The Times (and their "Education Lab") and Shoddy Reporting

 The Seattle Times has not one but two articles this morning about Seattle Schools being segregated. Let's dive in. The reporting is done through their "Education Lab" funded by the Gates Foundation. It's always a bit confusing to me because their blurb page says, "Education Lab is a Seattle Times project that spotlights promising approaches to some of the most persistent challenges in public education." That is not the nature of this article at all.

The first article is entitled "Why Seattle schools are more segregated today than the 1980." 

For those of you who don't know, Seattle experimented with busing in the '70s with very mixed outcomes and reactions.

For decades, the district sent thousands of kids on buses to far-off neighborhoods in the name of resolving the same problems Seattle schools face today. 

The article covers the history of SPS efforts. Embedded in the article is a nifty look-up tool to see a single school's integration path. 

Forty years of integration efforts ended, and no one ever studied the central premise over the long-term: Did Seattle’s racially balanced schools improve educational outcomes for kids of color? A definitive answer is lost to time. Given changes in academic measurements such as test scores and graduation standards, a retroactive study is unworkable. 

I had to smile ruefully at this one. It's very on point for Seattle Schools to not examine its efforts or their effects/outcomes.

The end of Seattle’s formal integration efforts came after white parents sued over the district’s policy. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the parents’ favor in 2007.  

This lazy, slopping reporting. Over the district's policy on....what?  It was on enrollment. However, the Court only said you could not race as the sole method to integrate schools. It could, however, be but one of several tools that districts could use. To note, in SPS, the enrollment tiebreaker on race was also used at one high school for white students to get into that school.

In the past decade, the district’s gap in academic outcomes between Black and white students grew to one of the widest in the country. Parent groups at one school can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars while another campus just a few miles away has no parent-teacher organization. Schools in wealthier, whiter areas tend to employ teachers who have more experience. And the advanced learning program at one school became so segregated the former superintendent heard it was called “Apartheid High.” 

That some schools don't have PTA is not the fault of the schools; it's the fault of the Seattle Council PTSA who, instead of pointing fingers, should be looking in the mirror. And, in particular, Director Chandra Hampson and Director Liza Rankin who both sat on the SCPTSA Board for years.

What teachers are where is a complicated question because teachers do have some degree of autonomy in where they teach. Indeed, newer, less experienced teachers do tend to be in schools with lower socioeconomic populations. But for those schools that buy staff, including teachers, that finger pointing needs to be at the superintendents and countless boards who allow it.

And lastly, that superintendent remark comes off hearsay and without attribution. So the Times is basically saying Superintendent Juneau "heard" this off-hand remark and believed it to be true. 

Further down in the story is a statement from School Board president Brandon Hersey. 

“It’s no secret that when you walk into schools like Roosevelt and then see Rainier Beach, that there is a deep legacy of deprioritization of schools in the South End."

 What Hersey probably doesn't know is that when the BEX program started and for the first 15 years of its existence more SOUTH-END schools were renovated than north-end schools. He could look it up but hey, that doesn't get you in the Times.

Glad to see a link to a story I had never seen before that does explain the district's efforts at getting back and keeping white parents in public education - a gifted program. According to the link, 90% of the parents surveyed said it was important to have that program. BUT:

Foley (Dr. Wayne Foley, head of Integration Services) points out that the option programs are considered "critical desegregation tools," designed to make the district attractive in the wake of mandatory busing.

"Our need is to attract more white kids," Foley says. He said district planners are banking that the expanded-option program next year will encourage more white parents to keep their children in assigned schools in the busing plan or to volunteer for options in schools that need a larger white mix.    

This link is a fascinating read that also includes this:

As the numbers of parents who can afford to pull out of city schools increase, the system itself begins to deteriorate; levy issues fail at a greater rate, bonds are tunred down by taxpayers with no interest in schools, the quality of education drops, crime increases, and a whirlpool of inevitable educational malaise threatens to wash the whole system down the drain.

 Well, we all know Seattle voters are INCREDIBLY supportive and generous to Seattle Public Schools so that is unlikely to happen but the rest of it? We can only wait and see but SPS should NOT be taking that tactic. They should be doing something about it and that should be a question for every single School Board candidate.  

Some of those special classrooms are still operating in the same network of schools. They make up what’s called the Highly Capable Cohort — a group of 5,700 students who attend most of their classes together, apart from a general student population. While the demographics and requirements to qualify for HCC have changed in the past several years, the program still isn’t racially representative of the district. Around one out of every seven SPS kids is Black. In HCC, it’s one out of 33.

I don't know if that 5700 number is K-5 - another piece of sloppy reporting - because that HCC in middle and high school do NOT have all separate classes. As well, interesting that the reporter only talks about Black enrollment but not Asian enrollment. Almost as if Asians are not a minority group.

Then the reporter, Dahlia Bazzaz, goes to the tired well of a book by one HCC kid as if it represents all kids of color in the HCC program.

And this is weird:
I’m not saying that (moving boundaries) is going to resolve all the racial issues in Seattle forever. But it’s going to resolve this racial inequality between two neighboring public elementary schools that are under the jurisdiction of the same school board,” said Monarrez. “Why do we keep this racial inequality?”

Hersey, the School Board president, says he personally sees the school boundary lines and other disparities wrought by segregation as worth addressing. But he believes that it should be a citywide conversation, and he’d need to see a push from the public before proposing any policy.

Huh? When they get rid of the HCC cohort and force everyone back to their neighborhood schools, there WILL HAVE to be boundary changes. Hersey knows that and could have said that and talked about working to make schools more integrated via that method and yet he didn't.

The article goes into depth with West Seattle Elementary School and look here at this statement:

And, with more socioeconomic diversity, the PTA could raise more money, helping with hiring.

Wait, so white parents do help a school? This from a Black principal. So confusing. And it was a Black superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, who championed the return to neighborhood schools. Funny how the Times left that out.

The article also mentions a white parent who stepped up to create a fund to help high poverty schools in West Seattle.

The campaign raised awareness about the area’s history, including how redlining boundaries affected the socioeconomic makeup of the schools. It also held a discussion between parents at low-income schools and their more affluent counterparts.

While some low-income schools said they’d spent the little PTA funding they had on rent assistance for families, a wealthy school sat on its PTA reserves for an entire year during the pandemic because it couldn’t find a reason to use the donations.

Hey Times, name - that - school. Because if you can't, then it's a bunch of crappy reporting. Or tell us who said what at this discussion. 

School Board items go through an equity analysis.

Not all of them but again, sloppy reporting.

Then there's  the reporter asking former Board director, Stephan Blanford, anything. Why?

In 2016, as he tells it, he battled with his colleagues over an idea to use surplus district funds on low-income schools. He observed “thinly veiled racism” from white parents pushing back against moving boundary lines in Magnolia, or installing a program for recently incarcerated students in Queen Anne.

Really? He didn't want to put Interagency, a small alternative high school for students who need different supports, on Queen Anne. And this from a guy who was on the Board and never ran for Board president. A guy who never put forth a single policy.Who was never even on the Executive Committee which was THE committee for Board action.

Lastly, no comments? Just some form to fill out to "Education Lab?" Right, the Gates Foundation loathes criticism so we can't have random people in Seattle chiming in on their public schools.