He said he’d be able to cut SPS’ $100 million budget deficit in half before the start of the next school year, no sweat. And a good portion of the belt-tightening, he promised, will be focused on reducing redundancies among the 800 staff at central office, which he characterized as a “Wild West” of cronyism.
“We’re here for the kids. This is not a jobs program,” he said. “Big change.”
This is a man unafraid to say the quiet parts out loud. His Sunday night emails have become a must-read. In the March 29 edition, he decried some of the district’s processes as a “byzantine and Kafkaesque nightmare.” He called out “the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ pervading some places, especially around our BIPOC and multilingual students,” and criticized SPS for “Accepting and excusing low performance rather than owning it.”
No Seattle superintendent in memory has said anything remotely so pointed.
It’s refreshing. But some educators have taken offense. At last week’s community meeting in West Seattle, a teacher at Denny Middle School stood up and told Shuldiner it was irresponsible for a white male to make such public statements without offering data to back them up.
Later, she acknowledged, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”
A teacher knows the numbers as well as anyone: Kids of color don’t do well in Seattle schools. The gaps between white and Black students in discipline rates, test scores and gifted education have long been among the widestof any urban district in the country.