The Stranger's Endorsements for Seattle School Board

Activist SPS parent Albert J. Wong wrote this piece on his Medium page, 

The Stranger Should Cover SPS Consistently or Consider NOT Endorsing in Seattle School Board Races

Basically,

Until The Stranger demonstrates a deeper understanding of the school district and consistently tracks the impact of its endorsements there, you should recuse yourselves from endorsing school board candidates entirely.

I concur with what he says. I tried to reach out to The Stranger's editor in late summer to talk about Board endorsements. I never heard back (and I had something of an intro from someone connected to The Stranger). And the stats he gives about The Stranger and Board elections is stunning. 

(If you have not heard of Wong before, he is data wonk (akin to former director Eden Mack) and a good one.  He also has a website - SPS By the Numbers - with a lot of data on SPS. 

When I reached voting age, my older classmates told me to start every election with the “Election Control Board.” As a teenager fresh off an Orwell phase, I found that name darkly funny. But it’s a lot less funny when it starts looking like you’ve actually come to control elections.

That’s exactly what it looks like happened with The Stranger and the Seattle School Board. Since 2011, no candidate for school board has won without The Stranger’s endorsement. For fourteen years. No exceptions.

When I reached voting age, my older classmates told me to start every election with the “Election Control Board.” As a teenager fresh off an Orwell phase, I found that name darkly funny. But it’s a lot less funny when it starts looking like you’ve actually come to control elections.

That’s exactly what it looks like happened with The Stranger and the Seattle School Board. Since 2011, no candidate for school board has won without The Stranger’s endorsement. For fourteen years. No exceptions.

I will say that The Stranger is there to entertain, somewhat inform, and make money. That they have become the anti-Times media speaks to hard work on their part to build that base. That said....

Over 20 years your endorsements have placed 34 out of 36 school board directors. For better or worse, that means your endorsees have controlled the school board. If you covered the district regularly to inform your endorsements, or if the results were good, maybe that would be fine.

The results have not been good.

And he goes on to list all the issues with people who got elected to the Board.

His unhappiness seems to be jump-started over Sarah Clark losing her position on the Board.

Although Smith might prove to be a good school board director she is, by contrast, largely untested. Yet your endorsement of Smith was not grounded in her superior policy, knowledge, credentials, or experience but because, in your words, you “couldn’t get over [your] distrust” of Clark. The possibility that the influence of your endorsements might have tanked Clark’s campaign with such reasoning — despite her track record and campaign having garnered a lot more grassroots support — is frightening.

To put it bluntly: it’s possible a small group of mostly white editors put a highly qualified Black woman with a public record of pivotal contributions and achievement on equal footing with a white candidate with no such record, and the white candidate won because you didn’t trust the Black one.

He pulls no punches.

It’s true that your endorsement success rate may be just a correlation. It’s also true you’ve endorsed a fair share of good directors (e.g., Song, Mizrahi, and LaVallee in this election cycle). However, your endorsement process undeniably selected people who composed the board majority for nearly 20 years and as such, in aggregate, you are selecting people that have created the dysfunction we are living with.

Thoughts?