A couple of weeks ago, Gwen Ifill and the PBS News Hour crew flew to Seattle. They spent one day following me and one day following the richest person who ever lived, Bill Gates, to ask us about our ideas on education reform. I was simply shocked to hear that they would be running an …
Last Thursday I flew to New York City to take on Peter Cunningham, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education (under Secretary Arne Duncan, during President Obama's first term), in a debate hosted by Al Jazeera America’s program The Third Rail. We debated the question, "Is public education in the U.S. broken beyond repair?" I …
Today marks the first day scheduled for Common Core testing, such as it is, at Seattle's Garfield High School. As I reported last week, Garfield educators were debating about how best to oppose the new deeply flawed Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core tests, when the parents spoke and opted out hundreds of students …
Before the testing season began, educators in Seattle knew that because of the lack of proper preparations, IT support, technological upgrades, and training - and due to the outlandish number of tests administered this year - testing pandemonium would ensue. Last week the Social Equality Educators (SEE) put a call out for teachers to share their …
“…the Opt Out movement is a vital component of the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social justice in our region. Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants ‘lesser,’ while systematically under-funding their schools, has a long and ugly history in this country.” -Gerald Hankerson, current President of the Seattle/King County …
I AM AN EDUCATOR 
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