Seattle Schools Community Forum

 This from SPS Communications on the upcoming closure of the Viaduct and traffic issues : School bus transportation and commute times for nearly all schools will be affected by the closure.

In one heck of an op-ed by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in the NY Times Sunday Review, they lay out their case for the three conflicting (somewhat) reasons why students in different groups perform the way they do.  The two authors have a book coming out called "The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America." It's long but worth it (especially the comments).  The comments are widely different and you can see a lot of "right on" with "racist trash."  One commenter asked a question, "A more pressing question for us here in the US is "What drives a successful SOCIETY?"  Is that the more important question - how we succeed as a society or as individuals?  Another says: I think the authors have a very limited idea of what constitutes success--"income, test scores and so on." What's missing is emotional success: humanity, compassion, strong family ties, empathy. A...

I did link the latest Gallup poll on what Americans think about public education but it deserves an updated reprint. First, from Gallup itself, the highlights:

Great article in Crosscut about what is happening over on the Eastside with immigrant populations.  What draws immigrants to the Eastside and keeps them there, even when, like Tushara, they go to work in Seattle? Lee could be speaking for all of them when he answers, emphatically, with a single word: “School! I needed to raise kids, and Bellevue’s the place to do it.” It wasn’t just the Bellevue schools’ celebrated instructional quality (its average test scores place it among the top 10 districts statewide in math and science and the top 30 in reading and writing) or their ample tax base, which includes the wealthy lakeshore municipalities of Medina, Clyde Hill and the Points. It was the counter-intuitively congenial social environment of what was then an upscale, predominately white, monocultural community. In Bellevue and Newport, Pham found, he didn’t have to worry about his three kids being bullied or sticking with their own kind for protection. The frictio...