Seattle Schools Community Forum

Just a heads up on a candidate for King County Council - Girmay Zahilay - who is challenging incumbent Larry Gossett.  I have talked with Mr. Zahilay who is all the things you might want for the Council.  I have found Gossett to be equally compelling so I don't envy those who are voting for that race. However, I did find out that Mr. Zahilay served on a charter school board in NYC, starting sometime in 2017.  It's unclear to me if he still serves (I would think not). As well, in a photo at Crosscut, he is joined in a photo with former school board candidate Omar Vasquez as well as Dexter Tang, both local ed reformers.   This information certainly gives me pause and I wish I had learned it sooner because I would have asked Zahilay about it when I spoke with him.  I do have a message out to him. The ratings for candidates, including for Seattle School Board, are out from SEAMEC .

An excellent op-ed from Jordan Cahoon, a senior at Kent-Meridian High School , on how we talk about individual schools and the effects of a school's reputation on the students enrolled there.

The story was from the Seattle Times about students at Hazel Wolf K-8 having a protest over the lack of action from their administration on the use of racial slurs. What the Times writes versus what some of the comments - which seem to be from PTSA/staff - are quite different.  As in most of these cases, there are two items to remember.

I’m not sure you can have a bigger contrast between the Seattle Times’ article about the Board race between Leslie Harris and Molly Mitchell versus this article about the other two races, both in the northend.  The Times is a lot more even-handed here and that’s what you should expect in this kind of article (unless one candidate is severely deficient in skills).

Oakland Unified School District is the first district that I know of that uses targeted universalism (and has for seven years).

Update : the district announced today - via Twitter - that Franklin High School is now 1:1 for computers in the school.  The district plans to be 1:1 at high schools with higher levels of F/RL first and then start with 9th graders at the other high schools, with the eventual goal of all high school being 1:1 for all students.

Readers alerted me to the latest story from the Times' so-called Education Lab.  (Currently, the Gates Foundation is paying to seemingly get the Times to write about what the Foundation wants them to. They sent one reporter to Australia to look at a program for homeless youth in schools. Nice work if you can get it.) I want to first put forth my thesis on what is happening.