History of Seattle Schools Assignment Plan

Again, from Kellie LaRue who know this history backwards and forwards. 

Hi all,
I have gotten a lot of questions off-line, so I am writing my own wee FAQ to answer some of the most popular. Thank you Mel for sharing.

Assignment Plan
The Assignment Plan is HOW a district decides to place students inside a school community. Essentially, school districts have a wide latitude in how they do assignment. There are some state laws that guide this process. The bottom line is that all districts must have an official assignment plan, that is board approved and published publicly. Every year the school board votes on the assignment plan for the subsequent year. 

The New Student Assignment Plan (NSAP) or the current assignment plan started in 2012 and converted Seattle's Assignment plan to be attendance area based plan. Previously, the Assignment plan was 100% choice. The 100% choice plan, were 100% of students needed to choose a school was implemented about 1992. (Someone correct me if you have better dates/details).

(Editor's note: the district used to have an Enrollment Director named Tracy Libros who was probably the smartest person working at JSCEE. She and Kellie loved to talk about enrollment in ways that most people just didn't get. After Tracy retired, the enrollment office got worse.)
 

 

Why Change?
The change was made in large part because the 100% choice based plan created some extreme inequities. Far worse than the current system. Since physical distance from the school was a tiebreaker. This plan had two primary unintended consequences.



1) School deserts. In the choice based plan, “distance from school” was the final tie breaker. As such, there were many parts of the city where families live “too far” from their closest school to ever get a placement. 



The most notable example was Queen Anne and Magnolia. Ballard was by far the closest school, but Ballard High School was always full with families from the Ballard area. This meant Garfield was the next closest school. Garfield was also always full. 

The same dynamic repeated with multiple middle schools and elementary schools. 

2) The bias of a stable address. Families with a stable address in February of the preceding school year, were in a great place. As long as they did not live in a school desert, they could select a school with extreme confidence that they would be assigned to that school. If not immediately, they would be assigned via the wait list. At it’s peak, over 90% of the families who enrolled “on time” would get their first or second choice school. Sounds great, huh? 

Not so great for anyone without a stable address. This greatly disadvantages anyone who was either new to the district or had a barrier to completing the paperwork. (poverty, language, etc). This truly created a two tier assignment system where you either got your first choice, or no choice. This also exacerbated the good school/bad school dynamic. Good schools have wait lists. Bad schools don’t. 

The Supreme Court and The Center School
The dynamics of this really played out around high school. Elementary school deserts would only impact a few dozen families at a time. But the high school desert problem impacted hundreds of students each year. So naturally the residents of Queen Anne filled a law about the choice plan that went all the way to the Supreme Court. That is another long detailed story.

Short version: The lawsuit was about the “race tie breaker” rather than the “distance tie breaker.” Very few people understood the extreme bias of the stable address problem and the families that took the lawsuit to the Supreme Court believed that if the race tie breaker were eliminated that they would live close enough to get into Ballard. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen. They still lived too far. 

In the meantime, SPS opened The Center School to ameliorate the Queen Anne families. When The Center School was opened first preference was to Queen Anne and Magnolia students. 

(Editor's note: the Supreme Court decision did NOT say school districts couldn't use race as part of their enrollment plan but could NOT be used as a single data point to make decisions. I think after this decision most districts didn't want to include race not knowing for certain how to fully integrate it into their plan.)

School Building vs School Community
Unfortunately, there is a huge distinction between the physical building of a school and the community formed by the students and teachers inside that building. We are so accustomed to thinking of them as the same, that it is a bit awkward to separate them. 

They are separated to the point where there is an Operations Budget and a Capital Budget and the funds are separate. 

In very broad terms, a school district will open and close BUILDINGS based on capacity needs. Again, HOW students are assigned to those buildings is an assignment plan issue.

Why am I being so pedantic about this distinction? 


Buildings are intended be in place for 50-100 years, minimum. In theory, buildings are supposed to be part of the long term urban planning of a neighborhood and a city. This is why closing a neighborhood school has impacts that expand far beyond the enrolled students and their families. 

 

Students demographics can change drastically in that time period. Assignment plans are approved annually and small changes in assignment policy can have dramatic impact on the students enrolled. 

Why are some schools option schools and some schools attendance schools? 

 The answer to that question is unique to the creation of every school, BOTH ATTENDANCE AND OPTION. Because all the creation of every school community is unique to the assignment plan and the needs of the district at that particular moment in time. 



SPS is creating a mythology out of a monolithic answer on how schools communities are made. Moreover, the mythology they are creating is intended to support a current education philosophy that is also unique to this moment in time. 

At this moment in time, there is a philosophy that choice is the same as inequity. In the same way that the philosophy of the 1990’s was the choice is equity. 

That’s the nice thing about a philosophy, it does not require facts.