Seattle Schools Community Forum

1240 - Still 600K votes still to count and it's down by just under 46K.  So doable but the number crunching from the top counties where each side leads just don't support a win unless there is some big turn towards No.   Ditto on the race for Governor.  The numbers are just not trending McKenna's way so I believe Inslee will take it.  Frankly, I think that even though Inslee has been somewhat vague on funding issues, he is far less rigid than McKenna on education issues.  And, the Legislature is going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting of figuring out how to fund and enact the McCleary decision. I do go on record here.  Whether you like charters or not, McCleary should have been figured out and enacted BEFORE any vote on charters.   We only muddy the waters by bringing them in at this point and that will be just one more issue that makes this a difficult process. Good article from the Seattle Weekly 's Nina Shapiro about the conversi...

Everywhere I turn in the professional press I see stories about how our tough and heroic Superintendent, Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson, has been working diligently for the past three years to bring needed change and reform to an ossified public school system that was drowning in failure. And now, finally, she has broken the backs of her opponents and will bring us, almost singlehandedly, the academic achievement that we always thought possible. I see it in the Times. I see in Crosscut . I see it from the Alliance for Education and the League of Education Voters. I see it everywhere they reprint District press releases as if they were news stories. Yeah. Only I'm not seeing any of that. Honestly, I think that there were a lot of things in the District that did need fixing - mostly failures of management and supervision. I think that she did a pretty good job of identifying them and, in a number of cases, identifying the solutions. Unfortunately, she has done an absolutely disastro...

(Update: I hadn't seen the Times write an article on the audit so I went searching. Apparently one was written, dated July 6th, which is weird because I didn't see it. It also isn't under "Education" or "Local" stories; I had to do a search to find it. Interesting how those beatific stories on the Superintendent are front and center and yet try to find any article that might criticize her.) I had been a little unhappy with Nina Shapiro over at the Weekly being baffled by why parents and teachers want the Superintendent to go. She seemed to ask, "Where's the beef?" Now she has a story that outlines the audit problems as well as how the district is creating "corrective action plans for each finding." From her article : One has to wonder how effective they will be, however. Another beef of the auditor's office was that the district had failed to correct problems it had already identified in past reports. She di...