Seattle Schools Community Forum

Here are some stories from around the country that will have more and more bearing on what we are doing in Washington State. From Ed Week, a top 12 list of stories from the past year.  The majority of them are about Common Core as the fight goes on.  Linked to Common Core (and you see this in story after story elsewhere) is student data privacy.  I also note the presence of a story on grading schools A-F which I predict will show up in this session of the Legislature. Here's one from Bill Moyers about the "Snowden Effect" or we could just call it the canary in the coal mine.  For some reason the media chooses to listen to established (or paid for by, establishment) groups.  There are a lot of people out there, including this blog, going into the dark corners looking around.  That we only have a flashlight and not a spotlight doesn't mean we are wrong.   These days, the establishment media all too often adopts an indifferent attitude tow...

A couple of interesting contributors to Stephan Blanford' s campaign - former Board member Nancy Waldman (ousted from office in the wake of the Olechefske financial scandal) and former Board member (and Seattle mover and shaker) Don Nielsen.    One oddity, though, is a contribution out of Indianapolis from the Eli Lilly company.  Why Eli Lilly is interested in a Seattle School Board campaign is a mystery. Interesting in keeping up with national education trends ?  Here's a link t o the top ed Twitter feeds.  Who's at the top?  Why it's a tie between Arne Duncan and Diane Ravitch. Americorps gets into the school turnaround action and I think I trust them far more than I would any business. Officials announced in July that $15 million would go to 13 organizations nationwide during the next three years to put more than 650 AmeriCorps members in schools. One of the funded projects that will help rural schools exclusively was Berea College...

I know that many believe that the drumbeat, the concern, the outrage over corporate ed reform is a few voices in a canary mine.  Or exaggerating.  Or those voices are conspiracy therorists. And yet the evidence is stacking up as I have documented.  Against TFA, against charters, and now, in one of the biggest exposes - corporate ed reform.   The good news is that this house of cards is sagging and will fall.  From the eagle eye of Washington Post writer of The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss, comes a story about thousands of public disclosure e-mails, across six states, that show quite a lot of linkage between corporate ed reform and making money off of it. The non-profit that did the public disclosure request and released the information is In the Public Interest.   The correspondence is available at: • Rhode Island: http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/node/2746 • Oklahoma: http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/node/2745 • New Mexico: http://...

So continuing on the parade that charters are better, more innovative and, above all, allow more accountability, we have Exhibit 1.  That would be former Indiana and now current head of schools in Florida, Tony Bennett.  I'll let the Fort Wayne Journal tell you what "Mr. Accountable" did (bold mine)(graphic by Jersey Jazzman): But when it appeared an Indianapolis charter school run by a prominent Republican donor might receive a poor grade, Bennett's education team frantically overhauled his signature "A-F" school grading system to improve the school's marks. Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan's school received an "A," despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a "C." "They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wro...