Sally Soriano

Sally Soriano is challenging incumbent Barbara Schlag-Peterson for Position 1 on the Seattle School Board. Her statement in her candidate profile claims that one of her proudest achievements was

Educating the Community about U.S. Trade Policy - Through educating the public about how both NAFTA and WTO have the authority to overturn our democratically enacted laws, I used the skills of communication in various media and educated my fellow citizens on the importance of community-wide deliberation on these institutions of immense importance to us all.

Conclusions: (1) she doesn't understand economics and (2) she doesn't know how to write a coherent sentence.

Soriano opposes high stakes testing and accountability:

Soriano is critical of the WASL. During her run for a School Board seat in 2001 and again this year, she said the high-stakes test warps classroom instruction and demoralizes students and teachers.

"I want to get away from that labeling," Soriano said at an election forum. She would lobby state lawmakers to place less emphasis on the WASL and challenge the sanctions imposed by the federal government for schools whose test scores aren't improving fast enough

Soriano is right to be concerned about the disparity in achievement between different ethnic groups, but I am unpersuaded by her understanding of the problem or its solutions:

"I think we need to focus on the issues of achievement gap (between white and nonwhite students) and disproportionality right away," she said.

The gap is not between whites and non-whites, it is between blacks and non-blacks

The district can tackle this problem by reducing class sizes, giving teachers more time to collaborate with each other and embedding the curriculum with awareness of racism, sexism and classism, Soriano said.

I have no idea what "embedding the curriculum with awareness of sexism" actually means, or what it has to do with the achievement of black students. Furthermore, under the Soriano regime, we would never know whether or not we were making progress on the achievement gap, because:

Sally Soriano said the use of WASL scores to label racial blocs of students as failures also constituted institutional racism.

Naturally, Soriano is endorsed by all the elements of the clueless, lunatic left, including: Green Party of Seattle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and both weekly newspapers. As hard as it is to believe, her campaign seems to be stronger than that of the moderate, reasonable incumbent, Barbara Schlag-Peterson. Soriano has raised substantially more money than Peterson, and she has many more yard signs all over the city.

This is an important election. The good people of Seattle need your help to save our public schools from Sally Soriano. If you live in Seattle, vote for incumbent Barbara Schlag-Peterson. If you don't live in Seattle, but know someone who does, please e-mail them a link to this webpage.

For information on the candidates in the other Seattle School Board races, go here.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 31, 2003 08:21 PM