Seattle Schools Community Forum

In public education editorializing, the Times mantra seems to be, "keeping saying the same thing over and over and it'll work."  Well, it does sometimes but not always.  (You have to wonder about this tactic given their dropping subscription rates - people like to read about NEW things.) Here's their latest and it's fairly boring reading because it's the same old wording.  "Dysfunctional", they get the number of students in SPS wrong ("nearly 50k" - geez, aren't they journalists?), "melodrama" and, of course, should we have a conversation about governance? Here's my comments to them:

Following up on my analysis/thoughts on the Peters/Dale Estey race in District IV, I had promised a thread on this issue of so-called School Board "dysfunction ." As I have pointed out, in the Board evaluation, not a SINGLE member of the Board called the Board dysfunctional.  One Board member said if they didn't trust each other more, they would become "the poster child for a dysfunctional Board."  That's far from saying that they are.  (One senior staff member did call them dysfunctional.) Now if you read the whole evaluation, you can see there are issues.  No denying that.  BUT, what the Times and Dale Estey and all these people leave out are all the pages of comments - by both the Board and senior management - about the good things said about the Board as people and as Board members. Also, as previous reported, the Board voted in unison or 6-1 about 98% of the time.  That's not a dysfunctional Board.   This lack of balance in the election ...