TAF: capturing the ones left behind

To grasp the vivid failure of public schools, one had to be at Seattle's Westin Hotel, nibbling a breakfast roll with ears ringing from the thunderous applause.

The celebratory moment last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the Technology Access Foundation, also known as TAF. If time flies with success but drags with failure, the decade since Trish Millines Dziko transformed her Microsoft career and wealth into a science, technology, engineering and math academy has been one big blur.

Think about it. When Dziko and her partners set out in 1997, the digital divide was as wide as the Grand Canyon. The Seattle School District was wired, but computers sat untouched. Teachers were no more technologically proficient than the rest of us. Dziko recalls begging students to enroll in an eight-month pilot session.

The first lesson was taking apart a computer, component by component. I'm betting more than a few students pondered escape. But once the 27 high-schoolers completed the program and were offered internships at Internet companies around the region, TAF's begging days were over.

An average of 300 students move through TAF each year. An intensive program for ninth- through 12th-graders culminates with professional internships. A kindergarten through eighth-grade program operates in five schools in White Center and one in Seattle.

Children who entered school never having touched a computer emerge from TAF talking about SQL Servers and writing in HTML and Java Script. For the uninitiated, SQL is Structured Query Language, a Microsoft version of computer speak — sort of like Kleenex as one type of tissue. HTML is another common computer language and Java Script is the reason we can put our cursor on a word and have it light up and take us someplace else.

My applause for all of this is bittersweet because I'm bothered by public education's inability to do what TAF is doing, or to hire the nonprofit to do it for them.

Public educators promise but don't deliver. Despite all of the talk about education reform and academic rigor, despite tens of millions of dollars raised in voter-approved technology levies, receiving a solid foundation in the hard sciences is a hit-or-miss proposition in Seattle and other public schools. And math? Think subterranean WASL scores. I rest my case.

The Seattle School Board talks endlessly of narrowing the academic disparities between minority and low-income students and the rest of the student population. While they talk, Dziko is walking the walk. But TAF cannot be left to succeed alone. It doesn't reach enough of this city's 46,000 students, many of whom are struggling and will become part of the stubbornly high drop-out rate.

The solution would be to welcome TAF into the fold and use public education's mighty bandwidth to duplicate a proven program. Seattle could use the help. Dziko and the principal of the public elementary school that two of her four children attend have created a successful version. But TAF has been consistently rebuffed by the Seattle School District.

In a moment rich with irony, the district's chief academic officer, Carla Santorno, was in the audience at the TAF breakfast clapping madly. She even phoned Dziko later. But Santorno, charged with laying out a bold academic vision for Seattle schools, recently collapsed like a house of cards when faced with TAF's proposal to move into one of the city's worst-performing schools, Rainier Beach.

The school rejected TAF like a fearful competitor. Teachers and administrators seemed to fear that if TAF uncovered math and science whizzes at Rainier Beach, well, all of the staff's self-congratulatory mutterings about the difficulty of teaching poor and minority children would become suspect. As it should.

Dziko isn't wasting breath lamenting Seattle's missed opportunity. She's too busy responding to other districts, including the Federal Way School District, that are interested in TAF.

Following the breakfast, I bumped into TAF alum Barok Yemane. The 18-year-old sported a gravity-defying tangle of dark curls and the cool reticence of Generation Y.

I asked Yemane if he planned to study computer technology in college. He shot me a look that said, "been there, done that." Yemane is working for the public-relations firm Waggoner Edstrom and considering college majors: mathematics or physics. Before turning back to his cellphone, which looked like it could do everything including order lunch, Yemane told me he was interested in a field of study that would propel him to intellectual centers such as NASA.

Capturing the ones left behind doesn't take a rocket scientist. Doing it means our kids can grow up to be one.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com