Two Seattle Times' Eye-Rolling Takes (Part One)

The first take comes from none other than Don Nielsen in an op-ed called "WA's Children Can't Stride into the Future in a 19th Century Education System."

For many of you, the question might be, who is Don Nielsen?

Mr. Nielsen is a former Seattle School Board president from the '90s. His board was the one that brought in John Stanford, the general and the late superintendent of Seattle Public Schools. He was also the guy who helped install former superintendent Joe Olchefske into that position and Olchefske oversaw a $35M budget loss (he ultimately resigned).

From Seattle Education blog:

Way back in 2003, former SPS school board member Don Nielson seemed more worried about Olchefske than the district’s financial trouble.

He's currently a senior fellow of the right-wing thinktank, Discovery Institute, as well as their chair of the Institute's American Center for Transforming Education. Here's what his bio there says:

During his tenure, Mr. Nielsen and his colleagues oversaw major reforms to the Seattle Public School System that greatly enhanced the educational experience and heightened achievement for students, administrators, teachers, and parents.''

Sure he did. 

I will say that he and his wife gave a very generous $1M donation to Seattle Schools. Unfortunately, despite asking several times, I never learned how that money was spent.

The Seattle Times has this policy on op-eds:

To be considered, a submission should have a strong opinion and be no longer than 600 words.

Mr. Nielsen's op-ed is whopping 1511 words. Some people are more worthy in the Times' eyes than others. But that has always been the case.

To start, Mr. Nielsen calls out an editorial in the Times published in late Feb. 2023, Seattle Public Schools create chaos instead of community. The editorial points out how the district seems to be in constant churn especially over budgeting.

It doesn’t take a political genius to see how dire forecasts can then be leveraged to pressure voters and legislators. Meanwhile, families become pawns in this game, utterly powerless.

But Seattle wrings its hands over declining enrollments, as if the numbers were a shock. Perhaps, in one respect, they are: Seattle Public Schools doesn’t know exactly why its rolls have fallen so far because it never surveys families to ask why they’ve left. As the saying goes, you can’t fix what you don’t measure.

And the Times' editorial board is right. (I believe this may be the piece that President Brandon Hersey called out at a recent Work Session on the budget. He said the Times' didn't even ask the district for information which isn't really true as Superintendent Brent Jones was quoted in this editorial from a previous Times' story on SPS and its budget.)

Nielsen says that public education hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. He claims that it's an unchanged curriculum: four years of English, three years of science, math and history.

Well, if he bothered to check, Washington State graduation requirements include arts, health and fitness, CTE and World Language .

He goes on:

In addition, there is virtually no accountability built into the system. Teachers are not accountable for student learning, and principals have little authority over money, curriculum or personnel.

I can't really speak to teachers and accountablity, but most SPS principals DO have the ability to shape their school budgets as they want. Additionally, there have been many, many school waivers granted to individual schools on some curriculum.

Furthermore, there is no accountability for the money except to ensure that it was spent as specified. No one measures to see if the money made any difference. We are constantly told that schools need more money, and with more money, learning will improve. It simply is not the case, and history proves it. The lack of money is not the problem and, therefore, cannot be the solution.

Well, the accountability is the Board directors who can be voted out.

He does make a good point in asking, "Will money make a difference?" My answer would be that it depends on what you spend it on and why that choice got made. Plus, how long do you try a new initiative that comes with costs before you pull the plug? As well, if you are spending money on social services that directly aid students and families, it is very difficult to measure those outcomes. Maybe by attendance, but it's a soft measure.

What does he say to do?

Leadership is one area. He does make some pretty unfortunate statements like:

In our public education system, we obtain leadership by accident, not by design. I say that because virtually no qualifications are required to become a principal other than having been a teacher for two to three years and being able to pay the tuition for a principal training program at a licensed education school. Consequently, some of our worst teachers are often the first to apply to become principals. In short, “if you can’t make it in the classroom, become an administrator.”

So you can buy a principal certificate and do no work to earn it? Because that appears to be what he is saying. And bad teachers become bad administrators?

He says the same for superintendents.

For a guy who served on a public school board, he sure seems to dislike teachers and principals and superintendents.

And this there's this whopper:

Schools need to be able to hire the most qualified people they can find, certified or not. 

In an emergency, maybe but otherwise, nope, nope and nope.

Then he says something factually that I didn't know as well as another thing that's a bit of a laugh:

One of the fascinating omissions of Washington’s laws is that our state is one of only a few states that does not require a superintendent to be certified. This loophole is what allowed my colleagues and me in 1995 to hire John Stanford, a retired Army major general, as the superintendent of Seattle Public Schools. We hired Stanford because, in the early 1990s, we could not find a superintendent anywhere in the country that had taken excellence to scale — where every school in a district was excellent. Unfortunately, that is probably still the case.

Yes, where has a superintendent - anywhere in the country - "taken excellence to scale?" Could it be that education is a tough job because of the demographics, student challenges and money available to schools?

Then there is Governance. He makes the claim that:

We have made running for public office so unattractive that our best and brightest citizens tend to avoid the ordeal of running for public office.

That might be part of it but I think (uh oh, here it comes) that money may be a bigger part of it (as in paying salaries to board members).

He also says:

In addition, we need to recognize that a school board is a policymaking board, not a management board. All too often, we elect school board members who fail to recognize the difference.

Now that does appear what today's Seattle School Board is doing via the Student Outcomes Focused Goverance model. However, using SOFG, they are also working on "a policy diet." Hmmm.

He does have interesting thoughts on Unions, his next target.

Unions are not the sole cause of our problems, but they are certainly one of the biggest constraints to fixing them. Unions are adult-focused, as they should be, and they resist change unless they initiate it.

Unions, however, flourish when management is deficient. If I were a teacher in a school with an incompetent principal, I, too, would want a union to help protect my employment. So, if we want to mitigate the power of unions, we must first fix management.

I find that an interesting claim. Could you lessen the power of the teachers union if you had a stronger principal corps?

But he goes onto claim that teachers and their union have all the power and all I can say is that there are district negotiators in the room when they are creating a contract with the teachers. As for the last SEA contract, I think the district's negotiators knew exactly what to do which was to hammer out a contract that they KNEW the district could not afford. That's one way to turn the tables on the union and publicly blame teachers for the budget problems.

Next comes Change.

We need a system of education that focuses on children, not adults, and is set up to deal with each child individually, catering to their learning needs by meeting them where they are in their learning. A one-size-fits-all, adult-focused, traditionally managed, 19th-century system will never do the job.

Know what you need if you are going granular down to the individual child? Money. And using the word "catering" in the public education realm really reinforces that need for money. Because he could have said "serving students" but he didn't.

He says that the state legislature should pass a law to:

First, legislation should be passed allowing districts the flexibility to innovate. This is known in other states as “Districts of Innovation” legislation. Districts granted this status could implement changes to better educate their unique students. A few examples include lengthening the school day, revising the length and makeup of the school year, adopting a more rigorous curriculum, etc.

For me, when I see that word "innovation" I think of the claims of charter schools. As you can see from his suggestions, that looks like what a District of Innovation is.

His second suggestion is the state creating "an Institute for Educational Leadership."

To improve our schools, we need entrepreneurial leaders. The institute could be patterned after the best business schools, providing 12-18 months of training. Enrollees would be individuals with proven leadership qualities selected from multiple fields of endeavor. Tuition would be funded by the state in return for a commitment to serve a select number of years in public education.

Oh, I see, a TFA for principals.

I do not believe the latter will happen because I believe the members of the legislature have at least some degree of respect for the profession of education. Clearly, Nielsen does not.