Warning for Seattle: The schools’ pandemic hangover is not easing

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.

“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.