The district argues that the schools have too many empty desks; critics see a racial impact.

Nicholas Lemann looks at StudentsFirst, her reform organization, and finds it's really RheeFirst.

"Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way. But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention."

With winks and nods, the legislature has allowed local levies to rise to up to 34% of school funding. If the state finds a new $1 billion, shouldn't it also reduce dependency on local levies?

Schools are increasingly failing to rectify the advantages wealth brings to families.

Three sweeping conservative bills kicked off the discussion, and then legislators went to work on a modified bill that made it through the Legislature and Gov. Inslee will support.

Republicans, liberals, Hollywood notables, and global corporate executives are among those who gave to the Coalition for School Reform, hoping to elect a reform slate for the school board.

"Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work. By these criteria, American education is a failed profession."