Following Up on "The Decade of Decline in Seattle Public Schools"

I posted a link to this article written by Sandeep Kaushik earlier but here it is again.  It is a lengthy piece but a worthy one for anyone wondering how SPS got to the place it is today. There are many other good articles in this series called Attacks on Excellence at the Education Progress platform.

He starts with some data on the city of Seattle and its high-income, well-educated citizenry. And then there's this (which we could have another whole conversation about especially given the coming elections):

Seattle is also one of the country’s most politically left-leaning cities (like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Seattle’s recently elected mayor, Katie Wilson, is a self-described socialist), one that conceives of itself as a Disneyland of progressive public policy imagineering, where elected officials vie with one another to lead on incorporating au courant activist ideas and cutting edge cosmopolitan cultural commitments into governance.

Ouch! But he's right. Going on, he sees Seattle:

...as a microcosm of how the national turn in some of the country’s most educated and economically successful blue jurisdictions over the last decade away from a focus on accountability and academic achievement in schools has turned into an extended exercise in self-sabotage.

He walks us through the Maria Goodloe-Johnson years where academic gains did happen but on the heels of that progress, there was pushback from the social equity side.

In short, a new organizational culture rapidly took root, committed to reforming the educational experience root and branch to incorporate new equity-focused, identity-based anti-racist approaches. Where previously the school district had seen its task as helping children from disadvantaged backgrounds to acquire the skills they needed to meet the district’s educational mandates, the new thinking was that it was the district’s obligation to adjust its mandates to better accommodate the children who were falling short. This new dispensation, with its “multiple pathways to success” (as the equity policy required) would eliminate the stubbornly persistent gaps in achievement between black and Latino children on the one hand, and Asian and white children on the other. 

By any measure, Seattle’s public schools had performed poorly on addressing racial disparities in the NCLB era, despite recognizing wide achievement gaps as a problem for decades. When Stanford analysts first released SEDA in 2016, they found that Seattle had the fifth-biggest achievement gap among the 200 largest school districts nationally, with black children performing 3.5 grade levels behind their white peers — roughly 4 grade levels on the current scale.

 

So at the outset of this cultural shift a decade ago, a hard break with the past seemed long overdue. Equalizing outcomes became the new north star for Seattle educators, and it quickly morphed into the district’s singular focus for driving changes that SPS decision makers expected would finally create a fair and just educational experience for the children in their charge.

Equity trumped all.

The district squeezed students into the same box, thinking that was the most fair way to improve academic outcomes for those struggling. 

District leaders’ narrowed focus on engineering equal outcomes also carried the risk of being reductionist in a second sense: if equal outcomes were the only results that mattered, then it suddenly made perfect sense to reduce standards, eliminate choices, and force all children, especially higher-achieving ones, into a one-size-fits-all pedagogical box providing the quickest path to get there. Under this sort of equity-reductionist mindset, working to ameliorate performance barriers created by racial and class divides was not nearly enough; seeking to erase differential outcomes rooted in natural aptitude and ability became fair game as well. 

That this is the wrong way to apply equity principles, that it doesn’t actually improve the academic performance of poor and minority kids, and that it might alienate families with higher-achieving children, didn’t seem to matter.

Of course with that happening in the district, Seattle elected people like Chandra Hampson and Liza Rankin and Brandon Hersey. Hampson and Rankin had no problem wagging their fingers at white parents even to the point of being dismissive and rude.

Kaushik writes about the changes that came about at that point:

First on the chopping block was the district’s Spectrum program, which offered separate classes for children who had demonstrated the capacity to complete academic work one grade level above their age cohort. After a brief pilot in one school of reintegrating Spectrum kids into regular classrooms showed promising preliminary results, beginning in 2016 Spectrum classes were eliminated in all elementary and K-8 schools, and the district began piloting an effort to eliminate standalone honors classes in high school. The elimination of Spectrum in middle schools followed in 2020.

He doesn't explain that at that time the Highly Capable Program had three parts. HCC, Spectrum, and ALOs (Advanced Learning Opportunities). The Highly Capable Cohort was made up of the group of students who tested the highest and those classes were only available in a couple of locations. Spectrum was for those kids who did not test high enough for HCC. These were standalone Spectrum classrooms in some schools in each region. ALOs were supposed to be enrichment work for students who may have tested highly but whose parents chose to keep them in their neighborhood school.

What was upsetting about Spectrum is it was limited. Meaning, your child can test in but the district couldn't provide seats for all who did. The ALOs were haphazard and underwhelming but the district had no shame touting they had something in every school for high achievers. 

What played badly was the fact that some neighborhood schools had PTAs that could provide extra teaching for those HCC identified students who stayed in their area. Naturally, that was only available to those schools who had the fundraising firepower. 

As for those standalone Honors courses in high school, whatever happened to Garfield's touted excellence for all where students of all abilities would be in the same classroom with those who struggled receiving extra support outside the classroom?

Then he gets quite serious:

In 2019 a task force of parents and educators previously convened by the district was deep into the process of developing a set of recommendations calling for the district’s crown jewel, its highly subscribed-to, top-tier gifted and talented program, the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC), to be reformed to boost minority enrollment. 

But a vocal contingent of progressive activist school board members, impatient with bureaucratic process and time-consuming stakeholdering work, was already convinced that HCC was at the core of the district’s inequity problem. Moreover, the very idea of a separate program for gifted children violated their now ascendant equity-reductionist principles. 

Even before the task force could issue its proposals, the board’s progressives moved to kill the program, prodding then-SPS Superintendent Denise Juneau to declare war on HCC, which at the time enrolled nine percent of SPS students.

I do not believe that HCC was ever "the district's crown jewel" nor did I ever hear anyone call it that. It got called a lot of names but not that one.

I can tell you that the history of testing for the gifted program in SPS is not pretty. Some students got a bump in when the district allowed appeals via private retesting. (And, SPS did that testing for free for low-income students.) But the rate at which those students got in was suspicious. 

There were southend elementary schools that did not want to lose their high achievers. When the state testing came in and these schools saw the results for some students, those schools really didn't want those students to go because they helped keep the school's pass rates up. Those schools did not tell parents about the program nor did they leave out the application forms for it as they were supposed to.

So when you have a program that is rejected for all the wrong reasons by some schools, you have a disservice to the very students that could have flourished in the program.

Even before Seattle passionately embraced the spirit of the post-George Floyd racial reckoning, one downstream consequence of the district’s uncompromising embrace of equity reductionism was a chilling effect that silenced concerned parents or other observers who questioned whether the district’s new approaches were likely to be successful. Those who voiced even cautious concerns about the changes were angrily denounced as racists.

Yup. Kaushik goes on to lay out what then came from the Hampson Board years where she and Zachary DeWolf (now Pullin) would smack down anyone who dared to disagree. In that time there were fights and accusations and lawsuits - all taking time and money from educating children.

Changes that appeared:

With great fanfare and $3.7 million in philanthropic support, an Office of African American Male Achievement (AAMA) was opened and given a mission “to dismantle the anti-Black institutional and structural racism that exists within school systems.”

District leaders were also deeply concerned by unequal disciplinary rates between black and white students, and responded by reducing punishments across the board for misbehaving students. In 2015, SPS halted most out-of-school suspensions for elementary school students. But racial disparities in student discipline persisted, even as the total number of disciplinary actions by the district continued to drop dramatically. In the 2022–23 school year, disciplinary actions fell by more than 50 percent compared to the previous school year. 

 

This repudiation of traditional disciplinary standards had direct classroom repercussions: teachers soon began complaining they had little recourse when students in their classrooms were acting out, until they demanded and won contractual changes in 2025 that restored teachers’ authority to remove disruptive students and required that the school’s principal consult with the teacher before returning a child to class.

Yet all of that focus and funding to make black boys feel more culturally seen and supported, along with the reductions in disciplinary actions, produced no discernible improvement in “educational justice.” In fact, the academic performance of Seattle’s schools went in the opposite direction. Not only did the district’s test scores slip compared to the national average, but the racial achievement gap grew larger: the district had actually become less equitable.

Between the 2019 and 2025 SBAs, the proficiency gap between white students and black students increased by 4.8 percentage points in ELA and a full 12.6 points in math. In addition, the achievement gap that Stanford analysts found in 2016 has only gotten worse. Based on state and national data, in 2025, Seattle’s black students now score 4.7 grade levels below their white peers in math and 5 full grade levels in reading.

In the end:

Over the five years between 2019 and 2024 that this failing focus on black boys was the district’s primary educational concern, the school board or senior staff made almost no effort to interrogate why AAMA’s programs and strategies were failing to deliver the desired results.

At the time, it did seem odd that there would be these cheerleading sections of Board meetings and yet Board members never seemed to ask hard questions.  

Still, the district’s abject failure in its efforts to help black boys was plain to see for anyone who looked past the wall of happy talk. In January 2025 the school board quietly dropped its goals of raising the proficiency levels of black boys, again without making any effort to excavate why the previous five years of effort had failed.

The Office of African American Male Achievement still seems to exist now around community connections and a group called Kingmakers of Seattle "An elective program for Black male middle and high school students (referred to as "Kings") taught by Black male facilitators to support identity, empowerment, and brotherhood. There also appears to be mentorship for 9th and 10th grade Black male students.

Also happening at during this period was an uptick of violence in Seattle High Schools.

Despite these developments, the Seattle School Board has remained staunchly opposed to restoring SROs in schools. In the wake of the Garfield shooting, which occurred in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses (the perpetrator remains at large), SPS surveyed school families about restoring a police officer assigned to the school. Among the respondents, a supermajority of the school community expressed support, as did the school’s principal, who is black. Despite this, in the face of pressure from progressive activists, last October the board voted down a proposed one-year pilot to restore an officer at Garfield by a 5-2 margin.

I am going to be writing a post about school safety which I believe is one of the number one issues for SPS. I see from today's Seattle Times that there were six (!) people shot in three different incidents in Belltown in 24 hours; one was a teenager.

Then there is one heading in the essay that I have wondered about myself:

CURIOUSLY INCURIOUS ABOUT PLUNGING ENROLLMENTS

You could see enrollment going down and down and there was seemingly no real effort to figure it out except "Seattle is expensive." Except that a study SPS had done did NOT show this.

That changed in 2024, when the district finally capitulated and commissioned an enrollment survey of parents and caretakers of current and former students. The results, released publicly in January 2025, were both eye-opening and entirely predictable.

Just short of three in five parents and caretakers of currently enrolled students said they had considered disenrolling their children from SPS because of concerns about educational quality, while 44 percent cited the curriculum being taught as a concern. 

 

Another 42 percent cited the changes to HCC as something that had caused them to consider leaving. 

 

Among parents who had already removed their children, 57 percent cited the quality of SPS’s education as a major motivation for doing so, while 48 percent cited the curriculum being taught and 20 percent said they were majorly motivated to leave by changes to HCC. 

 

In an open-ended question asked of disenrolled parents about what would induce them to re-enroll their children, by far the most common answer (27 percent) was improving academic rigor. Cost of living in Seattle was a major motivation to leave for only nine percent of respondents.

This in a nutshell:

The perception of a district in perpetual crisis further eroded parents’ confidence in district leaders. Things may not have reached doom-loop levels of family flight, exactly — enrollment in Seattle schools held steady in 2024 — but SPS’s constant budgetary scrambling added to perceptions of a district that was seemingly careening out of control and either unwilling or incapable of getting its house in order.

I didn't know about this figure:

The percentage of students born in the city who enroll in public kindergarten has fallen to 53 percent, a 19 percent decline since 2012.

Kaushik talked with Superintendent Ben Shuldiner :

When asked about the district’s equity approaches, he routinely cites the 1961 Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which imagines a dystopian future world where the state enforces equality of outcomes by suppressing individual talent and handicapping higher achievers: beautiful people are forced to wear ugly masks, athletic people are saddled with weights to limit their physical prowess, and so on. This sort of equity reductionism, Shuldiner admits, is the path that SPS has followed.

And Shuldiner told The Seattle Times:

“We made a really big tactical mistake by lowering standards rather than raising standards,” he said in a recent public appearance, and told the Seattle Times that SPS has exemplified “the soft bigotry of low expectations” towards “our BIPOC and multilingual students,” while “accepting and excusing low performance rather than owning it.” 

In our February interview Shuldiner told me, only half-jokingly, “Either I’m going to be here 10 years or I’m going to be gone in six months.”

I feel strongly that Shuldiner is playing the long game and that parents and the public should support that. I do believe he has a plan but he needs backing to carry it out.

I think in Kaushik nailed it in closing his essay:

So if what happened in Seattle is broadly reflective of educational trends beyond the city’s borders, then it’s important to admit plainly that the people who were in charge of Seattle’s schools over the last decade failed. They promised that rebuilding Seattle’s schools on a foundational culture of identitarian belonging would address the many shortfalls and mistakes of the education reform era, and that a turn towards equity reductionism would deliver “educational justice.” 

 

They were wrong, in some cases spectacularly and embarrassingly so. But that they failed to deliver what they promised does not mean that they didn’t care.

They did care about Seattle’s kids.

They cared about encouraging Seattle’s children to advocate for bolder action to combat climate change.

They cared about making sure black and brown and gay and trans children across Seattle feel like they belong in the mainstream of their school’s culture, that they feel validated in their identities and connected to their communities.

They cared that Seattle’s children demonstrate fluency in the cultural codes and cues that mark upscale, educated cosmopolitanism.

They cared that no child feels like they aren’t good enough, or that they are less capable, or a failure.

They cared that society’s structures and institutions — especially its public schools — do not oppress or mistreat children from underprivileged backgrounds.

They cared deeply about all of those things, and many others.

They just didn’t care nearly as much about the basic education of Seattle’s children.