There's an overarching narrative for at least the last year in how Seattle's local political and media establishment have been portraying the Seattle School District. It goes something like this: Seattle's public schools are in a terrible crisis. That crisis is due primarily to incompetent leadership, particularly on the School Board. What we need is fiscally responsible adults running the district, and everything will be better.
The problem is that this narrative is not only untrue, but a calculated and self-serving agenda designed to restore to power the same unaccountable Old Boy (and Gal) network that left Seattle's schools in such a fiscal mess several years ago.
Don't get me wrong; there are still plenty of serious problems in the district. Most are common to every large urban district in the country. Among other things, Seattle's schools are underfunded (and some are decaying badly), motivated parents are leaving the district, and there are still enormous racial and class disparities in the education our kids get and in how discipline is meted out.
But all of those problems were as bad or worse four years ago. That's when a group of four new reform-minded citizens were elected to the school board (mostly ousting incumbents in the process), inheriting a financial train wreck from the previous do-nothing, establishment-approved board. Those members are up for re-election this year, and the downtown types - most recently ignored when they tried to browbeat the board into hiring an unqualified Norm Rice as the new superintendent - would like their rightful thrones back. Hence, The Narrative.
And it's simply untrue. The district has gone from a $34 million deficit to having $25 million in reserves in the four years under the current reform-majority board. Rotting high schools (most recently Garfield and Cleveland) are being rebuilt. Funding levies were passed by voters in February. A new superintendent (one actually qualified to run a school district) is now in place. And test scores are steadily rising.
The biggest recent stain on district leadership, the contentious school closure process, was a rite of passage being demanded by state legislators in exchange for loosening state purse strings for Seattle schools. And this gets to the biggest problem facing all public schools in Washington, but especially the ones here in Seattle: in the last decade federal and state government has cut education spending dramatically. And the quality of our kids' education is linked directly to how much money we're spending on it.
To understand how badly the state is shortchanging Seattle schools, consider the disparity in education between schools in Seattle's richest and poorest neighborhoods. Schools are actually funded fairly equitably by the district, but in affluent neighborhoods, they get help. In areas like Laurelhurst, elementary school PTSAs can and do raise up to $1,000 per student per year; meanwhile, some south end schools have no functioning PTSA at all. That extra $1,000 per year is how much the market is deciding a student needs to get a quality public school education in Seattle. Seattle schools simply don't get enough taxpayer money to do their job properly. That, not leadership, is the district's biggest problem.
The recently concluded legislative session in Olympia helped bridge the gap - some. Teachers got some of the $800 million being spent on pay raises for state workers, and schools themselves got about $341 million in new funding for the biennium. "[It's] much better than what we were getting, but there's still a long way to go," says board member and former board president Brita Butler-Wall. And she's right.
Large districts -- and Seattle is by far the state's largest - got hit especially hard by funding cutbacks in past years. It's the nature of large urban districts that on a per-pupil basis they're more expensive to operate: aging physical plants, more special-needs students, more ESL and immigrant populations, more problem students and difficult home lives. In that context, and with state cutbacks just starting to be restored, the downtown narrative of a school district that can't manage money is not only no longer true, but the exact opposite of what has happened since the Old Boys/Gals were ousted: a budget deficit being turned into a healthy reserve.
The Narrative, of course, is aimed at this fall's school board election, where a slate of well-funded downtown-backed candidates is poised to snatch business as usual from the jaws of progress. Of the four board members whose terms expire this year, only Sally Soriano has announced she is running again; Irene Stewart has already bowed out, and both Butler-Wall and Darlene Flynn have yet to decide whether to seek another four-year term. Their performance, and that of the district, has not been ideal in recent years; but it's been a dramatic improvement, and it deserves to be evaluated based on what's actually happened - not on the negative drumbeat of a few well-placed, self-interested guardians of the Bad Old Ways.
Eat the State! cofounder and Seattle writer Geov Parrish may be reached at this link. Go ahead, send a letter.
