"Quiet Leaving" From Seattle Public Schools

That quoted term - "quiet leaving" is a version of the new term "quiet quitting" wherein a person only does the work within the workhours that they have agreed to. Honestly, education would fall apart if those who worked in schools all did quiet quit. I don't know a teacher who doesn't work beyond the school day.

Danny Westneat, columnist for the Seattle Times, recently wrote a column on his version which is "quiet leaving" meaning, SPS parents who left the district with no explanation. Now that the numbers of gone students is ever-larger in SPS, it might make sense to find out why and maybe even stop the bleeding. His column received about 800 comments.

From the column:

Last week when I wondered why families have been pulling their kids out of Seattle Public Schools at such high rates, I got an earful.

Except from the group that’s leaving the most. I didn’t hear much from them.

“I’m not surprised, I think with them it’s a very quiet leaving of the school system,” says Erin Okuno, of the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition. “They say: ‘This isn’t working, but we’re not going to make a big fuss about it. We’re just going to go find something that does work for us.’“

“Because the kids were at home we could see what they were working on, and we wanted more acceleration than that,” one Asian parent of two Seattle elementary students summed up to me about why they shifted to private school.

In that previous column, Westneat wrote:

But there’s been a concerted campaign of late to bring down the public schools. That’s no exaggeration: Our local anti-public-school crusader, Christopher Rufo, described his goal in a speech as no less than sowing “universal public school distrust.” It’s all part of an aligned conservative movement for lower taxes (and book bans and the sanitization of history, a related story).

I'll add that the real endgame is two-fold - vouchers for parents to become education detectives for their child AND break the teachers union(s) which are the largest in the country.

But back to the "quiet leaving" column where Westneat says that enrollment across the spectrum of the term "Asians" has fallen in SPS by 13%, more than "any other demographic or racial group." Stats for other groups?

Between the 2019-20 school year and now, Seattle school enrollment dropped 9% among white students, 5% for Black students, and 4% for Hispanic/Latino students.

John Hay lost 200 students out of 500 — 40% of the school.

What about by income groups?

State data by income group shows that Seattle enrollment has dropped among middle- and high-income families at twice the rate (10%) as it did among low-income families (5%). There was such “money flight” from Seattle schools in the past two years that the overall percentage of students who qualify for the free lunch program rose for the first time in more than a decade.

I'm not altogether surprised by the above stat. Middle-class and high-income families have always had more ability to move their child around for their education. What is worrying is that parents talk to parents. You get several parents leaving and telling other parents why and pretty soon more parents start eyeing the door.

Westneat defends his writing:

This is why I’m harping on this topic. It’s not to bash the schools. It’s because it feels like a dangerous pendulum is swinging — that socioeconomic stresses, already there, got supercharged by the pandemic. With the city’s public school system now in the balance.

Why did so many Asian families quietly leave, and other families “bug out?” More importantly, how could the schools get them back?

All of us who have been around this district for a long time probably have a guffaw from that last sentence. The district has not tried, for decades, to figure out why people leave AND where they go. It's maddening. 

Here's perhaps one reason:

“Cumulatively, it adds up to this: if you have a kid who is doing well academically, and you want to accelerate them, SPS may not be the place for you,” said a parent whose northeast Seattle elementary school lost 25% of its students.

Westneat compares SPS to other districts on academically strong students:

Added one onlooker: “The data on merit scholarship finalists tells a story: there are qualifiers in Bellevue and Redmond, but not from the Seattle public schools.”

That isn’t quite true. Last year there were 15 finalists from Seattle’s 10 high schools. But the writer has a point, as there were 40 from just a single Bellevue school, Interlake High.

One parent mentioned charter schools. The way the Washington State charter law is written, the Charter Commission will give preference to those applicants whose schools will serve low-income and POC students. However, a clever person could figure out a way to create a school for the gifted that WOULD include those students and it would fill in a New York minute. 

Dismantle the HCC program as is planned and I think that drain will continue. SPS will end up with more students with challenges and high needs and that will make for a more fragile district.