Boom! And There It Is
Out of nowhere, the Seattle Times has this great op-ed on seeking a new superintendent for Seattle Public Schools.
It was written by Nancy Bacon, someone I had never heard of before. The Times' blurb says:
The moment to pause and reflect is now. Seattle has had a revolving door of superintendents in recent years. Meanwhile, student outcomes remain stagnant, and the district continues to fall short of its own stated goals. Community trust is at a low point. If the system keeps producing the same results, maybe it’s time to question the system itself.
She goes on to list three ways that "we can focus on making Seattle Public Schools leader-ready."
I think Ms Bacon is an outsider who probably doesn't know a lot of SPS backstory and perhaps not what the last 5 years have been about in SPS. But she did enough homework to hit the nail right on the head.
1. Build public trust by naming our values and living them
Seattle families deserve transparency — not just in how decisions are made, but in the values guiding those decisions. Public confidence in SPS leadership has eroded for a range of reasons, one of which is that their stated values don’t align with their actions. A quick read of the website would suggest that the district values inclusion of all children, community engagement and excellence in learning. Yet the district’s “Goals and Guardrails” name only one demographic group, the board has significantly reduced community engagement and offerings outside of cookie-cutter programs have been threatened or cut, and not just for financial reasons.
She got that right. SPS and the Board churn out a lot of words that end up feeling meaningless to many families.
And all that time the Board says that they did public engagement to find out about what the district should value seems to have gone for naught. Because here's someone who knows education, who appears to have gone and read up at the SPS website, and she still can't discern a clear vision for the entire district.
She also makes a good point at the end of this section (partial):
A new superintendent shouldn’t have to rebuild trust alone. School Board: Be honest with the values guiding your decisions and then walk the talk.
2. Fix governance before hiring another leader
Governance is how an organization makes decisions and holds itself accountable. Right now, Seattle’s board model — Student Outcome Focused Governance — creates instability instead of preventing it. By distancing the board from administration, it limits collaboration on complex challenges.
Yes, yes, and yes! I find it so interesting that Bacon could read up on SOFG and look at what changes it has made in the work of the Board and the superintendent and see that it hasn't helped a bit.
And she speaks directly to the Board:
Imagine stepping into the superintendent’s position today. Your boss is a group of people who haven’t figured out how to work together and who have a lousy track record of having the backs of your predecessors. Would you take that job?
3: Root out ethical failures
Leadership turnover is also a direct result of ethical failures. Nepotism, conflicts of interest and a culture of insider politics have created instability at the highest levels of SPS leadership. This isn’t just frustrating; it’s dangerous for students, unfair to educators and costly for taxpayers. These issues pose tricky political obstacles for a new leader as the “old guard” works to protect their own interests.
It's as if she read this blog (which I doubt but still). She says, "...ensuring that leadership decisions are made in the best interest of students, not personal relationships or political alliances."
She's suggesting an interim who is an outsider.
An external, professional interim superintendent — someone with experience in stabilizing large, complex organizations — can partner with our board and community to make Seattle Public Schools leader-ready. They can identify weaknesses and address them ahead of a new permanent leader, who can then focus on healing and rebuilding.
I think she's absolutely on the right track and I suggest you send this op-ed to the Board -
boarddirectors@seattleschools.org
Coming up this week:
Wednesday, April 9th from 4:30 pm-7:30 pm - The Board will have a special meeting on the Superintendent Search Process. As I recall from the first meeting, directors will have all the search firm applicants documentation and they will be whittling that down to up to three choices.
Thursday, April 10 at 4:30 pm - The Board will decide on the search firm to use.
Both meetings are at JSCEE and open to the public but with no comment time or interaction with Board directors.
I note that the Thursday meeting is not at the district website but I received a notice of meetings for the coming week and it was listed.
Comments
Fed up
Thank you for lifing up my Opinion piece and all the work you do to create a forum for the Seattle Public Schools community.
To be clear, I am not an outsider to Seattle Public Schools. I have been a parent and spouse in the District for a quarter century, watching the ebbs and flows of politics and programs. I was a co-signer on the school board recall effort because I am deeply concerned about the shoddy governance of the District and how it has allowed poor decision-making and a culture that lacks ethical integrity. I teach governance, and right now SPS gives us a textbook on what not to do.
I would prefer the dialogue to be about the issues, and not about me. Seattle politics, much like our current federal leaders, target people when they don’t like ideas. A disagreement about goals, for example, quickly becomes a discussion as to whether the dissenter is racist. If you want to shut down a conversation about expanding market share with innovative programs, accuse the person of not valuing equity. Conversation over.
When disagreements become labels, people shut down. We fail to bring together diverse perspective to build better solutions. The people in our District who prefer to cast stones have the ear of people in power right now.
My wish for Seattle Public Schools would be for us to have a hearty conversation about the ideas in front of us. Let’s discuss and even debate Student Outcome Focused Governance. Let’s look at the data to wrangle through the hard questions that come in shaping programs that serve all kids. Let’s learn how to disagree with respect.
Certainly I’m trying to stem off the haters that will read my column and find reasons to attack me or my spouse personally. More importantly I would like to stress the point in my Opinion piece—it is up to us if we want to try a new way of showing up for our kids. This isn’t about any one of us individually.
Nancy Bacon
Emile
- Toss your hat into the race
WTF
The editorial says SPS could “Build public trust by naming our values and living them,” but really? Taking the supposed values one by one, starting with “public engagement.” What does that even mean?
One clear SPS value is avoiding engagement with “privileged” parents – the ones with education, system-savvy, and free time to advocate for their children and presumably gain unfair advantage or bend policy to their interests. Director Rankin has never been shy about naming this value, and SPS definitely lives it. From the Board, to central office, to principal’s office, to classroom, SPS is well-organized to tell privileged parents to talk to the hand. They name the value, and live it, and it hasn’t built any trust.
Back in the ‘teens, SPS seemed to be operating with an assumption that a silent majority of marginalized or non-privileged parents existed, and if their voices could only be heard, they would cry out in a chorus of support for progressive leftist education policy. Public engagement efforts were designed on that assumption. But it never seemed to work the way they hoped. Not sure why, just guessing, but it seems that if you hear the voices of otherwise unheard parents, they mostly want to talk about management issues at their school, or want dull, practical, non-ideological things like safe, orderly classrooms where their children learn traditional skills. They don’t cry out to end advanced learning, or ban walk-to math, or mandate ethnic studies, or increase SEL, or consolidate schools, or support targeted universalism and MTSS. Some unheard parents are immigrants from countries with an unhappy history of socialist or communist rule, so they don’t actually want the schools to focus on leftist indoctrination. Some are religious or adhere to traditional cultures, and don’t actually want schools promoting liquid modernity to their children in elementary school.
Oh well, woke elites can fall back on theories of false consciousness – oppressed people may not know their authentic interests – so lack of support even from the people they claim to be helping is not necessarily a problem. Since the pandemic, “public engagement” by SPS has seemed more like public relations or marketing: selling the public on whatever insiders have already decided to do. “Well-resourced schools” was a prime example, positioned as seeking public input but really intended to manipulate the public into accepting school closures. When people say Brent Jones was a leadership failure, half of them seem to mean that he failed to end-run public opposition to school closures, and get the closures done, despite having a year to pull it off.
Say “public engagement” and you might create the false impression that SPS wants to align school policy with public opinion. No way, that’s definitely not one of their values. Public engagement is not a process for figuring out what to do. Quite the opposite, if public opinion causes a change in course, it’s usually considered a failure by senior administrators and the Board. SOFG seems mainly intended to insulate school policy from public opinion by neutralizing the elected school board. None of this inspires any trust. Superintendent candidates probably understand all of this, and it doesn’t make the job look easier.
Broadly speaking, we have two competing visions of what public education should be:
1) A service organization that strives to help all students reach their full potential.
2) A social engineering system that strives to manage the distribution of educational opportunity in order to influence the distribution of income, wealth and power in the broader society.
It’s not a strictly binary choice. The two competing visions can be blended to various degrees. But SPS values currently lean decidedly toward the social engineering end. Equal outcomes by race is a clear SPS value, based presumably on a Kendian definition of racism, whereby any system that produces unequal outcomes is de facto racist. SPS lives anti-racist and social engineering values as well as they can figure out -- elimination of advanced learning, banning acceleration in math, closing option schools, simplifying the science curriculum, the strategic focus on Black boys in particular – all trace back to this impulse. The city of Seattle has a political majority that favors the social engineering vision of public education, so you would be naïve to expect school board elections to change anything.
Many parents, meanwhile, take the perspective of their students and wish for more of a service model. SPS can’t, of course, reach into the skulls of bright, passionate students and pull out their neurons. But it can undercut their morale and waste some of their time, which it definitely does. If these students belong to privileged identity groups, the social engineering program is being advanced. Not to exaggerate – SPS remains a reasonably good district on a statewide or national scale. But it’s enough of an issue to prompt a lot of parents to buy their way out by “going private.” If you have the cash, that’s a lot easier than speaking honestly about the issue. The Seattle Times runs naïve commentary that approaches the issue delicately, from the side. None of this inspires trust, or makes the job easier for the next superintendent.
Some people get upset at any mention of the cost of inclusion, but of course there is a cost. Wealthy parents who go private often cite classroom disruption as a major reason. Disruptive behavior is increasingly viewed under the paradigm of disability rather than character flaws of the students, so valuing inclusion requires enduring disruptive behavior, or devoting a lot of classroom time to SEL and a lot of teacher focus to classroom management. Valuing inclusion pushes against advanced learning cohorts and specialized option schools like language immersion or STEM. Those programs tend to segregate relatively easier groups of students, which would be the source of some of their appeal and some of their success. A relatively more difficult mix of students would be left behind in neighborhood schools. The cost of inclusion would not be distributed equally, and it’s not fair.
Inclusion produces classrooms with a larger variety of students, some with greater needs. It makes teaching more difficult. But Seattle seems to remain an attractive spot for teachers – some combination of generous pay and more affluent students on average – so SPS is able to hire an excellent teaching corps who are usually up to the task. That’s probably one very appealing feature of the Seattle job to superintendent candidates. It’s possible to honor the value of inclusion here more easily than many other places. But still there will be arguments over the details, which will inevitably devolve into shaming, shouting down, and vilification. Trust will generally not be the result. One size does not fit all. Some students will be ignored or under-served, and some families will leave. The school board accepts that, and the next superintendent will need to also.
Outside Seattle (not that it matters to this discussion, but just for reference), the situation is often more dire. Inclusion orthodoxy, driven by both federal law and progressive ideology, makes teaching harder. That, in turn, shrinks the pool of teachers capable of handling the demands. The pool of capable teachers is already quite a bit smaller than the number of teaching jobs that exist nationwide. Most school districts have no choice but to hire teachers who can’t totally do it, and the effects ripple through the system. Teacher unions will argue for more support, but the money is never there.
Outside Seattle, it’s common for middle school teachers to find that their students assess at 2nd or 3rd grade level and have big gaps in learning – topics that appear in common core standards for elementary school, but students say they never heard of that, and never did that. In most cases, the students are telling the truth – their overmatched teachers weren’t able to cover the material. As the deficits build, teachers are torn between trying to cover the entire scope and sequence of their own grade, for which most of their students are not prepared, or trying to catch up students who are years behind. Mostly they won’t succeed at either part.
The cost of inclusion does not fall most heavily on smarty-pants HC students of well-to-do knowledge workers in Seattle. It falls most heavily on working class students in middling to poor school districts. Those students depend entirely on the schools, and even the ones who are capable and willing to meet standards may fall behind grade level or have big gaps in their learning because less classroom time is spent learning and much material is never covered. Much fuss has occurred lately about declines in NAEP scores, and blame is assigned to the pandemic, or smartphones, or tiktok, take your pick. But there is a hidden cause that no one wants to talk about – inclusive classroom orthodoxy has created demands that many teachers can’t meet, and school districts can't afford to put more adults in the classrooms, and the system doesn’t function any more.
But the bigger issue in my classroom of 30 right now is disruptive behavior that has zero to do with inclusion. It's the third of kids whose families have misinterpreted "SEL" as "meet my child's needs at every moment of the day so they are happy." I've touched base with parents so often in the last two years with a quick, "Hey, your kid is interrupting a lot and threw 3 pencils across the room today, can you have a chat?" and gotten "When can we meet to talk about what you might do to better support my child's needs?" as a response. When you combine that subset with inclusion, I can't meet anyone's needs well.
Also - not an HC superfan but don't love "Smarty Pants" HC students term. Certainly some of the loudest voices in the pro-HCC world can be annoying, but the stereotyping of these students and families is not helpful or fair. Though point of the paragraph is spot on.
-Seattlelifer