Seattle Schools Community Forum

Hard to believe at this late date that this is news but the company Land's End is producing - by popular demand- shirts for girls that are science-themed. Still on the clothing theme, there's a new campaign by a group, Too Small To Fail, to impress upon parents to teach their pre-school children news words by talking to them more .  How?  The cute kid-sized shirts list conversation topics that parents can use when chatting with their children. The campaign is designed to address the so-called "word gap" that exists between children from low-income families and those from more affluent families. According to research, affluent children have heard 30 million more words by age 3 than children from low-income families . "One of the things that families told us is that they know they should be talking, reading and singing," Susan True of the Bay Area Council, an organization that collaborated on the campaign with Too Small To Fail, said in a promot...

  Update:   Washington Post's guest post refuting claims Brown made to Stephen Colbert on his show.  Pretty interesting stuff. Move over, Michelle Rhee - here comes Campbell Brown. Did you hear about this? Rhee's star is waning. Her StudentsFirst group has closed up shop in about five states and the billion dollars she was hoping to raise didn't materialize. Well, nature abhors a vacuum and so we have former CNN anchor, Campbell Brown. This newest ed reformer on the block is going after the teachers union and, in specific, teacher tenure.  (But like the star-crossed coupling of Wendy Kopp of TFA married to Richard Barth of KIPP, Brown is married to Dan Senor who is on the board of the NY state StudentsFirst.) Let's pause here for a moment and all say together: Tenure for public school teachers is NOT the tenure of university professors. Teacher tenure basically guarantees due process for teachers so that they cannot be stripped of their jobs for things l...