Leaders for quality public education from cradle to career
LEV’s Senior Advisor Lisa Macfarlane wrote this editorial for the International Examiner. Right now, too many kids growing up in South Seattle and South King County are not on track to get the kind of education that they need to get a living wage job. The inconvenient truth is that we don’t have enough schools [...]
Updated 10:36am Read the press release. Read the complaint. Today, the League of Education Voters – along with the Washington Education Association, lawmakers, parents and taxpayers – filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court challenging the constitutionality of Initiative 1053. The initiative imposes a supermajority vote in the state Legislature to raise revenues or [...]
The court room in the Temple of Justice yesterday was filled to the brim, and then some. Lots of us brought children because this case is really about their future. Late comers had to watch the Supreme Court proceedings from a TV on folding chairs in the marbled lobby. Watching the state defend itself in [...]
Today, LEV will bring a dozen kids to the Washington Supreme Court to hear oral arguments in the McCleary v. State lawsuit. For these students, the issue of school funding is personal. It’s pretty obvious to them, and their parents, and their teachers that the state is not meeting its constitutional and paramount duty to [...]
Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn penned this op-ed piece in the Seattle Times about our state’s commitment to education. Superintendent Dorn is spot on about the need to redouble efforts to better educate our children and to protect education funding, as much as possible. Making “ample provision for the education of all children” is [...]
My parents did not finish college. But I did. After college, I joined VISTA, the domestic arm of the Peace Corps and I went to work in a maximum security juvenile correctional facility in Columbia, South Carolina. That was 30 something years ago. As I reflect on my professional life, half of it (15 years) [...]
An impressive number of school districts — 251 — have signed onto the state’s Race to the Top application, representing a whopping 96% of our students. And stragglers are still crossing the finish line! Does high participation even matter? Absolutely. Getting broad and deep buy in on our state’s new education reform plan from the [...]
Back in 1998, a small group of levy chairs, school directors, and parents came together and hatched a plan to direct the state’s surplus (we had one back then) into public schools, so that the promises of education reform could be made real for all children. Its success at the ballot box was stunning – 72 [...]
This morning, King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick ruled that “state funding [for basic education] is not ample, it is not stable, and it is not dependable.” This is a HUGE victory for a million Washington school kids! It’s been over two years since an impressive group of parents, school districts, unions, and community-based [...]
