Seattle Schools Community Forum

I'm leaving out opting out and charter schools stories; they need threads of their own. Over in Pasco (FL), they are so desperate for teachers they have a $1,000 training program to become one for their schools.  I was not aware of this program. The Professional Development Program that helps train people without education degrees to become teachers costs $1,000. However, candidates do not have to pay the money up front. Instead, they can have that money deducted from a series of paychecks and pay it over time. Remember how crummy American kids are at math ?  Not the elite students who are growing in power and numbers.  From The Atlantic (and you should check out the photographs of the kids in this article:

KOMO tv is reporting this: A disturbing trend has been identified in Seattle public schools, where marijuana now makes up most of the disciplinary actions involving students. Between the start of the school year and Jan. 7, marijuana made up 77 percent of all disciplinary actions taken against students, district officials said. That's a big number.  What seems to be the issue? Lately, school officials have faced a new threat: Marijuana edibles dressed up as sugary treats. Everything from pot-infused caramels to drug-laced lemonade has been confiscated. That's in addition to the pipes and joints collected. The article doesn't explain how/why KOMO came across this news.  I'll have to ask the district. Reader Mary G said this: If this is true, this is a stunning statistic, but how would one know? The district has been unable to produce any reliable statistics for the last two years, and certainly not any resembling real time statistics...

From the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet, an article about D.C.'s county superintendent calling on President Obama and Secretary Duncan to call a moratorium on standardized testing. He also said it was wrong to evaluate teachers based on the scores their students get on standardized tests because the method that is is based on “bad science.” He noted that he had previously worked in the New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school system, where was director of school performance and accountability. It became clear, he said, that the formulas used to assess a teacher’s value with the use of test scores had huge margins of error, as much as 55 points. In fact, he said that a good way to create assessments for Common Core-aligned curriculum would be to crowd-source the development and let teachers design them rather than have corporations do it. He criticized policies that help make public education   “a private commodity.” An op-ed fr...