Shawn Vestal

There’s a lot of research in education that suggests the single most important factor in students’ academic success is the teacher. And there’s a growing amount of research suggesting the students who need a great teacher the most – students in poverty, students of color, students who are performing worse than their peers – are less likely to have one. A recent study published by a pair of University of Washington researchers, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, undertook a comprehensive analysis of teacher quality and student access in Washington state and found that our “teacher quality gap” is stubborn and widespread.

In the wake of last week’s primary election, there is a much more interesting question than whether Mayor David Condon will hang on for a second term. Will the City Council’s liberal, veto-proof supermajority stand? Or will it be demoted to a simple majority? Or will it be bolstered even further, to a “super-duper” majority?

When police officers investigating the death of a teenager killed in an encounter with a speeding Spokane County deputy needed an expert to analyze video footage, they made an unusual choice: the guy accused of whitewashing the infamous Otto Zehm videos. That’s the bad news. The good news, so far as it goes, is that once concerns were raised about “credibility problems” with the work of Grant Fredericks, the owner of Spokane-based Forensic Video Solutions, the brass ordered a separate review, according to investigative files released last week.

Are we confused, electorate? I know I am. On one hand, the city of Spokane has, in essence, sued its citizens on behalf of corporations, trying to prevent voters from getting even a peek at an initiative that would enshrine the kinds of workers’ rights that give the business community the night terrors. On the same day, the city sued a corporation on behalf of a river – perhaps as Sierra Clubby a move as we can ever expect from the administration of David Condon.

When she was a child in a small El Salvadoran village, Luisa Orellana-Westbrook would imitate her father by preaching the word of Jesus Christ to other children. Today, living in Spokane 32 years after her father was hauled away by death squads, she’s still motivated by her father’s mission to lift up the poor and suffering. And she’s especially pleased that Pope Francis formally recognized her father as a martyr recently – an apparent change of attitude from the church toward Catholic clergy and others killed during El Salvador’s civil war.

So: Patrick Rushing isn’t a racist. And Rachel Dolezal is black. That’s how they identify, at least.

Today we have a tale of two votes – a Republican yes and a Republican no for a state package that will bring $1 billion in new transportation investments to Spokane and raise the gas tax by almost 12 cents a gallon. On one hand, Sen. Michael Baumgartner – whom the conventional wisdom pegs as a blunt and sometimes pugilistic battler – emerged from this year’s legislative session having worked alongside local Democrats to pull a lot of money to the dry side of the state, including the final funding for the North Spokane Corridor. Baumgartner took perhaps the toughest vote a Republican can take these days, voting yes on a tax, but he says the benefits for his district carried the day.

It’s not news that two Spokane psychologists were instrumental in developing, teaching and employing firsthand the torture program that the U.S. adopted in years immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But an exhaustive new report makes the case that the professional gatekeepers of psychology – as represented by top officials in the American Psychological Association – colluded with military leaders in developing a permissive and vague code of ethics regarding the participation of psychologists in interrogations, and actively thwarted efforts to develop policies that would have prohibited it.

It’s been just three weeks since the second Bazaar, the downtown local arts festival that already feels like a community staple. So naturally, Ginger Ewing, one of the people who work so hard to make that event happen, is taking a little time off.

If the Legislature manages to get its act together before Thanksgiving, there is good news for Spokane in the transportation budget. And I’m not talking about the north-south freeway.

In those days, our daughter would bang her head on the floor. She would bite us, hold her breath until her face purpled like a blood blister. Her shrieks would pierce the neighborhood, carry outward into other neighborhoods, into downtown Spokane and over to Idaho and Montana, Seattle and Canada, up and out of the atmosphere, all the way to the former planet of Pluto. Everyone told us the fits wouldn’t last forever, but I became certain these people were lying. That they were in on it with her. After all, how could she take us hostage, without accomplices? She was only 3. I would flee the house and eat cheeseburgers. Make up any excuse. Read the Mini-Nickel with a Big Papa burger and a tub of tots and eat until it hurt, and that was how I first saw the 2013 Crestliner Kodiak, a deep-V 16-footer with a live well and outdoor carpet. It looked nicer than our house. I took an afternoon off work — “sick” — and drove to Republic. The moment I saw it on the trailer beside the garage, dimly silver and scythe-like, I began plotting its purchase. I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head, hear her as she sat in the car at the public beach, window cracked and smoking, talking bitterly about the people with their boats, just another way she had of seeing the world as against her. “Must be nice,” she would say, in her most hateful voice.

At the fringe of the yoga-soy block of hipness on West Main sits a small, dusty storefront where one man makes boots with his own thick, ink-stained hands. Cruz Albisu, an immigrant from the Basque region of Spain, has been practicing a time-honored but fading craft for decades. His main products are work boots for logging and other outdoor labor, but don’t pigeonhole him.

If you think the NAACP is an important organization with a vital mission, now would be an excellent time to show it. If you think that the city’s ombudsman commission and oversight of the police department is a crucial enterprise, now would be an excellent time to show it.

An all-too-familiar tale flew under the radar last week while everyone was talking about you-know-who: A disgruntled yahoo, devoted to his guns and apocalyptic anti-government views, went from talking about killing people to actually killing someone, police say. James “Strat” Faire – a former militia trainer who believed that citizens need to rise in armed rebellion against the government – was arrested last week near Tonasket, Washington, on charges of murder and assault, along with his companion, Angelina M. Nobilis. Authorities say the pair was squatting in a home there, and a confrontation ensued when the owner, along with a couple of others, came to evict them. Faire allegedly pulled a gun and then drove over them in his pickup, killing one man and injuring a woman. Witnesses said he drove into the victims once, backed up, and did it again.

‘You ever had the feeling you wish you had said something to someone?” This is Bruce Jackson’s question, and the someone he had in mind was his fourth-grade teacher from Linwood Elementary School in 1971, and the something he wished he had said was how much of an influence she’d had on him when he was just a boy with bangs writing poems about mice.

Tomie Tsosie Leeds made the honor roll again with a 3.5 grade-point average. Now if he can only graduate.

At the end of February, I saw a social media post about a package of racist, seemingly threatening letters that the head of Spokane’s NAACP chapter said she had received. I reached out to Rachel Dolezal, and she agreed to an interview at her home. I asked her about the 20-page package – which included gun-range target imagery and a photo of a lynching – and looked at cellphone photographs of the materials, which had been turned over to police. Police were investigating it, had assigned it to a major crimes detective, and said they were taking it seriously.

Last week, while the mayor was discussing the results of the city’s latest homeless count, a city crew was out dealing with one of the thornier parts of the issue. City workers were dismantling a homeless camp on a steep embankment along the Spokane River. As the weather warms, such camps – informal, with makeshift shelter, sometimes with fire pit, often strewn with garbage – show up with more frequency on city land and in other public areas. The camp in question June 1 was tucked against a bank, roughly 200 feet down a steep slope across from homes in the 2700 block of West Summit Boulevard, on city parkland near a trail that follows the river. Three or four people seemed to be staying there, using carpet pieces and tarps to create shelters. They had leveled and cleared a small area, fenced somewhat by fallen logs, on a pitch that was difficult to reach from any direction.

Less than a year after marijuana became available in stores, it is no exaggeration to say that it’s booming. Each new month brings increased sales and tax revenues. Marijuana bucks have already become a key element in state budget negotiations. Hundreds of licenses have been issued to retailers, growers and processors.

The Garland Theater will show a special movie Saturday night, but they’re keeping the title under wraps. This time, the theater itself is the main attraction.

There is, at this late and inconvenient date, one way for the Spokane County Commission to ensure that the public can trust its process for hiring a new county CEO. Start over.

The Davenport Grand Hotel will open before controversy closes over city contributions to the project. That’s simply backward, no matter how good the project is for downtown – and there is every reason to think it will be very good indeed. As Mayor David Condon, the City Council and even hotel developer Walt Worthy debate just how it is that the city is on the hook for $318,000 the council has not yet approved, one point of agreement has emerged: The city needs a clear, clean, consistent plan for how and when it offers incentives to developers and businesses.

Today, 3,000 members of the Spokane Education Association will walk off the job in an effort to send a message to the Legislature that it needs to step up to its constitutional responsibility to fully fund education. As a result, nearly 30,000 students will be participating in an involuntary walkout of their own, with instructional time to be made up some mornings and at the end of the school year. The walkout has been predictably controversial, and it has raised questions even among those who support the teachers’ aims – smaller classrooms, salary increases for teachers and a reduced focus on testing. On Tuesday, SEA President Jenny Rose talked to me about the walkout and why her members felt it was necessary.

In August 1945, the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Five years later, the superintendent of schools in Spokane stood in front of 900 educators at Lewis and Clark High School and warned: “The same thing that happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki could happen here, and we must prepare for it.”