The audience at The Stranger‘s school board debate last week got into it right away. The opening round of “yes”/”no”/
“dunno” questions, in which candidates were instructed to silently scuttle across the stage at Town Hall and line up behind signs indicating their answers, drew loud cheers and derisive laughter from the audience. It was shaping up to be an entertaining evening.
And then the candidates started talking.
It’s not that the answers weren’t substantive. Some of them were. And it’s not like there wasn’t any conflict. There was. It’s just that so many of the issues debated seem so small in the face of a problem that is so dauntingly big: our refusal as a state to adequately fund public education.
On that one issue, no candidate had a satisfying answer. “Fundamentally, the problem is that the state has failed to fulfill its constitutional obligation,” explained incumbent director Harium Martin-Morris to sustained applause. Exactly. Now what are you going to do about it? Both challengers and incumbents alike seemed equally stumped.
I don’t mean to dismiss contentious issues like Teach for America (a program to bring college graduates into temporary teaching positions) or the achievement gap between North Seattle and South Seattle schools or the boneheaded way this and past boards closed schools in the face of a rising tide of enrollment. But with the district shaving another $45 million from its $570 million operating budget, and the state slashing billions of dollars from K–12 education over the past four years, all this talk about improving our schools is just that—talk—if we don’t figure out how to pay for them.
No, money alone won’t solve all our problems, and as Superintendent Susan Enfield emphasized at a Monday press conference introducing Seattle mayor Mike McGinn’s new campaign to cut truancy and increase attendance, “The school district can’t do it alone.”
In response to studies showing a close correlation between attendance and graduation rates—on average, only 59 percent of ninth graders missing 18 days of school a year will graduate, compared to 87 percent of those who miss five or fewer—the mayor’s office, working in collaboration with the district and other groups, launched the “Be Here, Get There” campaign, aimed at slashing chronic absenteeism through outreach and incentives. Students, classrooms, and schools will compete for prizes for improved attendance, including donated bikes, pizza parties, and a visit from the Molly Moon’s ice cream truck. It’s a worthy initiative with a feel-good message that costs taxpayers nothing. Kudos.
Now if only we would stop slashing the dollars the state spends to educate the kids who show up. 
You’re leaving out some important parts of this story, Goldy. 1) Board after board has allowed one superintendent after another to lose money or wastefully spend money. I think your child is old enough for you to have experienced the Joe Olchefske years. He was the superintendent who lost $35 million, or rather allowed the Seattle School’s finance office to lose it. He was hand picked by John “The General” Stanford, coming from a career in, wait for it, finance. The board not only didn’t bother reading the budget, they gave him an almost unanimous vote of confidence after he screwed up. This led to the Raj Manhas school closure era, which led to the Maria-Goodloe Johnson hatchet woman with a bonus era. (She sealed the deal, closing schools, only to see them reopen.) Again, the board gives bonuses and votes of confidence for failure.
The legislature continues to despise Seattle Schools as the most top heavy district in the state. States with less rich people per capita are giving more money to their schools. Our board and superintendent have two obvious tasks before them: Do the best with what they have, and either work around the legislature or work with them. Fail on both counts. Instead, you see the grip of privatizing and Ed Reform Inc inserting itself into Seattle Schools. Not because they’ll make things better. They’re grabbing the opportunity to turn another “failing” school district into a cash cow.
Seattle has some of the best and worst schools in the state, and that’s just based on test scores. Getting kids to attend is minor in the face of the kids already in class who are in over crowded classrooms with over worked teachers being threatened by TFA interns who get 5 weeks of training and a Goldman Sachs summer job. Eye on the ball please.
The thing about money for schools is that the children of affluent families are relatively inexpensive to educate – and educate well.
Unfortunately children who live in poverty are extremely expensive to educate. They need a lot of services just to get them to the starting line.
The people who control education funding – and those who complain loudly about it – are either from the class of people who didn’t cost much to educate or are from the few extraordinary people who were driven to exceed expectations. They usually don’t have much understanding or sympathy for the children who have been disadvantaged. Until they understand the nature and extent of that disadvantage and they come to see that their enlightened self-interest is served by supporting those kids, public education will continue to be under-funded.
We have spent and spent and even had bill gates and all his cronie jokers shovel billions at Washington education? Homeless jokers have to move as the church has used up the feds money to shelter homeless and Bill Gates has shoveled a Hundred Million at that pile?
The UW can “Now” charge students without the state playing dictator and as the FDA awards exclusive rights for one drug company to make a drug that nobody else can make the cost goes up 1000%….. The FDA says it don’t decide the cost of a drug but it can create an exclusive monopoly on a drug that Americans need and we are to believe they are to stupid to realize that its OBVIOUS like Vladimir Putin that they actually don’t know that they are screwing Americans?
Like we could not buy drugs from mexico? Why?
Per student we spent how much on students compared to Japan? China? France? Germany?
As it is they built new schools just to close them down and closed down many schools to save money and they charge $200 bucks for some text books? The teachers I had did not need a book at Frickin all to teach their subject? and they all had developed shoulders from pushing chalk and erasers over their heads all day long and were quick to call you a meat head and make you sit in a corner with a dunce cap on and they would slap kids in the face and when their parents came to complain they slapped the parents too.
The schools “may” need a huge injection of cash but first we need to know “EXACTLY” why Schools are behind the power curve 24/7/365 and “exactly” how to keep schools on the curve no matter how curvy or strait the line is?
Yea right pipe dream? until then its just stupid slobs who keep coming up to bum every day every week every month every year as they have the brains of pine cones. Even our great Governor Sea Hag is sick of this same sad song on the juke box all the time?