Seattle Schools Community Forum

A great, great op-ed in the NY Times by UC Berkeley professor, David L. Kirp, called T he Secret to Fixing Bad Schools. He just spent the last year researching a book on public education in Union City, N. J.  I'll let him tell you what he found out: The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have.  Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. From third grade through high school, students’ achievement scores now approximate the...

Ever the education reformer, Bill Gates told the a National Urban League audience this: "Let me acknowledge that I don't understand in a personal way the challenges that poverty creates for families, and schools and teachers," the billionaire said at the civil rights group's annual convention. "I don't ever want to minimize it. Poverty is a terrible obstacle. But we can't let it be an excuse. We know you can have a good school in a poor neighborhood," said Gates. "So let's end the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education. I say it's more the other way around: Improving education is the best way to solve poverty." So first of all, is that a common myth?  That poverty has to be solved (or severely curtailed) before education can help? Second, I get that you can't let poverty stand in the way of giving a child a good education.  But is that really the problem or is it that the problems of pover...

So following up on yesterday's thread, is foreign language instruction and/or arts instruction part of basic education? Kids could live without having either and could be educated without either. But that's not really the point (I know it is for Tea Party people - the "basics" and nothing else). But I would say for 21st century learning, a foreign language is going to be very useful. And not just learning the language, but the learning that comes from finding out where a country is on the globe, its culture, etc. are all part of a 21st century America. Arts. Well, how do we live without them? The world and the school experience would be so much less without music, theater, video production, painting, etc. Arts like sports is something that keeps kids in school. But it's a cost. So should the state help at all?

So elsewhere a reader said this: I understand the state pushed the responsibility of purchasing books onto the District. Hopefully, we could get a line item for books while trying to get the government to assume responsibility for basic educational needs. (As an aside, I'm looking into this whole textbook replacement issue. It seems that some information told to me was wrong, namely that the state funds textbooks but only every 18 years.) The district is embarking on early discussions about next year's budget so now is a good time to talk. What struck me about the comment above was the term " basic educational needs ." First, how do we define those? Off the top of my head: a clean, safe building qualified teachers/principal textbooks no older than 10 years old (especially for science and/or history/social studies) instructional materials (I don't even know if this still gets funded but paper, pencil, ruler, glue, crayons, stapler, etc) other instructional ...