A cautionary tale about forsaking educational basics for castles in the sky
The top-line narrative of Seattle Public Schools’ past decade is the story of a comprehensive, even radical, internal cultural and pedagogic shift. The reset is broadly characterized as a turn away from a reformist culture built around instituting multiple layers of accountability (for students, teachers, and schools) that was intended to maximize academic achievement, to one fixated on warmer, less prescriptive, therapeutically tinged pedagogical approaches designed to foster a sense of identitarian belonging.
In keeping with the national Democratic Party’s embrace of education reform in the early Obama years, SPS from 2007–11, under the direction of then-Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, became intensively focused on boosting student achievement and school and teacher performance. And those efforts bore fruit: according to the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), produced by Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, Seattle students’ average test scores were 0.7 grade levels above the national average in 2009. By 2013 they had risen to 1.43 grade levels above average, finally peaking at 1.68 above average in 2018.
The rapid academic gains may have been real, but not everyone was pleased with the way they were being achieved. By the early 2010s, many progressive Seattle teachers and activists had joined forces with racial and social justice organizations to push back against what they saw as culturally inappropriate testing and academic accountability regimes that were unfair to children of color. In 2013, this opposition went nationalwhen some local teachers launched a defiant boycott of standardized tests, winning support from leaders of national teachers unions and other prominent progressive education advocates like Noam Chomsky, Diane Ravitch, and Jonathan Kozol.
Already in 2012 the district had adopted a new foundational policy for “Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity” that among its other elements mandated district schools offer a “welcoming culture and inclusive environment” for students. By the time Congress replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its accountability mechanisms in 2015, SPS was well on its way to unwinding what had come to be widely perceived as a cruelly indifferent, unfeeling, and counterproductive fixation on measurable outcomes. In its place, SPS moved to implement policies centered on making students who had previously been deemed underperformers, particularly black and brown students and those of lower socio-economic status, feel affirmed in Seattle schools. As the 2012 equity policy explained it, “A student whose history and heritage are appreciated and celebrated will learn better and be more successful than if that student is forced to overcome a cultural barrier.”
