Seattle schools changing course

In the late 1990s, former Seattle schools Superintendent John Stanford envisioned a stripped-down central office that put schools in control of their own destinies.

Put in place over time, the plan allowed principals and teachers to make many decisions about personnel, budgets and curriculum. Stanford's model was aimed at providing a variety of program options for families, and it energized the community for a diverse selection of schools managed from the bottom up. But Stanford's decentralization bandwagon has been making a slow turnaround over the past couple of years. Under new Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and the possibility of a new majority on the School Board, the district is heading in the other direction: toward a centralized, more uniform way of managing public schools in Seattle.

Among the changes under way:

• Starting with math this year, Seattle Public Schools is aligning its curriculum so that students are learning the same things in the same way across the district.

• The district is changing the way it doles out money to schools. Under the previous model, principals handled their own budgets, hiring teachers and support staff with the dollars they had.

Today, schools receive funding on a per-student basis; they get extra money for students who are in poverty or need bilingual or special-education services.

The new system will assign a certain number of staff members to each school depending on its size.

• Families still will have their choice of a school, but a plan expected to be approved by the board next year will assign students to a school in their neighborhood unless they choose not to go there. That means every student in Seattle will be guaranteed a spot at a school near his or her home.

• Goodloe-Johnson and the district's academic staff have promised more accountability. That's already being felt in Southeast Seattle, where the district gave extra money to three struggling schools — and also stepped in to take a bigger role in choosing school principals and other staff, like academic coaches.

District leaders say the new model will help especially schools that face a lot of challenges: students in poverty and kids of color, who often lag academically behind other children; and students at schools where shrinking enrollment has made it hard to attract good teachers and programs. Many of those schools are in Seattle's South End.

"This is a public education system, not a business system, if you will, so there's advantages of schools that already have built-in support, community support," said School Board President Cheryl Chow. "So the schools that have a high-poverty enrollment, they're not going to have access to as many resources."

Learning left "to chance"

Whether school districts should unify curriculum and coordinate operations is subject to debate in education circles.

Goodloe-Johnson, who took over the Seattle district in July, pointed to research by the Council of Great City Schools that indicates urban districts that face issues similar to Seattle's (including Houston, Boston and Miami-Dade County) do better with aligned curriculum. That's one of her first priorities — something Chief Academic Officer Carla Santorno was working on before Goodloe-Johnson started.

"We've been all over the board, and everybody's been doing a lot of different things," Goodloe-Johnson said. "Well, that leaves student learning to chance."

The way the district is set up now, she added, "you have no quality control."

It's important for teachers to get the same training, students to work at approximately the same pace, and for the district to know what's going on in classrooms, she said.

But many educational experts argue the opposite, said Joseph Olchefske, who succeeded Stanford as superintendent and now works for a Washington, D.C., educational think tank. Since kids learn differently, it's impossible to prepare them for the same test unless you have a diverse group of schools to teach all of them, he said.

"Given the diversity of the student body around Seattle, given the Seattle tradition of local control and diverse options, this sort of goes against that," he said. "A set of diverse options was a good fit with both what I believe in education and also fitting with the tradition and culture [in Seattle]."

But he said allowing schools to be diverse and do what they want has to pair with the district's willingness to step in and help underperforming schools.

To be sure, some Seattle schools thrived under a site-based system. Strong principals hired talented, experienced teachers, and involved parents helped build unique programs. School choice prompted schools to market themselves with videos and tours for kindergarten parents. As wait lists grew, parent groups at packed schools could raise money to hire more teachers, allowing schools to cap enrollment and lower class sizes.

Aiding struggling schools

Meanwhile, other schools struggled just to make ends meet, let alone offer special perks. Enrollment slumped, and with it, funding. More experienced teachers and principals often moved to other schools.

Roxhill Elementary principal Cathy Thompson said she felt the site-based system put the onus for success largely on principals. As former principal at Rainier View Elementary, which merged with Emerson Elementary this year and, like Roxhill, had a high percentage of students in poverty, Thompson had to seek grants to ensure she could afford special programs for her students.

Seattle should have stepped in sooner to help struggling schools, said Marguerite Roza, a research assistant professor in the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.

"There are cases of schools that thrive with needier student populations all over the country," she said. "If decentralization were done really well here, then the district would help the schools on the South End compete."

The district is taking the first step this year with its Southeast Initiative, in which it's investing money in Aki Kurose Middle School and Cleveland and Rainier Beach high schools. District leaders count that as part of an effort to centralize control, but Roza said it could have happened in a decentralized system, too.

"I think that centralized leadership can be done really well, and you know what you get and what you don't get with it," she said. "I actually have some faith that this superintendent might do a really good job with that, but it's a definite change in direction."

Goodloe-Johnson said her plan for a more centralized system isn't absolute. Schools will get to earn the right to do what they want. If students are doing well with a particular curriculum, she said, there's no reason to change.

"If you're not broken, if you're doing well, if you're meeting the targets, you don't have to change," she said. "I don't want it to sound like a takeover, because it's not a takeover. It's about accountability and results."

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com