Shuttering a school is more than mothballing a brick-and-mortar edifice — it is hanging a closed sign on the hopes of a community.
I was part of the organizing effort to stop the last round of school closures beginning in 2009. They proposed closing 10 schools.
By building a sizable movement of parents, students, & educators, we got half the schools off the closure list, including Rainer Beach High School.
One of the points we made is that closing schools doesn’t save much money, & actually often ends up costing the district! I’ll explain why….
As I wrote in a Seattle Times 2009 OpEd:
“The total number of students involved in the current closure plan is 3,562. Projecting only 10 % attrition directly linked to closures, we’ll lose about 356 students & the $5,282 per student from state funding—around $1,880,392 a year!”
Closing 20 schools in Seattle—the most of any school district since Chicago closed 50 in 2013—would result in hundreds of students leaving the Seattle Public Schools…and we would lose the per-pupil funding that goes with them.
It doesn’t make fiscal sense to close schools!
This is the OpEd I wrote in 2009 to explain what was wrong and inequitable about the Seattle school closures then—including the math showing why it doesn’t make fiscal sense.
The Seattle Public Schools and the Union, @SeattleEdAssoc should unite with parents and students to build a broad mobilization to demand the funding from the state to keep the schools open!
In one of the wealthiest cities the world has ever known, the money is here!
Join @SeattleCORE206 and other organizers in the struggle against the school closures!
Every student deserves a fully funded school in their neighborhood!
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.@MayorofSeattle: As a teacher of many homeless students in #Seattle over the years & someone w/ homeless family, I demand you apologize to them for saying: “I don’t think anyone has a right to sleep in a public space or has a right to sleep on a sidewalk” seattletimes.com/seattle-news/p…
If you don’t want my students sleeping on the streets, then provide affordable housing.
We live in one of the richest cities in world history. We have the money to house everyone, but you would rather blame my students for being poor than fix the system that creates poverty.
It’s appalling that the @MayorofSeattle can vilify my homeless students who struggle to find a place to sleep at night, but doesn’t have a mumbling word to say about the billionaires who are hoarding the wealth of Seattle & creating the homeless crisis. teenfeed.org/about/facts-ab…
The most menacing aspect of #StandardizedTesting is the way it trains kids to fear making mistakes by labeling & shaming. Misunderstandings should be opportunities for breakthroughs in comprehension, but the tests teach that miscalculations are perverse transgressions.
Playwright Oscar Wilde made a magnificent observation in his novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" when he wrote, “Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”
Oscar Wilde understood that creativity cannot exist without mistakes, & without creativity life lacks meaning. Kids live in fear of getting low test scores because they are used to label & shame at best—& sometimes carry extreme high stakes (closing schools, denying graduation).
“Learning loss” due to COVID is part of a deficit narrative—like the “achievement gap”—that is racist. These models proclaim Black kids to be behind white kids without acknowledging: 1. The brilliance of Black kids 2. What Gloria Ladson-Billings calls “The education debt”
It’s true that High stakes standardized tests (originally invented by eugenicists) show that on average Black students are behind white peers. These tests are good at identifying: 1. Who is good at eliminating wrong answer choices 2. Your proximity to white middle class society
But when we change the evaluation tool and the goal of education to be about identifying problems in the world and finding collective solutions, it turns out that Black students are some of the most advanced.
Proposal: Let’s end the segregation of accidemic disciplines (a thread).
A lot of teachers are enamored w/ their subject areas, but what if we stop separating classes based on academic disciplines & based them on questions that need addressing & problems that need solving...
What if instead of Math, Language Arts, Social Studies, we had (for example) a class called, “Should our city defund the police?” The class could analyze city budgets & learn about percentages; read about the history of policing, & write policy proposals & poems about policing.
What if we had a class called, “Should fossil fuel companies be allowed to exist?” Students could study the science of climate change; the math of renewable energy; the history of environment movements; & write essays on their conclusions to share with local & national leaders.