OPINION | Seattle Public Schools Didn't Lose Their Way — They Need a New One

Lately, it's hard to defend our public schools from a steady barrage of disparaging headlines. Scanning these headlines in local media may lead you to believe the school board is the only reason our schools are in crisis. But in reality, the situation is much more complicated than that.

With last year's humiliating school closure plan that was proposed, then withdrawn, followed by a legislative session that brought watered-down reforms to school funding, and now, increased pressure targeting our school board's 2021 adoption of a "neoliberal" governance framework, it is clear we need radical change.

If you zoom out from this blame-game-doom-loop, you will see adults playing political tug-of-war, using students as the rope.

To build trust and rebuild faith in our public schools, we must start by avoiding the temptation to nostalgically fantasize about returning to some prior version of our school system that has never worked for all of our students — with disproportionate failures to Black and Brown students in the South End.

We need to elect school board directors who will uphold robust accountability from district bureaucrats to operationalize not only a more holistic vision for student success, but one that also empowers educators and all families to be at the center of the solution.

So Wait, Is It All the School Board's Fault?

School board directors control the purse strings to the $1.3 billion budget of Seattle Public Schools. Not to mention they can decide whether or not trans students "exist" or if we teach Black history.

The school board's primary job is to hire, evaluate, and fire the school district's superintendent. This is currently a top priority, as Superintendent Brent Jones recently announced he will be departing in September.

The school board is also responsible for determining the policies that govern the district and the superintendent's procedures.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about what happens at our schools, and as both an educator and a policy advocate, I can tell you it is confusing who you can trust and what to believe.

The most recent school board critiques target a "governance policy" framework called Student Outcome Focused Governance (SOFG), yet another acronym that sounds good, but in reality isn't being implemented in a way that achieves its intended outcomes — with its primary goal being improved test scores for Black boys.

To put it as simply as possible (no easy task), SOFG is a framework for the board that shifts the board's attention from tracking district staff and teacher performance to instead focus solely on student outcomes. SOFG has been implemented in at least 30 school districts across the country, including major cities like Atlanta, Austin, and Houston.

SOFG, as it's critiqued by Seattle parents, The Seattle Times, and across the country, has limited the opportunities for public testimony during board meetings; removed standing committees where the board would go in depth on particular topics like curriculum; and reduced measuring our schools' success to a few standardized test scores. SOFG was originally adopted because the school board would often feel the need to set policy and priorities for the loudest parents in the room — often those who have access to media, public testimony, the political machine of public policy, and most importantly, time to spend making these complaints.

The framework was adopted to ensure a clear mechanism for measuring the progress of our students and the performance of the superintendent, with a targeted focus on the achievement of Black boys. It was also enacted to build lasting relationships with a broader collection of community stakeholders to shape the strategic plan of the district.

Community engagement has looked different under SOFG, with board members engaging in more district-wide conversations than spending time in schools themselves and holding fewer opportunities for public testimony downtown. In theory, this attribute of SOFG is a much more accessible and equitable way of engaging with the community. But when interpretive services are not provided, for example, it falls on deaf ears, quite literally.

One reason so many parents are mad with SOFG is that they can no longer "speak with the manager" in public testimony or micromanage the activities of the district. They also feel that the community engagement meetings have been a bridge to nowhere.

The problem with going back to the good old days before SOFG is that "speaking with the manager" only worked for some communities.

At this point, our district has had four years to implement SOFG, but it doesn't seem to be working, at all, according to their own 2019–24 goals.

In January, the board attempted to move away from measuring student success based on Black boys' third grade Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test scores in the 2025–30 strategic plan. But the district's academic department and superintendent pushed back by proposing the replacement of SBAC with another standardized test, second graders' Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) scores. The new goals move away from the targeted universalism approach of the past five years, shifting focus from Black boys to all students' test scores.

But the district still hasn't come up with clear metrics to meet these new goals, suggesting they don't know how to measure student outcomes beyond test scores. What about mental health? What about academic self-image? What about educator preparedness?

Did SOFG restrict the board, by eliminating committees, from getting timely and transparent information from the district, and reducing the assessment of student outcomes to test scores? Or, did district bureaucrats simply never know how to serve Black boys?

After all, how could the district dedicate its entire focus to raising the test scores of Black boys, then entrust the success of the framework to a curriculum department that hesitated to acknowledge Black Lives Matter at Schools, a nationwide tradition that actually began in SPS?

The board needs a governance framework, don't get me wrong, but we need the district to believe in its goals and then take action to implement them.

As we shuffle bureaucrats who hide behind rotating superintendents, the question of who is accountable for these failures still remains.

After all, has anyone been fired after four years of failing to meet SPS's three distinct district-wide goals? SOFG, also, has been a bridge to nowhere, but it will take a new superintendent to overhaul the district and a committed school board that will ensure they implement these changes.

So what now? Do we return to our old ways?

What Types of Solutions Should We Be Pursuing?

While recent critiques certainly identify a problem, we must be cautious of what type of solutions we call for SOFG's replacement.

If SOFG was functioning as recent critics contend, the district wouldn't be continuing to disproportionately fund highly capable programs that predominantly serve white students. The airtime and resources allocated to this issue suggest "the manager" is still within reach, as the district continues to fail students furthest away from educational justice.

In Chicago and New York, for example, they have begun the difficult work of implementing "community schools." Chicago's strategic plan to implement community schools entails a much broader conception of student success, it also includes measurements for school environments, investments in educators, and robust community engagement. The interdepartmental overhaul of Chicago schools is one model that Seattle could learn from. In Chicago, however, there is power in the Black community, specifically amongst labor-educator leaders like the late Karen Lewis, Stacy Davis Gates, and the current mayor, Brandon Johnson.

In Seattle, an overwhelmingly white majority city, we like to use the language of equity and racial justice, but when it comes to implementing transformative change, we end up tokenizing our minorities or weaponizing their arguments to uphold the status quo.

While part of the responsibility is on the board and the district, education doesn't happen on an island.

Students must be safe, they must be healthy, they must be clothed, fed, housed, and transported. They also must be protected from ICE, criminalization, surveillance, injustice, and increasing anti-trans ballot initiatives coming from people like Brian Heywood. In order to do all of these things, students must also have teachers who not only look like them but teachers who want to come to school every day and make wages that allow them to live comfortable lives.

Our public schools, unlike our private schools, cannot just turn away families or price them out from becoming "a burden."

Part of the responsibility should be on the mayor to support things like social housing, which he opposed. Part of the responsibility also falls on our legislators and governor, who continue to defy our state's paramount duty to amply fund public education, let alone fix our broken tax code.

Before they leave office, our current school board directors will need to find an interim superintendent who can break through the noise of the loudest critics, bargain a new contract in good faith with educators, and fight alongside community, not against them.

Then it will be up to our new school board directors to find a long-term superintendent who is committed to finding holistic measurements for student success and educator well-being that go beyond standardized test scores.

With Trump's cuts to federal public services, we need to be less concerned with families that can choose to send their students to public schools and more concerned with the families that rely more and more on them for health care, food, mental health support, and career pathways.

Our new board directors must also fulfill the promise to address school safety by expanding restorative justice, violence intervention, and culturally responsive programs that have been piloted in the South End to become fully funded citywide services.

In the August primary, if you live in one of the four districts whose board directors are up for election, you will be able to narrow the field for the citywide general election in November, when everyone gets to vote for all four.

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.

Oliver Treanor Miska is a queer Seattleite, educator, community organizer, and lobbyist for educational justice policy in Washington State. They work to organize youth, families, educators, and community organizations to pass progressive revenue to fully fund our schools statewide.