Joey Anchondo
Preparing save-our-school signs and petitions at Thurgood Marshall Elementary.
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It's been a traumatic couple of weeks following recommendations by a citizens committee on closing Seattle public schools. Are we better off than a year ago, when a similar plan to consolidate was dead on arrival? For all the angst, will these closures even save much money or improve learning?
Like last year, there was a torrent of community criticism about the schools targeted, and at least some of the questions raised are valid. On top of that, Superintendent Raj Manhas revealed that the closure list he ultimately will present to the Seattle School Board will save only $3 million a year in operating costs—half of which, the first year, is to be reinvested in remaining schools. In contrast, a different committee of community members with a broader mission earlier envisioned $8 million in savings from school closures.
At least we have a list, and that's progress. On June 2, Manhas released a preliminary list of nine buildings he is proposing to close, almost the same as one submitted days earlier by the Community Advisory Committee on School Consolidation and Closure, convened by the board—12 heroic citizens who stepped up to the truly thankless task of preparing an initial closure list. The superintendent will present his final list on July 3 to the board, which is already debating the list and is to vote July 26.
For all the criticism, the evolving list of targeted schools is mostly reasonable. The first draft released by the committee last month had fewer glaring mistakes of the sort that doomed Manhas' attempt last year to choose schools for closure. The biggest problem with that year-ago effort was that the district failed to consider academic performance, so some of the best schools were on the chopping block. This time, the board instructed the citizens committee to pay attention to academics, and it showed.
The committee did make a few puzzling choices, however, and a couple of closure recommendations are instructive about challenges that faced the committee. As examples, they show how difficult it is to know enough to make the right decision, and they lay bare the emotion inspired by any closure proposal.
Thurgood Marshall Elementary is a Central Area school that made the committee's initial list. It's been taken off the list—for now. In defending it and another targeted school, Martin Luther King Elementary, community members essentially accused the committee of racism. The two schools are populated primarily by African Americans and bear the names of famous black leaders. Committee co-chair Mona Bailey, a former Seattle schools deputy superintendent and an African American, raised her voice for the first time as she addressed this question at a press conference. What people ought to be paying attention to, she responded, is not the color of students in a school "but the kind of program they are experiencing." It's an excellent point.
The real problem with targeting Thurgood Marshall was that the program might not be failing. According to Bailey and others, the committee noted drops in the school's statewide Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) scores, particularly among boys, who at Thurgood Marshall study in classes separate from girls. Yet those troubling drops have occurred only the past two years. Prior to that, Thurgood Marshall was a remarkable success, hailed nationwide. Under the leadership of then-principal Ben Wright, since recruited to a job in Philadelphia, the school's test scores jumped from not one single student passing the math portion of the test in 1999 to nearly 59 percent passing in 2003. The timing of the recent drop in scores, down last year to a pass rate of 31 percent in math, corresponds with the departure of Wright—a leadership question the district needs to address without necessarily shutting down the whole school. "Mr. Wright was a presence," says parent Mozel Bendshadler.
The committee, however, was not aware of the school's leadership change or past success, judging by interviews with Bailey and others. Bailey says the committee looked at test scores over a five-year period, which just misses capturing the school's dramatic gains. This startling gap in the committee's knowledge points to the oddity of having citizens, plucked from the community at large, deciding which schools should live and which should die. The committee had just two months to get up to speed on 70 schools. It could not have known as much as district officials do. After last year's disastrous closure effort, the board obviously hoped a citizens committee would have more public trust. That route has obvious limitations.
Before passing its recommendations to Manhas, the committee took Thurgood Marshall off the list. But it suggested that the district find a school to close from a pool of four Central Area buildings that includes Thurgood Marshall.
Another questionable closure choice, Graham Hill Elementary, was on the committee's final list and on the superintendent's. Committee members say they chose that southeast school because of disparate performances between a high-achieving Montessori program at Graham Hill and that of the regular program, which the committee saw as unsuccessful. That judgment was based on one year's WASL reading scores. When you include math and writing, the regular program's performance falls into the middle of the pack of South End schools. "It doesn't make sense to anybody," says Julie Vlasaty, Graham Hill PTSA president.
