Matt Damon and his teacher mom Nancy Carlsson-Paige support the Seattle school testing boycott

[cemaphonic]

4. Garfield is an interesting school, and one where testing would be really distorted

It basically has two student bodies on one campus. For the local kids, it's a somewhat poor inner city (though a rapidly gentrifying one) school with a high minority population and many of the typical problems that such schools tend to have. And, as far as testing goes, there are a lot of Hispanic and recent East-and-Southeast Asian students, so it has a fairly high proportion of ELL students. But it also hosts the highest tier of Seattle's public school system of gifted programs. so there is a second population of extremely bright and motivated kids from all over the district (about a quarter of the student body). So you have two distinct sets of students that don't share many their classes. And you can't really draw any conclusions about its higher-than-average test scores in previous years, since that is largely a result of being a magnet school for gifted kids. Since it has both a high profile and good reputation, the teachers and administrators probably feel they can weather the political fallout of protesting.

It also has a really strong music program. Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones went there, and their jazz band and orchestra win awards all the time.