Seattle Schools Community Forum

From the House Appropriations Committee work of last week, comes these results (via Ed Week ): Winners: Extension of allowing teachers in alternative certification programs to count as "highly qualified" through the 2014-2015 school year.  This would include those "higly qualified" TFA 5-week trained teachers.  Losers :  organizations, many of whom support disabled/Special Ed students, like the council for Exceptional Children, National Center for Learning Disabilities and the NAACP who do not want the provision extended.  Here's what they said: Absent expiration of the problematic provision ... low-income students, students with disabilities and English-learners will continue to be disproportionately taught by teachers-in-training and that fact will be masked from parents and local communities. Yes, because while TFA thinks the world of their teachers, they don't feel districts have any obligation to tell their parents where their teacher cam...

This issue of what Congress can fund under the Constitution seems to have finally reached public education. If you read any comments after an education story in the Seattle Times, you always get the people who ask why we fund food for free/reduced lunch students or make food at all (bring your own lunch). They ask why the districts fund transportation. They ask why the districts fund bilingual education. I think some of this is the fear that the focus (and the money) isn't on direct teaching and learning and some may be people who feel parents are responsible to get their children fed and to school. (No matter that many of those writing probably had and used transportation and the cafeteria in their public school when they were kids.) Justice Scalia (one of my least favorite Supreme Court justices) just came out saying that women (and for that matter men and he probably meant gay men) are not protected from discrimination under the Constitution. "If the current society wan...