Seattle Schools Community Forum

These people need to get to Starbucks and stat! so they can wake up and smell the coffee. From the NW Progressive : Proving once again that their Fund education first rhetoric is nothing but a false front, Republicans today pushed a bill through the Washington State Senate that transfers sales tax revenue collected on transportation projects out of the state’s general fund and into its highway fund. Since the general fund principally pays for our schools and universities, the bill would effectively take money away from education and put it towards laying asphalt instead.

Good article over at Crosscut by Lisa Arnold.  I love the way she starts with a nod to all that parents do to raise money for their schools.  Selling cookie dough is good. Widespread, ongoing citizen action directed at the Washington State Legislature is better.  She quotes me and I probably could have stated it better  about this issue.  Parents have and do want to advocate for fully funded schools but, in the absence of much movement in that direction (even with McCleary), parents hunker down for their child's school (and that's good and bless them). She makes some good points about what does work in this advocacy recently around issues like the MAP boycott: Each movement made a single, clear demand; was hard to ignore; and wouldn’t go away. How can busy people who care about education create a focused, stubborn, cannot-be-ignored campaign that also overcomes the too-few -people and too-little-time barriers?   She has some good advice es...

The Times continues its ed reform push and, as we have previously reported, they continue to do it both editorially and in their reporting.  The latest example is in an article about a "poll" for the A-F grading for schools bill currently in the Legislature.  (It passed in the Senate but hasn't gotten a committee vote yet in the House.) (Sorry, I can't link the story because of the Times' paywall.) The story does not say who commissioned the poll or who took the poll until the fifth paragraph.  That is very odd and would seem to indicate that the Times was more interested in pushing the results than what the poll was about and who created it. The article only states how many people took the poll (402) but not how many questions were on it nor what the questions were.  We all know what a push poll looks like and I suspect this was one of them.  It appears there was a question on the A-F bill which came out 66% for and 29% against (but what the other 5% ...