Seattle Schools Community Forum

As Diane Ravitch said, when starting the Network for Public Education (NPE) , We are many.  There is power in our numbers.  Together, we will save our schools. I felt very embraced at the 500-person conference.  We were parents, teachers, bloggers, public education writers and activists. We want a bigger and more diverse tent.  What was amazing was to heard many stories - from across the country - about what other states were experiencing.  I can tell you that Washington State is not half as bad off as other states (and the people in Louisiana, Florida and New York are really having to fight major battles.)  The conference was the #1 trending hashtag on that Saturday (and this was with the Oscars coming on Sunday and the issues in the Ukraine.)   One topic was blogging.  I learned that Diane's own blog , at one year old, had passed one million hits in April 2013.  In January 2014, her blog passed nine (9!) million page views....

Once again, we find several complaints about this blog not being a welcoming place, not curbing the anger/passion/frustration of comments and not being neutral. Again, this is a community blog.  We could force people to register to comment but we don't.  You just sign in and away you go.  All are welcome.  Charlie and I have viewpoints.  We sometimes just report and we sometimes put in our viewpoints.  We sometimes write headlines to spark interest, not a fight.  (I personally sometimes write headlines just to tweak some noses.) As Charlie pointed out elsewhere, we put a lot of information in here that is not in line with our own viewpoints. We didn't have to put up the support for Enfield petition.  Could have just ignored it like it didn't exist.  But no, we put it up and even put the link.   If we wanted to only support our views, we certainly would not do that. We obviously don't have the time and space to put every sing...

For the record (for those new or semi-new to this blog), the blog was started by Beth Bakeman, an SPS parent who did not like how the first round of closures went. Beth, a thoughtful, smart cookie, fired up this blog at that time. Beth asked a number of people to be contributors and, interestingly, we don't all come from the same backgrounds or viewpoints. I can't speak for all the contributors but I am not really what you would consider "friends" with anyone who writes here and heck, I haven't even met some of them. So we are not friends preaching to the choir. Again, to her credit, Beth wanted to have well-rounded discussions so she reached out in all directions. As I have said previously, I'm not interested in starting any new parent group but if you are looking for one, previous threads have discussed the ones available. I never wanted to be part of a blog that was a rant and rave. Sure, we can have heated discussions but personal attacks or mout...

Thanks to Dorothy for the link to a Washington Post article (and follow-up letter ) on parent activities and their growing clout (at least for the parents in this article). I thought it deserved its own thread. From the article: "For a new generation of well-wired activists in the Washington region, it's not enough to speak at Parent-Teacher Association or late-night school board meetings. They are going head-to-head with superintendents through e-mail blitzes, social networking Web sites, online petitions, partnerships with business and student groups, and research that mines a mountain of electronic data on school performance." This reporter, Michael Chandler, then refers to these parents as "parent insurgents". Hey! Victories? "In recent weeks, parent-led campaigns helped bring down a long-established grading policy in Fairfax County and scale back the unpopular practice of charging fees for courses in Montgomery County. They have also stoked debate...

With fairly good regularity I check a number of online discussions about Seattle Schools starting with this blog but also the P-I's SoundOffs, the P-I's education beat writers' blog School Zone , the P-I reader's blog Chalkboard , and another P-I reader's blog that I also recommend Learning Connections , (see if you can guess my user ID on the P-I's online discussion boards) Director Martin-Morris' blog , the West Seattle Blog , CPPS, and a couple of Yahoo discussion groups. With slightly less regularity I check Crosscut , The Weekly, the Stranger, and the occassional Seattle Times discussion board. Well, now there's another source as well: Examiner.com . I will be blogging there as well as here. I would guess that there will be a lot of cross-posting. The major differences are that I presume a more general audience there and there's a real picture of me instead of a japanese cartoon character or a satirically appropriated picture of someone else as ...

Jessica Blanchard and Amy Rolph, education beat reporters for the Seattle P-I, have started a new blog called School Zone . The School Zone is where you'll find education news that might not make it into the newspaper, but still impacts your life as a student, parent, teacher or taxpayer. Join us here to find out what issues are mobilizing your local PTA, what your best bet is for financing that college degree - even how happenings in the "other" Washington will affect education here. This is in addition to the P-I Reader Blogs: Chalkboard and Education for a Global Age .

Linda Thomas' Educating Mom blog closed, but the Seattle P-I has a new Education Blog, Chalkboard: A Parent Perspective on Education in Seattle , by Denise Gonazlez-Walker.

Here's a link to the Partnership for Learning's blog, The Hall Monitor , that has links to many education stories. For example, this from an article following analysis of what happens after students after they graduate in Oklahoma and Florida: "As more states follow Oklahoma 's lead, there will be more measures to choose from. Some states have already connected their education data systems to databases containing information about employment, welfare, and public safety. In addition to tracking students into college, the Florida Department of Education 3 publishes, for each high school, statistics such as: The percent of high school graduates working in Florida on a full-time and/or part-time basis the autumn after graduation Average hourly earnings of employed graduates, as well as the percent of employed graduates with earnings meeting certain hourly wage thresholds The percent of graduates working for the federal government The percent of graduates enlisted in t...