OPINION | Seattle Public Schools Has Long Failed South End Students — Now Is the Time for Change

by Vivian van Gelder

In 1990, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was a district in deep crisis. According to an audit commissioned by the Washington State Legislature, SPS faced "urgent and fundamental problems," including ineffective central management of schools, precarious finances, low employee morale, dwindling public confidence, and racial disproportionality in student outcomes. Students of color, who as a result of historical racist redlining practices were concentrated in Seattle's South End, were particularly likely to attend ineffective schools and experience academic challenges — despite the district's program of busing students crosstown for racial integration.

The situation within SPS echoed a larger national crisis in education. In 1983, "A Nation at Risk" — a hugely influential federal report on American public K–12 education — described an academic system hobbled by centralized bureaucracy and unable to meet the needs of students and the economy. According to the emerging neoliberal consensus of the 1980s and 1990s, the solution lay in decentralizing bureaucracies to unleash the creativity of educators and administrators and in subjecting individual schools to competitive market pressures through increased consumer choice. By 1995, SPS had committed to decentralization as the answer to its "urgent and fundamental problems."

That year, the school board hired retired Army Maj. Gen. John H. Stanford as superintendent with a mandate to implement this radical reform. During his brief tenure, Stanford laid the groundwork for a decentralized, "market-based" system of schools in which schools were positioned as "businesses" and families as "customers" (as Stanford wrote in his book, Victory in Our Schools: We Can Give Our Children Excellent Public Education).

Each individual school was given the power to make independent decisions about staff hiring, training, curriculum, instruction, and spending of cash budgets through new "building leadership teams" of educators and principals. Families could exercise consumer choice after Stanford ended busing, replacing it with a system of district-wide open school choice. Their students now had movable dollar amounts attached to them through a new voucher-style school funding formula, so that unpopular schools that lost too many students would, like unsuccessful businesses, eventually close down.

However, Stanford's sudden illness and untimely death in 1998 prevented the full implementation of his vision. Under his successor, Joseph Olchefske, who had come to the district from a career in investment banking, SPS did decentralize, rapidly and extensively — so extensively that the result was described in 1998's A Curriculum Management Audit of the Seattle Public Schools as "100 plus separate school systems," severely siloed school sites only loosely tethered to the central office and to one another.

Each school effectively went its own way to design its own educational environment for students. Schools that had ready access to supplemental support (often in the form of parent group donations and volunteering) were often able to build robust, responsive educational experiences. Schools that did not — especially those in the South End, which served far more immigrant families, families living in poverty, Black and Brown families, and more historically marginalized families than their North End counterparts — were left to manage as best they could.

In May 2002, 200 students walked out of Rainier Beach High School during the school day to protest a lack of textbooks, library books, and technology. At the time, RBHS junior Isaiah Bouie told the Seattle PI, "We're not getting a proper education, and all Seattle schools aren't like that. We want what North End schools have — books, good teachers, music, art and most of all R.E.S.P.E.C.T."

By 2003, decentralization had compromised the district's budget and "eroded the provision of a consistent educational program for the district's students … [and] resulted in a culture of autonomy that [had] splintered many efforts in the district and hindered high achievement for every child." These were the findings of a series of audits of the district's Special Education, English Language Learner, and Accelerated Learning programs; curriculum management; and general operations.

The district's most vulnerable children — who were disproportionately located in the South End — were most likely to be attending schools that struggled to provide a quality educational program in the district's decentralized environment.

Between 2007 and 2009, almost all of Stanford's reforms were undone, except for the assumption (located in the teachers' union contract and therefore required) of site-based decision-making. While under Stanford's system, schools would be incentivized to improve through families' exercise of open school choice and closure of under-enrolled schools, no school was ever closed for lost enrollment, and by 2009, school choice had been largely replaced by a return to a neighborhood schools model. A short-lived attempt in 2010 to impose external accountability on schools and teachers modeled on the Federal No Child Left Behind law was unsuccessful. In the years since, SPS has largely abandoned further central efforts to reintegrate its schools into a coherent system, focusing instead on encouraging each individual school to adopt best practices and pursue common goals.

We have multiple data points showing that continuing to leave student success to chance in this way has not led to consistently better outcomes for Seattle's South End students — especially those who were identified as long ago as 1990 as being the least well served by the system. With the neoliberal education reform movement of the 1990s and early 2000s now having run its course nationwide, it is time for our Seattle community to come together and create a new and better approach to school governance and management.

To do this, the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC) invites the South Seattle community to join us to work across our city to identify and actively advocate for meaningful, long-term solutions to our systemic challenges that will uplift the brilliance of all our city's children.

The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.

Vivian van Gelder is the director of Policy and Research at Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC).