Seattle Schools Community Forum

The video of the day getting a great amount of attention (and it's great that it is) is John Oliver on Last Week Tonight.   He takes on charter schools in his imitable fashion. The main thing he does is take on both sides. Kinda.  He says he doesn't want to examine the "principle" of having charters but their "outcomes."  What he does say is that charters are in 42 states and D.C. so obviously they are here.  This is at three minutes into the program and the segment is 18 minutes long but luckily, there are many abysmal charter stories from all around the nation. Amazing how the NAACP and Black Lives Matters have both recently come out against corporate charter schools (which are most of them) and now this from John Oliver.  The stars seem to be aligning but to see the scrambling of charter supporters to try to figure out how to say the NAACP is wrong without saying, well, they're wrong, is fun to watch. But it's fun for about those 18 minutes...

Interesting article from The Washington Post on boys and sleep.  Thank you to reader, Dan D. For much of history, of course, most girls couldn’t even get a decent education. But as soon as girls joined the classroom, they revved ahead. These charts from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development  show that in developed nations, girls started outpacing boys in educational achievement starting in the 1960s. These days, girls earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, and 51.8 percent of PhDs.

The news is not good.  In fact, there's quite a lot of rumbling across charterland.   Get a cup of coffee because there are many stories to read.  These stories create quite the crazy quilt of the landscape of charter schools. Let's start with the NAACP and the resolution brought forth at their national convention recently.  When you see the NAACP saying things like:

Opt Out Bus Spring Tour   (Starting at Garfield HS,  Thursday March 31 st , 2:20 pm ) As the spring high-stakes ,  common core tests begin, the Opt Out B us will be touring Seattle schools to provide families with information on their rights to opt out of standardized testing.  

Yesterday's media event about opting out in Seattle Schools at the NAACP headquarters was quite the happening.  All the media outlets showed up for a very lengthy press conference.  At first, I worried about how many speakers there were - community leaders, parents, and, most of all, teachers on the front lines - but each had an important story to tell. Basically, from what I can draw from various sources, the majority of opting out is happening in high schools.   This figures as high school parents have been around longer than younger parents AND high school students are savvy and more likely to stand up to authority and say no. My belief is that after the first year is done - and the scores come out - then next year even more parents will say no.  This is exactly what is happening in NY and NJ with thousands of kids being opted out. Apparently, State Superintendent Randy Dorn is falling back on the old standard "change is hard" and says the test will improve ...

From Seattle Opt-Out: Press conference on SBAC testing: Opt Out Movement Biggest in Seattle’s History A new gathering of community groups, parents, teachers, and students from across Seattle question the equity and validity of SBAC testing and including: Garfield High School teachers and parents to announce their opposition Technological malfunctions creating testing chaos in schools Seattle/King County NAACP to announce position on the new exam  Opt out numbers from schools around Seattle will be revealed Who : Parents, students and teachers from schools across Seattle, including Nathan Hale, Garfield, NOVA, Franklin, Chief Sealth, Dearborn Park, and more. · Seattle Opt Out group · Parents Across America (PAA), Seattle Chapter · Social Equality Educators (SEE) · NAACP, Seattle/King County Chapter When: Tuesday April 7, 4:00pm Where: Seattle NAACP Headquarters, 715 23rd Ave S, Seattle, WA 98144

We are just coming off a presidential election where, to some degree, race mattered.  Governor Romney lost because the GOP seems to be tone-deaf to the fact that what they allowed various GOP officials, including Romney, to say about Hispanics and women really DID matter.  The GOP can continue this at their own risk but the numbers are against them (and so is history and common decency). The NY Times had two articles about students and race and its impacts that I thought worthy of posting.  Both are about Asian-Americans. One article is about Asian-Americans in college.  This is a large and diverse group of students with varying outcomes.  By the numbers, Chinese, Japanese and Korean-American students tend to do fairly well in school.  Pacific Islanders, Samoans, Vietnamese-Americans tend to do less well.   Add into those groups Pakistani, Indian, Filipinos, and Cambodians and you get a lot of people under one umbrella who are wildly diff...