Seattle was told it was ‘disappearing’ its top students. Did SPS hear?

Seattle Public Schools has decided to press pause on dismantling its dedicated advanced learning program, which is a bit of welcome news.

But the damage already done by this misguided crusade has been profound — and still isn’t being reckoned with by school or civic leaders.

Consider what happened in one Seattle middle school, Hamilton, in the years since David Evans began teaching math there.

As recently as 2016, he says, the school had six classes of middle schoolers taking geometry, which is technically a 10^th grade course. There was one class taking Algebra II, an 11^th grade course. This was heady stuff — that’s as many as 150 middle schoolers in just one Seattle school who were two to four years advanced in math.

“Now we have only one section of geometry,” Evans testified at a School Board meeting last week, while Algebra II isn’t offered at all.

“What we are doing in Seattle public schools is we’re disappearing our top students in math,” he said.

We’ve disappeared them in more than just math.

School leaders denied for years that families might be pulling out of the schools because the district was eroding the academic offerings. They often blamed high housing costs for the declining enrollment instead.

But finally some departing families were asked, and the obvious was made plain.

Families “who disenrolled their students from SPS overwhelmingly cited concerns about the quality of education and the curriculum as top reasons,” found a study presented last month.

What’s more, “a majority of adults of current students have considered disenrolling their students over concerns about the quality of education” (emphasis added).

The cost of housing was cited by only 3% as the main reason for leaving.

What happened has been chronicled at length going back to 2018, so I won’t repeat much of it here. The advanced learning track has long been racially imbalanced (true), and so the district began tearing it and other unique programs down in the belief that this would help foster racial equity (false).

“The headline tomorrow should be: ‘Seattle Public Schools has voted to desegregate a middle school in the Central District,’ ” crowed then-board member Zachary DeWolf, after voting to cancel the advanced learning track at Washington Middle School in 2020.

That school had 669 students in 2019, of which 60% were students of color. It has 102 fewer students today, with 78% students of color. So it’s both smaller and less racially mixed. The Asian and white enrollments there have both dropped by 50%.

Droves of parents predicted to the School Board that this would happen. They pleaded with them to set up proven advanced learning options at each neighborhood school before whacking away at the advanced track.

“Do not remove any current service models until there are a set of systems and structures in place that have been shown to effectively serve students,” wrote an Advanced Learning Task Force of 21 teachers and parents, convened in 2018 to find ways to make the program more inclusive.

Or as I wrote five years ago: “It’s never been clear how eliminating a program at the top will translate into a boost for anyone else.”

Fast forward to today: It didn’t. It instead contributed to enrollment declines in the past five years (Asian enrollment alone has dropped 17% since 2019). There’s been no improvement in academic outcomes to date for any group.

Parents say some schools took the equity drive so far as to effectively ban lessons above grade-level.

All these trends were untenable, so last week the district backtracked. The new plan is closer to what it should have been all along. It’s a hybrid of keeping the advanced track going while trying to make it more diverse, while simultaneously proving they can integrate advanced options into each neighborhood school. The District still plans to resume phasing out the advanced track in three years.

“I think it’s really important that we acknowledge that what we’re saying is happening in neighborhood schools isn’t happening,” School Board member Evan Briggs said at a recent meeting. “It points to a chronic issue, I think, in this district, of ideas and words on paper and then a failure to implement.”

That is chronic. It recalls so many local pushes, from defunding police, to the lenient approach to hard drugs without first setting up treatment options, to the laissez-faire posture toward homeless encampments. At some point, Seattle’s progressive movement ought to confront what went so badly wrong with so much of this stuff.

Was it the execution, or the ideas themselves that were flawed?

For now, though, it’s extraordinary that one of Seattle’s top math teachers got up and told the education establishment that the net effect of their work has been a mass “disappearing” of students.

“I see our top students waltz away every year to Lakeside, SAAS, Bush, you name it, they’re leaving because we didn’t serve their needs,” Evans told the School Board, listing Seattle private schools.

“We should not be ashamed of the (advanced learning) program,” he concluded. “We should bring it back. We have to decide to get out of the way of the kids.”

This is the kind of inconvenient truth this city didn’t wish to hear in recent years. Maybe the mood is shifting.