Seattle Public Schools - Things May Be A Changin'
As I have mentioned in years past, the John Stanford Center for Education Excellence (aka district headquarters, JSCEE) is generally very quiet. I note that the building is closed on Fridays every week until August 19th. As well, the Admissions Office closed on July 8th and doesn't reopen until August 1.
However, the Board seems very busy which is unusual for summertime. But, in fact, it appears the majority of the Board is on a mission to cede power to the Superintendent.
Here's what I'm seeing and why it is troubling.
- As I reported, Vice President Chandra Hampson started a series of meetings about the district's movement towards Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) which is a way of narrowing the focus and work of the Board with an eye to try to eliminate anything that does not directly address students. Director Hampson started these meetings in late March 2022 and, as I pointed out, conveniently schedules them in the middle of the day on a weekday. You can imagine that would strictly limit who could go and engage on this topic. (I don't know if these are available to view; I do not see them at the district's YouTube channel.)
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Or call in (audio only) +1 206-800-4125, Phone Conference ID: 138 156 245#
- Which leads me to the next occurrence. The Board has created a new committee - the Ad Hoc Committee. The directors on the committee are Liza Rankin, Chandra Hampson and Vivian Song Maritz. (I'll just note that every single committee has a majority from the majority that rule the Board's actions. You'll never see a committee made up of Song Maritz, Rivera Smith and Harris.)
- Then I received a comment for a post a couple of months past but important to this topic so I'll reprint it here (bold mine):
Under Crabill's guidance our board is proposing to turn almost all district policy over to the superintendent. https://www.live5news.com/2022/07/16/board-considers-move-split-its-policy-manual/?fbclid=IwAR17SuV4QRZgptgALjANVn4QgaSSvK48oAgLs54hyiLJH-D2PwAl9AgKsrA
- Student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change.
- The intention of the Council of the Great City Schools’ (CGCS) Student Outcomes Focused Governance framework is to translate existing research and the collective experience of dozens of CGCS board members and superintendents into a set of tools that boards can use to identify their strengths and weaknesses as well as to track progress along their journey toward improving student outcomes.
- This document is best used by the full board and superintendent with guidance from a facilitator specifically trained in its application. After receiving an orientation to the framework, each individual board member and the superintendent should fill out the Board Quarterly Self Evaluation. (As you may recall, during a Board meeting this year, someone from CGCS was on the phone and had stopped the Board - and its business - to tell them they should be ranking their work in real time. I have no problem with the Board monitoring itself to stay within an established framework of objectives but in real time?)
- Monitoring is never an opportunity for board members to provide advice to the superintendent regarding what should/shouldn’t be done about student outcomes. It’s also not about liking/not liking the superintendent’s strategies.
- Monitoring is about understanding the extent to which reality matches policy -- and in this case, the Board’s adopted goals / ends. Monitoring is never about offering advice or recommendations. The Board’s curiosity is focused on what’s true for students, not on what adults are/aren’t doing. Here are observations to look for / questions to ask (and the order in which to ask them) that support progress monitoring.
Reading through the entire thing, well, I guess that's why you need a new committee. So - much - work!
Here are my takeaways when viewing all these things in conjunction:
1) I can look back on decades of being a board watcher and see many boards that could be called dysfunctional. It's an interesting thing that board members are elected both locally and citywide so who's to say what their mission - as delivered by the votes from different communities - truly is.
2) As well, there have been various mission statements, "visions" and strategic plans. And without hesitation, I say all of those had different degrees of failure. I can't really point to one real and lasting success especially if you are talking about "student outcome focused" goals.
3) Thinking then about how to achieve better student results, you could see how a united front of a majority of directors AND an installed superintendent might move in an entirely different direction than any other one ever tried.
Instead of fighting for power, they restructure it.
Could it produce better outcomes? Maybe but I would say you'd need 5-10 years of this restructuring to see if it does. Meanwhile, Mr. Crabill and the CGCS are charging how much for this effort? I'm still trying to find out but it appears Mr. Crabill is on retainer so this cannot be cheap.
4) For me, all this Board monitoring of itself seems to take up a lot of time and attention and meanwhile, who is making sure the district is accountable for its work? Let's go to that article about the Charleston County School Board which may be taking this pathway. What leaps right out at me? The lede of the article.
The Charleston County School Board will consider a move on Monday that may change who is setting policy for the district. The proposal before the board is to split its policy manual into two – one for the board of trustees and the other for the district at large.
“Any changes to the Board Policy Manual will come to the board for approval,” the agenda item reads. “District policies will be the responsibility of the superintendent and no longer come to the board for approval.”
Is this REALLY what Seattle Schools needs? What about the accountability to voters/taxpayers as well as parents/guardians of the thousands of students in SPS? Superintendent Brent Jones was hired by the Board so if the Board cedes power to him, who oversees his work?
Board member Kristen French says the policy change does not weaken the board and is more akin to a housekeeping item to bring the district up to speed with best practices.
The above sentence? Substitute "Board member Chandra Hampson" and it is exactly what she would say.
My read on all this:
It is a strengthening of the role and power of the superintendent.
It would mean the Board would be there to vote on legally obligated items but probably little else. There would be no queries on direction of the district nor actions of the superintendent or recommendations. Basically, a rubber-stamping Board.
The Superintendent and staff would determine most policies.
Real community engagement would radically shrink. I think the new SPS trend that started with the tenure of Superintendent Jones of doing the minimal outreach to communities would continue with revisions to old policies and/or the introduction of new policies.
Of course the majority of the Board is working at a breakneck pace in the summer - they need to solidify all of this before the next Board election in November 2023 when the majority of the Board will be decided.
It certainly will make it easy for voters to see the differences in what they will get between board candidates who want to do and say less on the direction/work of the Superintendent and district and those who will be the eyes and ears for the public on the direction and work of the district as well as accountability for that work.
Comments
The bottom line is the school district is too big for its current governance structure! That's a serious issue that effects everything, but no one is really talking about that openly or transparently.
If the state legislature cared at all about school governance, they would institute salaries for elected school boards of large districts, as well as staff reporting only to them. I also think we need a larger school board, as our city has grown and the current number is too few to represent the true diversity of people and their values in Seattle. Our boards typically also lack the expertise and qualifications to oversee a $1 billion budget (and the board members know it, too), with the exceptions of Song Maritz, Harris, and formerly Mack.
But the legislature won't help modernize schools governance, which is needed state-wide. They literally don't care. Chris Reykdahl also doesn't care and is generally dismissive any time the word "Seattle" is uttered. He is probably the worst superintendent of public education we've had in Washington in a generation.
The Seattle delegation to the statehouse is not aware of and does not care about this stuff, either. Parents should start changing that by complaining often and loudly to their state reps and senators.
Anyway, given the workload, the volunteer status, and reality, I think it makes perfect sense for the board to offload a lot of things, and focusing on student outcomes sounds perfectly reasonable. Our current board is not known how reasonable they are, though, so they'll probably muck it up.
It doesn't free the board of accountability to the electorate or liability under the law for any failure to detect and correct corruption and financial impropriety. If I were a board member, I would be extremely concerned about those issues, particularly if a direct or indirect associate of Goodloe-Johnson is involved.
My personal view is, if a highly paid superintendent is going to have more power, then the superintendent should be elected by the public and not appointed by the board, or at least subjected to biennial votes of confidence by the public. But again, the legislature would need to help out there.
Mitt
Hampson, Hersey and Rankin began giving up their oversight when they raised the threshold for board approved expenditures to $1M for operations and $5M for capital projuects.
Chandra Hampson didn't feel that the board shouldn't vote on changes to transportation.
I agree with Melissa: We are looking at another project that will consume enormous amounts of administrative dollars and time and will not yield results. It is only a matter of time before the next batch of who- knows- who will come along and dismantle SFOG. Along the way their might be a scandal or two.
A Senator tried to get funding for SPS board. There isn't support. It will never happen.
Yes, that's the problem I think we need to be focusing on. The Seattle delegation does not know and/or does not care about Seattle Public Schools, and that's because constituents and political endorsements never raise the relevant issues with them. This is another area in which our local media lets us - and frankly, democracy - down. Studies are now coming out about the harms the pandemic school policies inflicted, but you'd never know it from local coverage or political candidates.
Washington has decentralized schools only in terms of some local taxation, curriculum and similar local policy-setting, and of course bargaining agreements. At the same, though, we actually have an unusually centralized school system for the US in terms of state mandates, RCW statutes, and state-level taxation, etc. In a way, we have the worst of both worlds, a high level of state intrusion into local control but very low levels of accountability to "check" that and high thresholds to achieve legislative change.
In The Stranger's endorsements, "education" comes up only when talking about sex ed in its endorsement of Debra Jean Entenman and "fully funding" education in its endorsement of Shukri Olow, and "schools" come up only in the context of mental health, gun control and school shootings, and school discipline or, in the case of Entenman, charter schools. No one is even talking about Seattle Public Schools as a dysfunctional behemoth that only the state can fix as an institution.
The Seattle Times's endorsements show a similar lack of awareness.
Even The Urbanist, which has been refreshingly critical of Seattle Public Schools the past two years (as it should be, since dysfunctional schools tend to undermine the growth and development of dense, climate-conscious cities and transportation plans) mentions schools or education only in its discussion of Claire Wilson.
Our political class, our civic leaders, our local journalists really need to start seeing the big picture here. As Mack said in her resignation letter, Seattle Public Schools needs an intervention, but that can come only from the state. Reykdahl won't do it, even though he has considerable power to do so. And the legislature and governor won't care about this until we make them care.
The board majority usually goes along with Hampson.
The specific SOFG documents shared with the district explicitly state that their goal is to minimize not just board input over the district, but public input as well. It is a blueprint to turn democratically-controlled public schools into a de facto corporation where the public's wants and needs are not relevant.
Thankfully there is a way to fix this. In 2023 four board seats are up for election. We need to elect four people who are committed not only to restoring democratic, public control over the schools -- we need four board members who are committed to reform and who will not be bullied or silenced by the JSCEE leaders.
Hercules