Seattle Schools Community Forum

I asked the district: Is it true that opting out your kids can get them removed from the Spectrum/APP seats? The answer, via Advanced Learning, was a flat "no."   So if your teacher/principal is saying this, tell them you checked with the district.   If you continue to hear this, I would write to your region's Executive Director because it is wrong to give out misinformation about SBAC testing. Nationally, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, endorsing opting out (at least in her home state of New York).  Her statement yesterday via Twitter, We believe parents have right to opt-out & tchrs shld be able to advise parents how. We’ve said it repeatedly, are fighting for it in ESEA. @lacetothetop et al have asked what I’d do if I had kids in NYPS—based on what I’ve seen, if I had kids, I’d opt them out of the PEARSON (PAARC) tests this yr. I may have put this up before but I think it worthy of a repeat: it's the ...

Unhappy with Pearson ?  Apparently you are not alone.  Speaking of Big Brother, here's the SBAC's "Guidance for Social Media Monitoring during the Field Test."  The State Senate is to drop its budget this week.  Let's see how that fulfillment of McCleary is going and where they find the funding.  I spoke to Speaker Chopp last week and that's pretty much all he would say.  I note that when I mentioned that while I think preschool is great, that the Constitution says K-12 is the state's paramount duty and that I was worried about the push that both preschool and higher education are receiving this session.  He said something to the effort that there would be more dollars for preschool but not in McCleary. Whether it's in McCleary or not is not really the point.  Because, frankly, education dollars are education dollars. I note that there's a new group, Why Not Us Washington that is pushing the Legislature to invest more in preschool.  ...