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Warning for Seattle: The schools’ pandemic hangover is not easing
Oct. 11, 2023 at 6:00 am Updated Oct. 11, 2023 at 6:00 am

Enrollment has plunged by 1,100 more students in Seattle schools, and
test scores for many kids in need are not bouncing back. Where is the
civic rally to save the schools? Here, a student walks down the hall on
the first day at the newly remodeled West Seattle Elementary on Sept. 6.
(Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)

Danny Westneat By Danny Westneat
Seattle Times columnist

Plenty of Seattle institutions are having pandemic hangovers. From the
police to arts groups to parts of the city such as downtown, it remains
a struggle to get that mojo back.

But one in particular isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Even
though it’s more vital to the future of this city than all the others.

The Seattle schools have suffered another blow, with enrollment dropping
this fall by 1,100 more students.

According to the district’s September count, 48,960 kids showed up for
the city’s public K-12 schools. That’s down from 50,111 last September.
It’s nearly 5,000 fewer students than in the fall of 2019, before the
virus and the school closures touched off an unraveling.

This is the smallest the Seattle school district has been since 2012,
just as the big Amazon boom was about to get rolling. It means a decade
of progress, growth and popularity has been lopped off.

Yet there isn’t some big civic rally to save the schools. There’s not
all that much attention paid to them compared to homelessness or crime
or housing.

The drop is why schools are disruptively scrambling to merge classrooms,
after some of them ended up with as few as 11 students, The Seattle
Times reported last week.

I’ve written before about who is leaving. Asian families are leading the
exodus, with an enrollment drop of 15% since 2019, according to state
data. There’s no way to know exactly why they’re going, though, as it
hasn’t been studied.

I would love to see a campaign to win families back. A number of parents
told me last year they left due to a lack of academic rigor in the
schools, but that was anecdotal. Regardless, ask them all: What can we
do for you?

So far, it’s crickets. I’m certain Seattle people want the public
schools to thrive. So why are we letting them slip-slide away?

This isn’t some casual exercise, some “nice-to-have.” The whole premise
of Seattle as a city with democratic ideals depends first on getting the
schools right.

The other major pandemic hangover in Seattle schools is even worse than
the enrollment drop. It’s learning loss.

The district is reporting that white and Asian kids have rebounded near
to pre-pandemic levels. But Black students have not.

“The data is deeply concerning and requires urgent action,” says a staff
report to the Seattle School Board, before Wednesday’s regular board
meeting.

The gist is that only 17% of 3,755 Black students passed the state’s
standardized math test in 2023, down from 2022. The results for most
other categories of students — white, Hispanic, Asian — went up.

There’s now a 50 percentage point achievement gap in Seattle schools
between white and Black kids, in both math and reading. Before the
pandemic, a gap of 40 points was accurately called a crisis. It’s now worse.

“Given how concerning the student outcomes are, we have begun to
consider bolder actions,” the staff report says.

Well it’s about time!

Sorry for that outburst. I know this work is difficult. But the lack of
urgency around pandemic learning loss has been frustrating.

One of the bolder actions the staff report suggests, still some way off
in the future, is “high-dosage tutoring.” That means meeting kids
one-on-one and personally back-schooling them to try to catch them up.

It was something I floated we do three years ago, to both dig out of
learning loss and relieve the pandemic’s social isolation. As always, I
have no special insight — I just plagiarized the idea from national
education researchers.

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at
the University of Washington, told The Seattle Times two years ago that
school districts like Seattle were already late then in boosting tutoring.

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“It’s a concern to me because if there’s one thing we know … (it’s) that
tutoring works,” she said in 2021, for an article titled “The Science of
Catching Up in School.”

Tutoring’s main problem is that it isn’t sexy or high tech. It doesn’t
scale well. It’s as old-fashioned as sitting face-to-face to help
someone go through their homework.

The district hired some coaches to help teachers boost math instruction
for Black middle schoolers. One of the board members asked, in advance
of Wednesday’s meeting, what specifically these coaches do.

“Our coaches are leading common Red Wednesday PD around the 5 Practices
in Practice, leading grade level math PLCs, co-teaching/modeling
enVision lessons with the 5 Practices for orchestrating productive math
discourse and providing planning/feedback coaching cycles with
teachers,” came the answer.

My parents were teachers, so I’m familiar with eduspeak. Still I’m going
to have to trust that all involved here have some clue what that
gobbledygook means.

But these kids are failing basic math. With all respect, they need human
beings to just sit with them and work through fractions and algebraic
equations and all the other operations that make math so beautiful and
tricky. Don’t they?

I’m a believer that Seattle has an army of volunteers eager to do this
work, if asked. So far they have not been asked. I’ve also featured the
success of a new tutoring nonprofit, The Math Agency, which is doubling
the math learning rates for its low-income students. They’re getting
resistance to expanding in Seattle, so they’re shifting some of their
work away to … Bellevue.

Come on, Seattle. The alarms are sounding. This should be an all-hands
on deck moment for our schools. It’s not a time for the ship to be
seeming so rudderless.

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an
opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.

View 476 Comments

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(Edited)
The people running the SPS show are full of...ineffectiveness and
unbelievable ineptitude.

I used to be a teacher inside the belly of the SPS beast. It's UGLY.

Luckily, I got out. The independent school I teach at now is glorious.

Of course, not every family can afford the tuition. But that's another
story.
You're missing the "when" part--after school, summer, Winter Break?
Places that offered high dosage tutoring over the summer or after school
were not taken up on the offer because kids don't like being in school
and parents don't force kids to be in school anymore.

So unless we are proposing pull out tutoring during the school day,
there will be no uptake on the offer.

SP
I volunteer in one of the public schools in a large suburb of Seattle,
not one of the richest ones. There are no problems there that are
causing kids to leave; in fact the school and the district continue to
add students. No surprise that the differences with SPS that I notice
are the same as causes of SPS decline noted by other commenters:

1. Better discipline;
2. Better high-capacity student programs;
3. Better in-school "development centers" and other separate rooms and
programs for slower students and special needs kids. This takes more
teachers, which takes more money, which takes Seattle backing off its
efforts to change the climate and to provide free unlimited housing.

Tutoring by volunteers is a good idea; but emphasizing to parents the
need to do homework and to support the school goes along with that.
Excellent article Danny about this important problem.

Dragging Seattle Public Schools lower for the sake of achieving race
based goals doesn’t seem like the best strategy. Perhaps the school
district should consult with parents that have opted to leave and those
that have opted to stay. Focus on the rationale of both, instead of
making this a race based issue

A couple of reasons why there are fewer kids: 1) lack of rigor in the
curriculum, 2) curriculum ventures into cultural/politicized topics that
would be better left out of a public school setting. I say this as a
democrat myself. I agree with many of the cultural things that are being
taught, but that doesn’t mean it should be part of an SPS curriculum.
School should be focused on academics. If I’m a democrat saying this,
imagine what all the republican families think. SPS made their bed and
now they have to lie in it.
I am a Seattle Public Schools parent with children in 4th, 8th, and 10th
grade.