Seattle Schools Community Forum

It's been a while, but I've been feeling an Advanced Learning rant building in me. It got pushed over the edge today when I got thinking about the District's inability to implement MTSS. For those who prefer to skip rants - and especially rants on this topic - please do skip it.

Warning: This is a rant. The one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement recently passed.  I think about Occupy quite a bit because it was really a discussion and demonstration about the factors of political efficacy. There are still, remarkably, a lot of people who claim that they don't know what the Occupy protests were about - if anything. These folks, disingenuously I presume, ask "What was their message anyway?" For me, the message of the Occupy protests was loud and clear: The wealthiest 1% of our society use their wealth to buy political power then use that power to perpetuate and expand their wealth and to pursue their narrow self-interests.

Fair warning. This is going to be a rant. Those of you who come to this blog for news and information should just do yourselves a favor and not read it. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've concluded that I need to write rants like this from time to time. I just need to keep them separate from the news - like the newspaper separates the news from the editorials - so the folks who want to read the news aren't offended by having to read an opinion from outside their bubble. This is going to be a math rant, and they can be among the worst. So, if you want to skip the rants, stop reading now.

I’ve been doing this for eleven years and people wonder how I can continue in this work without getting burnt out. Why don’t I get tired of it? After all, I never win. And, given the fact that the District has all of the power, all of the authority, and makes all of the decisions unilaterally, I am unlikely to ever win in the future. How can I possibly endure and persist when it is all so futile? I don’t have some well of energy that keeps me going. Honestly, I am not really built for long distance races; I’m no good in a mile run. In truth, I’m not even a sprinter; I’m slow over the 90 feet between the bases. I’m more of a guy with a quick, hard first step. How can that last over eleven years? While my eleven years of advocacy in Seattle Public Schools may appear to be one long contest, it has actually been hundreds of brief ones. This is not one long reaction to a single outrage, this is a series of reactions to literally hundreds of different outrages. Hardly a month goes by – n...