Gone missing: The struggling public schools as a top issue in WA

For most of the past three decades, Seattle pollster Stuart Elway has asked voters to set the agenda. He includes a question in his polls asking what people think state politicians in Olympia should laser-focus on.

“I do it to set the stage,” Elway said. “What is everyone going to be talking about this year in local politics? What matters?”

He’s noticed that ever since the coronavirus floated into the state, something strangely has gone missing.

“Education and the public schools have always been near the top of what’s most important,” he told me this past week. I asked him to look back. “From ’95-2000, 2003, 2005-2006 and from 2015-2018, education was the No. 1 issue in the state. And every other year it was in the top two or three.

“Now it’s just dropped off the agenda.”

Two years ago, only 6% of voters in his surveys, which he now does for the Crosscut news site, suggested the state Legislature prioritize K-12 schools. The pandemic pushed everything aside that year, but education plummeted the most, ranking ninth. It fell to the level of concerns about nonexistent election fraud.

Last year the schools stayed out of mind, at just 5%. This year, with Gov. Jay Inslee retiring, Elway asked voters what factors or issues might sway their upcoming 2024 votes on who should be the next governor. The state’s public schools barely made the list, trailing homelessness, the economy, taxes, crime, drugs and even “no answer.” (The top answer was which party the candidates belong to.)

This past week, I tuned in to Olympia to hear the “State of the State” address from the governor. And also opening remarks to the Legislative session by the speaker of the state House, Laurie Jinkins. It’s not just these polls; Jinkins didn’t mention the K-12 schools at all, while Inslee noted he hopes to boost pay for paraeducators. That was it.

It can’t be that voters or politicians have concluded everything is fine in the schools. Many districts face large budget deficits, despite an influx of money from both coronavirus aid and the McCleary legal decision. Other districts can’t pass bond issues to fix crumbling buildings.

Then there’s academics. You can make a case that of all societal institutions struggling to recover from the pandemic, the schools are still struggling the most.

The lost learning, which researchers have pegged at about half a year in most Washington school districts, has mostly not been regained. Test scores still lag pre-pandemic levels by 10 percentage points. This means about 100,000 more kids in the state are failing to meet grade-level standards — many of them kids who weren’t failing before.

I took a look at test scores for one class, the Seattle Public Schools’ class of 2027. When the pandemic hit, they were in fifth grade. The two previous years, in third and fourth grades, a promising two-thirds of this group of roughly 4,500 students passed the state math standards, well above the state averages.

By sixth grade, during the pandemic, only 42% passed math. Last year in eighth grade, 47.5% did. This is a 20-point drop in math passage rates for the group overall. Statewide the math deterioration for this class was even worse, roughly 25 points, as they headed into high school. Some of this is learning loss, while some could be due to families of passing students preferentially leaving the public schools for other options.

Recently the Seattle School Board was reviewing some equally grim stats when the staff gave a shocking reason for why test scores haven’t recovered. About 40% of middle-schoolers, and 30% of elementary students, are chronically absent from the city’s Title 1 schools. (These are schools with higher proportions of students from low-income families; of Seattle’s roughly 100 schools, 37 have Title 1 designation.)

One school board member could scarcely believe it.

“This is saying that 32% of all students in third grade in Title 1 schools missed 18 or more days of school? Across all races and incomes?” she asked.

Yes, came the answer.

“Whoa,” said the school board member.

Whoa is right. No amount of great intentions or high-dosage tutoring is going to make a dent if the kids simply aren’t there. Something has shifted; before the pandemic, chronic absenteeism in Seattle’s elementary schools was about 15%. That’s not great, but 30% to 40% is a five-alarm crisis. (There’s a proposed bill in Olympia to try to address this, including paying for home visits; hopefully it will get enough oxygen, and money, to pass. Before it’s too late.)

Elway said it isn’t clear why the public isn’t dialed in right now. Other big crises like homelessness and crime are more visible. Other problems, like the soaring cost of living, are more broadly shared.

There’s also the nationalization of politics.

“Everything is filtered now through a national partisan lens,” he said. “If the national candidates and parties aren’t talking about it and whipping everybody up, then the media doesn’t focus on it. It kind of drops out of sight.”

This is a mistake. National topics like, say, threats to democracy, are vital and can be all-consuming. But we’ve got to be big enough, confident enough, not to be totally dominated by that.

The harsh reality is Washington’s public schools are slipping. In 2015, the gold standard of tests, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, ranked us eighth among the states in fourth-grade math, and 12th in eighth-grade math. Reading scores were similar. This put us within range of the longtime star of American public schooling, Massachusetts. I recall heady talk at the time, as education advocates had a dream of making Washington the undisputed Massachusetts of the West Coast.

Last year we slid to 27th in fourth-grade math, and 18th in eighth-grade math, with reading scores similar. Academic scores dropped everywhere due to the pandemic, including in Massachusetts, but it remains No. 1 overall.

The dig out from the pandemic is going to be a long slog, with fits and starts. That students are still going missing four years on would make this a terrible moment for the political system and its leaders to go missing, too.