Seattle Schools Community Forum

You'll notice I didn't say "looking forward" because honestly, I don't see much hope for public education for all students in this country, state and city.  Let's start with nationally. Trump won the Electoral College and is therefore elected president.  However, that win is clearly not a mandate when you consider that he received nearly 63 million votes to Hillary Clinton's nearly 66 million votes.  Add into her votes the ballots cast for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and others and you get to about 74 million people who voted against Trump. He has not even been sworn in and already there are many warning signs.  His background and actions tell us three important things.

Good for Mr. Kline (who appears to be a high school teacher in Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

It's not often you see public education and entertainment cross (but see John Oliver and charter schools) but now we have a trifecta of Donald Trump, Colin Kapenick of the San Francisco '49s and public education .  (For those out of the loop, Kaepernick did not stand for the national anthem in the last two preseason games he was in.  He said he was because the song is racist (and read that third verse - I honestly never did before this) and the nation does not have freedom for all. In wades Donald Trump.  He addressed the American Legion Convention this morning and said  would be "promoting American pride and patriotism in America's schools." How? Via ABC News:

Last night's Republican convention saw speeches from a couple of Trump's children (I'm not really watching; I let other people do that and report out.)  One of his children, Donald, Jr.,was attempting to introduce his dad as a fairly "aw shucks" kind of guy (which is puzzling given his father's professional persona on tv.)   But in his remarks he said this on public education: Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class, now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students. You know why other countries do better on K through 12? They let parents choose where to send their own children to school.

As the Republican convention starts today in Cleveland, here are helpful charts from Ed Week on the stands of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on public education.   There are a couple of areas of gray for Mr. Trump because he either hasn't brought forth an opinion or, more likely, has no clue.

Just a few days left to view new K-5 Language Arts materials during the adoption process, more here. Wondering what Donald Trump' s plan is for K-12 public education?  So is everybody else . From Media Matters: Education Week reporter Andrew Ujifusa surveyed a bipartisan group of education experts and advocates about Trump’s education stances, and found widespread confusion over what Trump believes and what he could actually accomplish. Several conservative and centrist experts concluded that Trump did not know “what the federal role is, or could be” when it came to education policy, and that he “doesn’t know what ESSA is,” referring to the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind in December. Looks like Seattle Schools is not the only district growing; Bellevue SD has grown about 600 students per year over the last few years.  From the Bellevue Reporter: