Posted Tue, Feb 7, 4:05 p.m.

"Second, those who would batter a private charity for Komen for having a policy to remove funding for a time when an org was under investigation reminds me of a persistent panhandler downtown." When organization as large and influential as Komen drafts a policy that precludes a current grant recipient ...

Posted Fri, Jan 27, 8:38 a.m.

"The Seattle School Board is blowing up! " Really? New Directors Sharon Peaslee and Marty McLaren are responsible for blowing up the Seattle School Board? No, the blame for that can be placed squarely on the Seattle Times, Crosscut, and to a lesser extent the Seattle Weekly. A vendetta is ...

Posted Sun, Jun 12, 4:34 p.m.

@Starfish Mom - Thanks for posting the above. I second everything that you posted. Someone very close to me is also a MiT student. The trajectory is similiar to what you described but grad school was deferred to do two year stint in Americorps. The work assignment was in a ...

Posted Sat, Jun 11, 5:27 p.m.

@ Wilbur The piece listed at the end of my comment is quite informative about the overall effectiveness of TfA compared to traditionally trained teachers. The attrition rate of TfA recruits is higher than college prepared teachers. TfA corps members leave teaching at rates of 50% after two years and ...

Posted Fri, Jun 10, 3:42 p.m.

AltEd -interesting as SPS has only posted 5 or so openings for classroom teachers and a couple are only 1 yr. contracts. If the positions are not yet posted then they are not open. There are many passionate grads of the UW MiT program. They come trained and certificated and ...

Posted Fri, Jun 10, 9:53 a.m.

Not only is Mr. Stritikus a snake oil salesman, but there is a conflict laid out here between his role as Dean, his role as a TfA alum, and his part in the of selling TfA to the U.W. As an alum of TfA, he bent over backwards to accommodate ...

Posted Thu, Jun 9, 2:49 p.m.

Mr Stritikus is an alum of TfA; a fact that he neglected to mention in this bit of "lipstick on a pig." Let's not kid ourselves here, TfA is an employment agency which will charge SPS $4000 for each "recruit" that is hired. The fee for math and science types ...

Posted Wed, Jun 8, 2:47 p.m.

Thank you coolpapa for saying everything that I was thinking and more.

Posted Thu, Mar 10, 2:52 p.m.

Dick, thanks for this thoughtful piece with a bit of old fashioned common sense thrown in. In their zeal -some of them do mean well- the ed. reform crowd has laid waste to common sense. It is that blind insistence that only way to improve public education is a wholesale ...

Posted Sun, Mar 6, 9:58 p.m.

Thanks for this thoughtful piece. In my view, the current ed. reform movement is looking for simplistic answers to complicated problems. The reform movement would have us believe that if only there was a way to get rid of the bad teachers and hire TFA recruits,provide more choice ala charter ...

Posted Thu, Sep 2, 10:07 p.m.

Grousefinder great observations. First paragraph "Seattle Education Alliance" the teachers' union,..." Um, the Seattle Education Association is the union and the Alliance -well that is a group of business folks who believe that they know more about educating children than real educators. Maybe the Alliance had a hand in helping ...

Posted Mon, Aug 30, 2:31 p.m.

Joe, perhaps you should read the latest scholarly work on tying teacher evaluations to student test scores. It is available at www.epi.org. LEV, the Alliance, Stand for Children, etc. would also be wise to read this. As it turns out there are big problems with incentive pay for teachers and ...

Posted Mon, Aug 23, 1:19 p.m.

@jsperry – I am not a teacher and speaking only on behalf of myself, I don’t disagree with you. Yes, a rigorous evaluation system needs to be used to dismiss teachers who are clearly not doing their job. We all know teachers -both experienced and ones described as young and ...

Posted Sat, Aug 21, 9:53 p.m.

Councilman Burgess actually I was shocked that you and Councilman Conlin inserted yourself into the SEA/SPS contract negotiations. Even more surprising was that your op-ed piece in the Times seemed to be a recitation of current education reform propaganda, which stresses the urgency to act now. As you probably know, ...

Posted Fri, Jan 30, 7:49 a.m.

The Final Recommendation passed, and the Superintendent might consider this a victory. But it is puzzling that she and the Board risked so much political capital to push it through. It was an ill-conceived plan, rushed,seemed to have a predetermined outcome, and should have come after the new student assignment ...

Posted Wed, Jan 21, 2:18 p.m.

Sorry Mr. DeBell but you don't get off so easy. The reasons for the current round of closures and program changes have been shifting,contradictory, and confusing. 1. Cooper students will be moved into schools with lower academic profiles. How does this help Cooper? 2. Summit, whose population mostly draws from ...

Posted Thu, Dec 11, 6:40 p.m.

It may be that students will be grandfathered into their "new" school. This has been district policy in the past, but the question not answered is will we be doing this same dance (school closures) after the implementation of the student assignment plan? ML King closed and many of those ...