They Choose or We Lose

According to plan, Maria Gutierrez is supposed to be filling out a Seattle Public Schools application to enroll her daughter in kindergarten next year. Now the Lake City mom doesn't know what to do. The school district has announced that to save on transportation costs, it is considering drastically reducing or eliminating the choice system that allows parents to pick from schools throughout the city. "We bought our house in Seattle specifically because we believed we could choose a school," says Gutierrez, who might have moved instead into the Shoreline or Eastside districts. She views the nearby school to which she would likely be assigned if choice were eliminated, Olympic Hills, as far less attractive than some of the schools she has been considering a little to her south. "It doesn't have a language program," she says of Olympic Hills. "It doesn't have a PTA that raises $200,000 a year."

Stressed by the uncertainty, she recently called the Shoreline district to find out about getting a boundary waiver that would allow her child to go there. Similarly concerned, many of her friends are applying to private schools. She calls what's going on "fright flight."

The backlash has begun. The school district isn't contemplating making any changes to its choice system until the 2006–07 school year. With the district kicking off community forums on the issue early this month, the scale of potential changes isn't widely understood. But already there is a palpable sense of panic among parents, compounded by a range of other cuts the district is contemplating in the face of a financial crisis, including closure of numerous schools.

The looming school closings have garnered most of the publicity, but the possible scrapping of the choice system is equally if not more momentous. "It's not just tweaking," says longtime schools activist Melissa Westbrook. "It would change the landscape of how we do things." It could not only affect enrollment in the Seattle Public Schools, prompting some to flee to suburban and private schools, it could alter the composition of the city, worsening economic and racial stratification. You can bet that if their kids could only go to one neighborhood school, parents with means would make darn sure that they moved into a neighborhood with a good school.

And those without means? "If they take away our choice, we're stuck with whatever we're given," says Sharon Nakamura, a Beacon Hill mom whose daughter attends TOPS in Capitol Hill. What you're given can be a problem, given the highly uneven performance of schools around the city, especially in the South End. Students at TOPS, for example, score three times as well on the math portion of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) as do students at Dearborn Park, the closest elementary to Nakamura. Roughly 77 percent of TOPS kids passed, versus just 26 percent of those at Dearborn Park. There's almost as large a gap on the writing portion. Or take McGilvra and Martin Luther King elementary schools, which score 84 and 27 percent, respectively, on the math WASL.

McGilvra and Martin Luther King lie in adjoining neighborhoods, meeting at the southern tip of Madison Valley. If the district moved to a mandatory assignment system, it would draw boundary lines between such schools to determine who gets to go where. Although, at the elementary level, the district already has so-called "reference areas" that it could employ to help determine a student's priority when applying to popular schools, there's bound to be pressure to fiddle with the lines. "It's going to be worse than political redistricting," says parent Judith Leckrone Lee of the Genesee neighborhood. "It would be a block-by-block battle."

The district has offered two rough plans for discussion. One would assign a student to a school based on such geographic boundaries—the choices being "specific" alternative schools presumably designated for an area and, possibly, special needs programs. (Which current programs would qualify as alternative and special needs is very much up in the air.) The second option would allow for a very limited choice among, say, two or three schools, with the same exceptions as the first model. This would be a greatly scaled-back version of the current elementary "cluster" model. Although students now can attend any school in the city if they can get in, they only receive transportation within their cluster of eight or so schools, unless they're going to alternative schools or qualify for some other exception. In its proposals, the school district has not given an indication whether a grandfather clause would allow students to stay where they are now.

Some district officials question the importance of choice. Board member Dick Lilly, in an interview a few months ago, said choice within clusters was more "psychological" than "a real one"—which might be true in some cases but certainly not, for example, in the central cluster that contains McGilvra and Martin Luther King. Superintendent Raj Manhas recently told The Seattle Times: "The question is, how many kids have we really helped with choice? I think it's a small number, primarily at high school." Manhas says now that he was speaking specifically about the impact of choice on the performance of minority kids—which, it is true, is on average disturbingly low.