Mike Riley for Seattle Schools? NOOOOOOO!

Mike Riley for Seattle Schools? NOOOOOOO!
Ch13 reports that Seattle is looking at Bellevue's Mike Riley for their new superintendent. Oh God No. That guy is crazy. He made the cover of newsweek for best school district ... based on what? On percentage of kids TAKING advanced placement tests. His idea is to REQUIRE every student to meet HIGH STANDARDS by taking this test to get a high school diploma. AP means proving that you are capable of COLLEGE level academic material. Why in the heck would you require proving you can do college level work just to get a diploma that says you are capable of high school level work? He also told me he didn't see why they couldn't arrange the math curriuculum so that everybody could take calculus. He's also been fighting with parents who hate "Investigations" anti-math standards.

This "let them all have BMWs" attitude is typical of the "trophy student" mentality that has taken over public education. Excellence for all is not excellence, since by defintion, it's the performance of the top few. If everybody is excellent, the word has no meaning. Standards based education is just a rehash of the old Outcome based education, it's the belief that if you just come up with standards and tests to establish what the best kids can do, and then implement a system of carrots and sticks to require EVERYBODY to perform at the same level, we can simply legislate that everybody perform at a new, higher grade level. ARGH!

Olechefske and Stanford were both standards-bots. Then they had a sham selection for their academic officer where all 5 finalists were black women, obviously to make up for replacing a black Stanford with a bald white guy, after we passed the initiative banning selection of people by race. The odds of picking a demographic that is 5% of the population 5 times in a row is less than getting a jackpot on a one-armed bandit, but the Seattle schools wrote me a letter saying that race had nothing to do with the selection. Right.

At least Manhas wasn't a standards-bot, he was an administrator worried about not running schools into the ground, which is exactly what a superintendent should do. Well, I'm offering myself for the job again. I applied for the last melt-down process where every applicant quit, and they turned me down .Where do I apply? I also nominate MJ McDermott. She can't run for office, but with her "Inconvenient Truth About Math", she know what's going on in standardes based education reform which seeks to eliminate math and reading as we know it, not promote the same standards every previous generation was held to.



WASL still sucks.