Who’s doing the ‘quiet leaving’ from the Seattle public schools

Last week when I wondered why families have been pulling their kids out of Seattle Public Schools at such high rates, I got an earful.

Except from the group that’s leaving the most. I didn’t hear much from them.

“I’m not surprised, I think with them it’s a very quiet leaving of the school system,” says Erin Okuno, of the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition. “They say: ‘This isn’t working, but we’re not going to make a big fuss about it. We’re just going to go find something that does work for us.’“

Okuno was talking about the broad category of “Asians” — so broad it’s made up of nearly 50 ethnic subgroups. Generalizing about it is hazardous, but state education data shows that Seattle school enrollment from pre-pandemic to now has fallen more among Asian students, by 13%, than among any other demographic or racial group.

Between the 2019-20 school year and now, Seattle school enrollment dropped 9% among white students, 5% for Black students, and 4% for Hispanic/Latino students.

“Because the kids were at home we could see what they were working on, and we wanted more acceleration than that,” one Asian parent of two Seattle elementary students summed up to me about why they shifted to private school.

I heard from scores of parents, anxious to fill an information void left by the school district, which doesn’t ask why parents leave. Many echoed what the parent above said: That Zoom school, while everyone was home together, gave parents unprecedented access to what their kids were actually doing in class.

“What happened is there were a lot of wealthy parents (Amazon) who pulled their kids out,” a parent at John Hay Elementary on Queen Anne wrote. “This isn’t really spoken about, but many parents have become frustrated with the SPS curriculum. During online learning they saw what they were focusing on, and many bugged out.”

John Hay lost 200 students out of 500 — 40% of the school.

Another John Hay parent wrote that he would occasionally ask his son about a friend at school, and he’d answer “Oh he’s not there anymore.”

People have theorized that low-income families have been forced out of the city by the high cost of living. That doubtless happened in some cases, but the data doesn’t bear it out as the main issue.

State data by income group shows that Seattle enrollment has dropped among middle- and high-income families at twice the rate (10%) as it did among low-income families (5%). There was such “money flight” from Seattle schools in the past two years that the overall percentage of students who qualify for the free lunch program rose for the first time in more than a decade.

“I think the extreme income-inequalities that have been building up for years are now having a huge effect on the public schools,” one elementary school parent wrote.

This is why I’m harping on this topic. It’s not to bash the schools. It’s because it feels like a dangerous pendulum is swinging — that socioeconomic stresses, already there, got supercharged by the pandemic. With the city’s public school system now in the balance.

Why did so many Asian families quietly leave, and other families “bug out?” More importantly, how could the schools get them back?

It’s not as if Seattle schools are cratering. In the just-released round of standardized test scores, Seattle schools scored 12 percentage points above the statewide average in reading, and 14 points above the state average in math. Any big urban school district in the nation would swoon for results like that.

But countless parents wrote that standardized tests are only the floor. With advanced learning options taking a hit, it’s the ceiling that they say is being lowered.

“Cumulatively, it adds up to this: if you have a kid who is doing well academically, and you want to accelerate them, SPS may not be the place for you,” said a parent whose northeast Seattle elementary school lost 25% of its students.

Twelve elementary schools in the city lost more than 100 students. One school in North Seattle, Licton Springs K-8, was down to just four third graders when school ended in June.

“Current elementary and middle school students will not have the same opportunities in their college pursuits as recent high school grads,” a parent of a high schooler wrote.

Added one onlooker: “The data on merit scholarship finalists tells a story: there are qualifiers in Bellevue and Redmond, but not from the Seattle public schools.”

That isn’t quite true. Last year there were 15 finalists from Seattle’s 10 high schools. But the writer has a point, as there were 40 from just a single Bellevue school, Interlake High.

“Next up in the downward spiral,” another frustrated parent added, “is that engaged parents with fewer means will start demanding charters, as their schools suffer funding crunches that impact quality. So you end up where [Washington] D.C. Public Schools are now.”

Meaning: private schools mostly for the rich, fractured public schools mostly for the poor. Nothing in between.

Seattle, we really don’t want this as our future. Now that the strike is settled, and there’s labor peace for three years, can we please refocus on this? On wooing back all the customers — of all races, all socioeconomic sectors, all academic abilities?

School is where the whole democracy thing starts. If we can’t all go to school together, then whatever other progressive dreams Seattle has for itself will be a sham.