This ‘adult fight’ about Seattle schools misses bigger issues

As Seattle teachers and administrators were headed for another strike the other day, state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, a Seattle Democrat, tried to appeal to the better angels of community reason.

Citing all the pandemic disruptions of the past few years, he called on both sides, in the “spirit of grace and humility,” to make concessions to avoid this strike.

“This is not the year for an adult fight,” he concluded.

Boy did he get blistered for saying that.

Adult-fighting is Seattle’s love language, senator, you should know that by now. Complete with sign-waving, sidewalk-rallying and protest chanting, it’s one of the main ways we communicate around here.

I don’t have as personal a stake in this strike, because both my Seattle Public Schools kids are now off in college. The last strike, in 2015, kept them out of middle school for a week. That one went well for the teachers, as the cause was widely supported by the broader community, and by most school parents, including me.

This one has been more of a reach, as Carlyle was suggesting.

In 2015, Seattle was booming, school enrollment was surging, and both teachers and schools around the state really were being seriously shortchanged.

Due to the McCleary lawsuit at that time challenging the way schools are financed, the Legislature poured billions more into the schools. In Seattle, this has meant substantial spending increases — we went from a $750 million annual operating budget for the schools in 2015 to a $1.14 billion budget this year, a 52% increase.

That’s not some scandal, it’s what was supposed to happen. The whole thrust of the McCleary lawsuit was to make schools the paramount duty of the state again, to pay teachers more, and to finally back our local schools at East Coast financial levels.

The problem now though is that enrollment has dropped. The district forecast in July that enrollment will keep sliding post-pandemic, to as low as 46,900 in 2025. That would be a total decline, since 2020, of 6,000 students — even as enrollments start to tick back up elsewhere around the state.

That’s a huge drop. It also means the district is expecting annual budget shortfalls of $100 million, escalating up to $128 million in 2025, as the enrollment drops.

When the adult-fighting abates, as it hopefully will in short order, the two sides have some more pressing questions to ask.

The biggest is: Why are all these families leaving Seattle schools?

Some of it was the pandemic (people delaying kindergarten), some of it demographic, and some is probably due to the high cost of living in the city.

But the truth is they have no idea. Nobody is asking parents — which is typical for Seattle schools. It’s not a customer-focused enterprise, to put it mildly.

I have told the story here many times how improved Seattle schools have been academically, compared to, say, 20 years ago. But I get a sense, from talking to parents, that there’s concern about that slipping. For example the district is slowly dismantling its controversial, but also highly sought after, advanced learning program. Could that be a cause for some of the enrollment drop?

Nobody knows. There could be multiple problems. The point is: The district can’t fix whatever’s ailing it through guesswork.

It also isn’t clear what all that post-2015 money surge is doing. A lot of it went to salaries, which was needed. But the education researcher Marguerite Roza notes that in the past decade, the total staffing of Seattle Public Schools has also ballooned 32%, from 5,300 employees to 7,000.

“Seeing a lot of this around the country: Districts adding staff while losing students,” she wrote.

This matters because much of this current dispute has been about staffing — about teachers saying they need more support for special education students. I believe them, and it sure hasn’t felt out in the schools in recent years that they’ve been plentifully staffed. But then you’ve got to wonder: Where are those 1,700 additional employees? Administrative bloat?

I know — I’m supposed to answer questions, not ask them. All I can say here is that it seems a top-to-bottom audit of this district is in order. The pressure to spend money more efficiently — and get results for it — is only going to ratchet up as the enrollment declines.

Finally, the era is more volatile than it was in 2015. Nobody minds strikes when they end quickly. But there’s been a concerted campaign of late to bring down the public schools. That’s no exaggeration: Our local anti-public-school crusader, Christopher Rufo, described his goal in a speech as no less than sowing “universal public school distrust.” It’s all part of an aligned conservative movement for lower taxes (and book bans and the sanitization of history, a related story).

Why give them ammunition? The public schools are the indicator species for the health of a city. And with enrollment declining, Seattle’s are clearly hurting and in need of some recovery.

Seattle likes to either take it to the streets, or form blue-ribbon committees. This is a plea that when the dust settles, we move on to the latter as quickly as possible. Instead of more adult-fighting within the family.