Thursday, February 4, 2010

Court cases on state funding and Discovery Math

Charlie Mas writes in the comments to an earlier thread:
Two important court cases decided today.

1. Court rules that the state is NOT fulfilling its constitutional duty to fully fund education.

2. Court finds that Seattle Public schools choice of high school math textbooks was capricious and arbitrary and directs to Board to reconsider the adoption.
More details and good discussions going on the posts ([1] [2]) over at the Seattle Public Schools Community Blog.

Please see also our earlier thread, "Gregoire's budget cuts APP".

Update: Five weeks later, Cliff Mass -- UW professor, well-known weather blogger, and a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the math textbooks -- writes, "Seattle, Bellevue, and Issaquah: School Districts Versus Good Math Education".

5 comments:

Greg Linden said...

Over at Seattle Math Group, the plaintiffs in the math textbook case are asking for donations toward their legal costs (currently $11,320, expected to go higher).

Anonymous said...

I gladly mailed them a check and will be writing the school board to urge them not to allow the district to appeal.

Charlie Mas said...

We should encourage the Board to take prompt action on the judge's order. The Board should model swift compliance with the Court by getting right to work repeating their review and vote on the adoption of the high school math materials.

Prompt action by the Board - regardless of how they vote - will make any other action by the District unnecessary.

Greg Linden said...

For parents' convenience, the contact information for the Seattle School Board is here:

http://www.seattleschools.org/area/board/contact.xml

ArchStanton said...

Shameless plug:

In a thread on the SPS blog, I was inspired by Dan Dempsey and gavroche to create some images for fun. I have since refined them and used them to create some merchandise at cafepress. I will send all profits to the Seattle Math Group to help defray their legal costs. (FYI: they haven't endorsed this - it's just my project)

The first bit of swag is at nofuzzymath

I've got another that is more specific to the Discovering math case, but I'm trying to answer a legal question before I promote it.