.@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.

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.”

“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

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.

A thread on #PoliceFreeSchools.

Every parent or educator who has ever said the words, “#BlckLivesMatter” should work to get cops out of schools.

This school year has many cases cops harming kids: 1) a cop assaulted a girl for taking an extra milk.

thesource.com/2019/10/25/wat… In Florida this school year, a cop traumatized a 6-year-old girl when he handcuffed, arrested, & forced her into his squad car.

Then he took her to the youth jail, took her mug shot & fingerprinted her, all for a temper tantrum.

#CounselorsNotCops

thegrio.com/2020/02/26/bod…