Seattle Schools Community Forum

Out of Florida via Ed Week : A new Florida bill would ensure that the state's high school students have a little more time to catch up on their sleep. Filed by state Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican, the bill would make it impossible for any Florida high schools to begin the school day before 8 a.m. starting with the 2014-2015 school year, reports the Tampa Tribune. A recent Education Week story highlighted this issue, with a look at some research on the subject and efforts to highlight the value of later start times. Sleep deprivation is considered a widespread health problem for adolescents, it notes. While the exact benefits of adequate sleep are hard to pinpoint, a May 2012 study found that, for middle school students in Wake County, N.C., a later start time correlated with a 2 to 3 percentile point jump in standardized math and reading test scores. According to the Education Week story, experts recommend that high-school-age young people get around nine ho...

From City Living Seattle , a great listing of empowerment programs for girls.   Many types, many locations - good stuff.  (Thank you to reader Carolyn.)

I hadn't meant to write about this but enough stories came across my radar to make it worthwhile. There are two issues to consider about the U.S. female population. One is that women are STILL underpaid in this country.  Do you remember this being an issue when you were in high school? I do and I am eons out of high school.  And, apparently, Seattle has the worst gap (.73 cents versus the .77 cents nationally).  Here's what some of our mayoral candidates said when asked about this at a recent debate (only Staadecker, Burgess and Harrell were asked).  From the Stranger Slog : As it was, two out of three candidates flubbed their responses, hard .* Staadecker admitted that he didn't know the issue existed: "First of all, I will confess, I was not aware as a city that we were the worst in the United States. Therefore, if women aren’t being paid, if there’s a glass ceiling, that has to be through education and skills." Worse, Burgess said this: "We...

More stories on the hopeful side. From Scholastic , a story about the superintendent of what is considered the "best" public school district in the country.  That would be Mooresville Graded School District, outside of Charlotte, NC.  The article is called 10 Lessons From the Best District in the Country .  From the article: The district undertook a massive “21st Century Digital Conversion” in 2007. Students now frequently work in groups, and they use one of dozens of interactive learning platforms instead of textbooks. Rather than lecturing, teachers act as facilitators, circulating among groups or leading students in interactive lessons. Results of this transformation are off the charts—the graduation rate for African-American students was 95 percent in 2012, up from 67 percent five years earlier. The overall graduation rate is the third highest in the state, and 88 percent of 2012 graduates are attending college, compared with 74 percent in 2007. Mooresville has ac...

What is the standing of women and girls in the world today?  It's hard to know. On the one hand, we now have more women in Congress than ever before.  There are now 20 women in the Senate (although as The Stranger points out, that's a group that has been around for 200 years and yet it has taken this long).  New Hampshire state government seems to be an all-woman squad at this point.  Many European countries have long had female leaders. Yet, throughout the world, rape is still a harsh and terrible tool used against women and girls.  The young woman in India who died from her injuries (and I had wondered why that was until I read that a metal rod had been used and torn her internal organs apart) has now caused women in India to say enough.   But will it be enough when you still have men who say "don't wear dresses and don't go out after dark?" Now what has been happening in the U.S.  Well, there's this from Congress via The Atlantic: AWA, which...

Dear Taliban, You try to kill a young girl and for what?  Wanting to learn.   And you fire into a schoolbus full of children.  My, what manly men you are. A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone Tuesday that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity." She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Mr. Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”  All the world now knows of your cowardice and ignorance and stupidity.  And what have you gained?  Nothing. Her father ran one of the last schools to defy Taliban orders to end female education. As an 11-year-old, Malala — named after a mythic female figure in Pashtun culture — wrote an anonymous blog documenting her experiences for the BBC. Later, she was the focus of documentaries by The New York Times and o...

I've found this to be something of a women's month for me, reading articles and watching tv shows about feisty, tenacious women. First up, from Germany, Amalie Noether who Einstein called " the most significant and creative " female mathematician of all time.  What did she do?  From the NY Times : She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson.  It wasn't just that she was a great mathematician but she did it during a time when most German universities didn't have women enrolled and she was " a Jewish pacifist in the midst of the Nazis' rise to power. " Next, women in elective office from the great state of Washington .  T...