Seattle Schools Community Forum

 Update: Finally! An thoughtful piece about why Common Core is failing (and likely will be weakened).  It's by Jay P. Greene at Education Next and he has it right.  Supporters of Common Core have made some of the same political mistakes that opponents of gay marriage did.  They figured if they could get the US Department of Education, DC-based organizations, and state school chiefs on board, they would have a direct and definitive victory.  And at first blush it looked like they had achieved it, with about 45 states committing to adopt the new set of standards and federally-sponsored standardized tests aligned to those standards.  Like opponents of gay marriage, the Common Core victory seemed so overwhelming that they hardly felt the need to engage in debates to defend it . But in the rush to a clear and total victory, supporters of Common Core failed to consider how the more than 10,000 school districts, more than 3 million teachers, ...

Do hedge funder managers and big investors like the Koch brothers and others invest just for the heck of it?  No, they want to make money and lots of it.  Public education is just that mother lode. From Education Week : It's already been a banner year for ed-tech startups , and we've only closed the first quarter. Ninety-nine startups in education have raised more than $500 million , a record in the past five years, according to TechCrunch , citing statistics from its  CrunchBase  database of technology companies, people, and investors. That compares to 20 companies raising more than $64 million during the same period five years ago.  However, it's not the greatest number of companies to be funded in a given quarter. Over the past five years, that happened in the second quarter of 2013, when 120 companies raised a total of $319 million. (There's an interactive map in the article.  In Seattle, there's a company called Actively Learn - ...