Seattle Public Schools triage: taking from poor schools to help poorer ones

I read a news story the other day that made me wonder if Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, admired for her ability to make tough decisions and stand up to political heat, had finally gone too far.

Thurgood Marshall Elementary, a Central Area school that two years ago struggled with a student body of which 83 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, is losing its Title 1 funding — the federal aid specifically for schools with large numbers of poor students.

Marshall's percentage of low-income students is dropping, to 42 percent. Other elementary schools have lost their Title 1 funding a la Marshall. The schools have enough low-income students to face all the challenges of high-poverty schools, but not enough to justify Title 1 funds.

Some of the shift can be accounted for by changing demographics. Seattle has pockets of startling wealth and abject poverty, but part of the draw of the city's shift back to neighborhood schools was the integration, in some cases, of those two worlds.

But that's not why Marshall and other schools are losing their funding. Indeed, they would have still qualified had it not been for Goodloe-Johnson's decision to raise the threshold for Title 1 funding. Schools that once received aid if 40 percent of their students were low-income, now had to have 55 percent.

Money saved will be invested in other schools, specifically a cadre of schools whose persistent underperformance has landed them on a federal watch. One of the remedies required by federal law is tutoring services and Seattle will spend $2.8 million next year paying private entities such as Sylvan Learning Center to tutor low-income students.

That money had to come from somewhere. Faced with a legal and moral obligation to dramatically improve the city's worse-off schools, Goodloe-Johnson in effect robbed Peter to try and save Paul.

If her triage plan works, schools that lost Title 1 funds will carry on, albeit with less. The other schools, infused with additional aid — including federal funding from the Obama's administration's improvement-grant program — get better faster.

But taking aid from poor schools to give to even poorer ones?

"What a lot of people don't understand is that when we have constrained resources, all you can do to invest in something is to take it from somewhere else," said Marguerite Roza, associate professor in the University of Washington's College of Education.

Seattle didn't invent this new model of spreading resources for low-income schools more thickly among fewer buildings. Title 1 is a 40-year-old program whose results have been underwhelming. Districts nationwide are revisiting how they use the funding. Indeed, the Obama administration is requesting funding for the program next year remain flat — $14.5 — while other areas of education are receiving stepped-up resources.

I think funding for low-income students should follow the students, whether they're enrolled at Marshall or another school comparatively better off — say, Laurelhurst Elementary. It should be like special-education funding: The money stays with the student. But for now and for maximum impact, money for low-income children is following the schools most in need.

That's not exactly what parents want to hear. Amid draconian cuts to education budgets, no one wants to see a program or their student ignored, even for the sake of a school comparatively more needy.

For one, I don't think any school or program will starve. It defeats the purpose of reforms if the gains Marshall and other schools have garnered were to be allowed to slip away.

Instead, Seattle's superintendent is making a choice: She thinks many schools can swim and she's going after the schools with the students drowning in an ocean of failure.

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