education reform

In a Seattle Times interview, Tom Alberg — co-founder of the Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group, who also serves on the Advisory Board of Discovery Institute’s new program on education reform — cites K-12 education reform as on of the most important issues of our time, and gives his recommendations on what is necessary to fix education locally in Seattle: Q: What are issues that need to be addressed? Alberg: I think the one place that a lot of tech people are really concerned about is education, K-12 education. I mean, we should have the best public schools (in the country) and we don’t. I think we need some radical steps and my two radical steps are: Transfer Read More ›

By DI Senior Fellow Don Nielsen. Originally published in The Seattle Times.

ISSUES related to public education have a certain circularity about them. What seems to get fixed becomes unfixed. This happens time and time again.

Currently, we have the state Supreme Court directing our legislators to increase spending on education. We have the teachers union filing Initiative 1351 to mandate class-size reductions in all schools. Though well-intentioned, these players contribute to the fallacy that putting more money into our schools would reduce the dropout rates and eliminate the achievement gap. Read More ›

WASL scores are here and the news is mostly good. You may guess by now that the WASL (pronounced WAHsil) is not something you do in December. It’s the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. It includes brain-teasing math questions, interesting literature selections to read and critique, demanding listening problems that require some note-taking skills, among other things. It makes you Read More ›