Seattle Schools' Spectacular Failure
The Community Should Not Accept This Plan
Terrible for Kids
My beautiful goddaughter started kindergarten this year. She is a bright, warm, sweet little soul, cute as a button, and has a particular special need that meant this was going to be a tough transition, and there was a lot, lot of work preparing her for September.
But her first day of Kindergarten went very well, and those of us who love her so much all shed a few tears and breathed a sigh of relief when it was over. You see, one of my sons had a really tough time with the transition from preschool to kindergarten, and we were all a little scarred from those memories. It felt so good to see that she had started so strong. We are so proud of her.
A few days later, Seattle Public Schools announced they want to close her school.
The district decided to help the medicine go down with a spoonful of tone-deaf propaganda, including their insulting tagline “Well Resourced Schools” in the email subject line.
It didn’t go well in that house, or in thousands of homes across the city.
(Picture Credit: Seattle Times).
We started hearing from friends, panicked, irate, and grieving about changes happening in their lives. Groups of buddies being broken up, parents with children with special needs or in specialized programs scrambling to understand what will happen to their babies. All in all, the community has was in a general state of shock and disruption.
A few days after the announcement, one of my boys came home from school sobbing because he found out four of his closest friends were redistricted away from his school.
Thousands of families have their own version of this story, many more devastating, and many of the families impacted have far less ability to buy their way around problems than we do. The harms, including substantial learning loss, will disproportionately fall on those who can least afford it.
This is a grievous failure.
Legislative Lunacy
First, and foremost, the legislature has failed to fully fund basic education. Making matters worse, their “per student” funding formula is much harder on districts with more kids with special needs, or students living in poverty. This has left many districts all over the state in dire straits.
They state has plenty of financial wiggle room and needs to deliver. I was shocked to learn that Washington is in the bottom third nationwide when it comes to school spending relative to our economic capacity
They should hear from parents and concerned citizens every day until this is fixed.
(Here is how you find your two Representatives and your Senator to get in contact. Calls get more attention than emails, but both are good. Get five friends to join you).
Local Lunacy Too
But Seattle Schools have made the funding mess much worse by pushing so many kids out of the district. And the plan to close so many schools is just a continuation of the shortsighted policy that got us here.
We must reject these local decisions as well.
Two Assumptions Driving District Behavior
I’ve been struggling to put my finger on the pattern of poor decision-making at the district. I’ve heard various ideological explanations, but most fail to capture the actual makeup of the leadership pushing it, at least to my knowledge.
My current best understanding is that two assumptions seem to be driving this forward.
Assumption #1: Walmartification Is the Best Way to Deliver Public Schooling
The individuals involved at the district seem to have different, overlapping reasons for embracing this blinkered view.
The tendency toward the big box approach seems mainly rooted in the notion that larger, uniform schools provide “scale” at each site. It is, after all, cheaper to spread the cost of a librarian across 500 students than 300 students. And cost efficiency is good.
It also seems that their belief is that this uniformity, across sites, provides a different kind of cost efficiency–perhaps districtwide standardization means a lighter administrative burden.
This of course ignores the cost efficiencies offered by specialized schools themselves (appropriate scale for certain kinds of programs that need enough students in one spot to make sense). It defines efficiency so narrowly as to exclude the impact of dollars on outcomes like learning–ignoring, among other things, the learning effects associated with teacher autonomy, school size, and school closures.
It also ignores the fact that some cost efficiencies are bottom-line inefficient, because they bring revenue losses too. Like when some families decide they don’t want Walmart-school and they leave.
A small subset of the board is reported to believe that forcing identical schools on the city somehow also aids equity, and that all the benefits of differentiation and individualization will be provided in uniform classrooms.
This is a naive, impoverished view of equity if I’ve ever heard of one–one that will produce inequitable outcomes in the transition, and exacerbate racial and economic segregation and inequality going forward by further separating people into the haves and the “still in Seattle Schools” kids.
It also seems hopelessly confused about itself. If differentiation and individualization are affronts to equity, why are parents assured that differentiation and individualization will be replicated in all classrooms? And does anyone really believe somehow this will be done by already horridly overstretched teachers after tens of millions more in staffing reductions?
Whatever the reasons for it, however, there does seem to be some sort of convergence around the Walmartification plan. And that is what we need to reject.
Assumption #2: Public Services (Like School) Are For the Poor and No One Else
The administration and some of the board seems blissfully blithe about the fact that as it has started to signal that it will force uniformity on everyone, people have increasingly fled the district. In fact, Seattle has the second highest share of kids enrolled in private schools in the country! While wealth explains some of this, other districts like D.C., Boston and Portland keep far more of their students.
With these closures, many more students will follow, just like they have in other cities that do this, taking millions and millions more dollars out of the school system, which will in turn create pressure for more cuts and more closures. In fact, each student that leaves would cost the district roughly $26,000 in funding per year. Which means this plan would not only be ruinously disruptive; may not actually even save any money!
At the very least, none of this lost revenue has been accounted for in the “plan,” and so it certainly vastly overstates the savings.
While many people talk about this ushering in a “death spiral,” I think it’s important to acknowledge that’s not quite right. The spiral will eventually equilibrate, when the under-funded district reaches a point where its increasing inability to provide a good education near kids’ homes is outweighed by families’ financial limitations. Those families might want to flee–but they will be stuck.
Then we will have the rump– “well-resourced” as the district calls it–of a district left for just the poor kids, and everyone else will have either moved to the suburbs or will pay for private school.
Just like most public services in the US.
Intentional or not, this mirrors the neoliberal privatization dreams of the eighties–a small safety net, with no “wasted” money because it only goes to those who need it most. We don’t have to “spend” any public money on the middle class, white collar professionals, or wealthy families. We can all feel really efficient and maybe even kind of enlightened because, look, we are prioritizing the poor! (This is part of the mentality behind the Seattle City Council’s opposition to funding workforce housing, by the way.)
I have been planning to write a Rondezvous on why universal or near-universal public benefits are better than means-tested benefits and still well. But the direction of that argument should be obvious by now. When the whole public has a stake in a public program, we tend to invest pretty reliably in it (see Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Policing, Fire Departments, Highways).
But when we narrow the benefit to a small class of powerless people and pat ourselves on the back for being “efficient” or “using all our resources for those that need it most” the benefits are reliably underfunded, crappily designed, at risk, or just don’t exist (See Section 8 Housing, Food Stamps, Affordable Workforce Housing, Psychiatric Care, Transit, and Medicaid especially before Obamacare, affordable/free Childcare, Elder Care).
This narrow, anemic public sector is what Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan bequeathed us. And our school board seems weirdly way too ready to embrace this same sad capitulation in our schools.
Now, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I don’t believe for a second that the School Administration and Board want to be left with a tiny rump of a public good that most people are actively disinvested in when this is all over.
But, unfortunately, I do believe that is exactly the path they are pursuing (again).
Don’t let them.