down since 2019. Less than a third of the district’s low-income students, and less than 10 percent of its ELL students, are MCAS proficient in reading and math.

San Francisco Public Schools Bring Back 8th Grade Algebra from the NY Times:

The San Francisco school board narrowly approved a plan on Tuesday evening to bring back eighth-grade algebra across all the district’s public schools, 12 years after the system stopped offering it.

The course was removed from middle schools under the rationale that many students — especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds — would benefit from having more time to master foundational math before tackling algebra in high school.

But the plan didn’t work. The number of students enrolled in advanced high school math declined, and wide racial gaps remained. Meanwhile, many parents enrolled their children in summer and after-school math courses to keep them accelerated, often paying out of pocket.

For years, San Francisco “tried to achieve equity not by raising the floor, but by lowering the ceiling,” said Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford University economist who studied the policy with colleagues. “It’s a problem we see nationally,” he added.

That last paragraph sounds familiar, no?

The results suggest the opportunity for “a quick win” in education at a relatively low cost, he added. “Simply making rich academic content more broadly available is an appealing strategy.”

He noted that at least nine states are moving toward automatically enrolling high-achieving students in advanced course work, including Texas, North Carolina and Washington.

Water bottle death in Los Angeles; student charged with murder. From the Associated Press:

A 12-year-old has been arrested in connection with the death of a classmate who was hit in the head with a metal water bottle during an alleged bullying incident at a Los Angeles school, authorities said Friday.

Miller said that he couldn’t release any other information because both the victim and the suspect are juveniles. Khimberly’s family says she was struck in the head on Feb. 17 during a bullying incident at Reseda Charter High School, which also includes a middle school.

Khimberly was in a hallway on the school’s campus when she was struck in the head with a metal water bottle while trying to help her older sister, Sharon Zavaleta, who was being bullied by a group of students, the family said in the wrongful-death claim filed last month against the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The sisters had been bullied, harassed and physically attacked for months at school, and their mother reported the incidents to school officials, who failed to stop the abuse, he said.

“The focus cannot stop with one student — there must be a hard look at what the adults in charge knew, when they knew it, and why meaningful action wasn’t taken sooner,” Glassman said.

 

Do you have a metal water bottle?  I do and it has crossed my mind how heavy it is when full.