Better yet, give parents school choice. Let those who want to continue sending their kids and money to the current Democrat/union/tribe/non-profit indoctrination academies, do so. Let the rest of us send our kids, and our money, to places that teach kids to think for themselves.

Giving the City control over the school district wouldn't stop the City wackos from their ridiculous pursuits, Wilbur. It would just give them access to a different pot of money to use for same.

Despite the low opinion many may have of City and County government, both have substantial numbers of highly qualified managers. The school board and new interim superintendent should request the City and County "loan" several of their highly regarded managers to come in and at a minimum assess the district's business operations: facilities maintenance, finance, procurement, human resources, information technology, etc. and make recommendations for improvements. Where necessary, they might even loan a manager to the district for an extended period of time to restructure or reorganize those operations in the greatest need of change, while giving the district the opportunity to recruit a new superintendent and COO/CFO.

Frankly, the last thing the school board or district need is additional politicians getting involved.

Right on, David.
You've reduced the issue to a couple of essentials and offered a proposal that could effectively cure many chronic ills in our long-suffering school system.
How can we help you advance this?

I think Wilbur has this right, that David has proposed a more complicated solution than necessary. The problem is that school board members are unpaid, part-time, and have no staff, so they are unable to spend the time necessary to provide proper oversight. A simple solution is to pay school board members and give the board a modest budget. That should provide the time and resources necessary for the school board to act properly as a check on the superintendent and provide more accountability in the district.

I've been following the school district for 5 years seriously and another 10 before that. I've also been following City of Seattle issues for about 15 years. My kids are just finishing up.

I respect David Miller, but I do not find the solutions in his writings.

I don't think the City government gets to jump in and do anything at this time with Seattle Schools. They might want to prove that they're not more of the same and that they can get something done with the Families and Ed Levy.

Some success there might earn them more control, but until then I say forget that. As David mentioned they have their own house to clean up and they're not getting that done.

The Families & Education Levy would be a good place to illustrate whether the city of Seattle even has a clue how to help the district. Their current proposal is terrible. They should take some more time to rework it before putting it to a vote instead of wasting more of our money as they mostly have for the last 3 Families & Education Levies.

It's too bad they didn't take public comments at the months and months of meetings that Tim Burgess put together for the Families and Levy Oversight / Renewal Advisory Group. When I asked why no public comments, he said "NOT NOW", kind of rudely I might add.

Input after things are complete is so unproductive, but I did go to the special committee meetings for seattle's schoolchildren in council chambers last month and the recent hearing that was peopled by nothing but City of Seattle and Seattle Public Schools central staff employees.

Some successful strategies / evidence based clear-cut things they could do with the F&E; Levy Money might be:

1. Full funding for free all day Kindergarten (state currently funds 1/2 day) for all kids at all schools. Pay for K has to go.

2. Funding for in-school suspension programs (a la Baltimore) that include social / emotional / behavioral counseling along with regular coursework within the school building but not within the students' regular classrooms.

3. Funding (and amplified joint use agreements) for intensive use of school buildings all summer for K-12 traditional and innovative academic, enrichment and experiential programs for all kids in Seattle.

4. Funding for 250 Success Coordinators to advise counsel all students. The SC’s can help connect and strengthen relationships between schools and families which is essential and not happening. They also can perform triage to help the most gifted or the most disadvantaged learners navigate to the next level they need to get to.

5. Funding for School Based Health Centers that support the counselors and success coordinators in all the schools to help all students.
Above all though, it's not enough to identify proven strategies. We have to apply them to all schools without bias. The students will benefit in different ways depending on many factors, but they all need to benefit. We need to act more like one city.

It's become quite predictable that the government holds the top and the middle achievers down in order to focus on the lowest achievers in order to "show progress" in closing the achievement gap even though they’re actually not making progress.

This article written by Rob Evans, Ed.D. is a good foundational piece to understand the achievement gap.
http://www.theseattlejournal.com/2011/03/01/reframing-the-achievement-gap/

There is good science also available to help with governance. None of the ideas David brought up are amongst them.

In this case, the board did not do an adequate job supervising the superintendent. Activists have been calling BS on MG-J's "strategic plan", cronyism, wired contracts, and more for years. Propping them up with more political appointments...mmm..I don't think so and more people to form vote factions? Nope. With the 4 - 5% of the budget over the normal level of bureaucracy for urban district admin costs, 1% of a cut could fund a couple of researchers, accountants, auditors, and educators to advise the board / watchdog the district. The citizens should fund some oversight directly themselves as well. We need to do that to keep an eye on City Hall as well.

If we had a good superintendent who hired good people to run things at the district, the board would be in a better position to oversee them. So far the board has been nothing but baffled by the BS (except Smith-Blum, Patu, and more recently DeBell who seems to have stopped drinking the Kool Aid).

Education has become politicized, privatized & non-profitized as the feds, the hedge fund managers and "the charities" stroke their egos and espouse their junk science (think Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, Jeb Bush, and others). Together they have displaced science, sanity and common sense with their personal "faith based" ideologies and solutions that are profitable for their buddies.

People like Maria Goodloe-Johnson are trained to be puppets for these ideologists and profiteers. They don't belong anywhere and they sure don't belong here.

I thought a long time about SPS paying Board members and for new staff. Seven competitive salaries, benefits, offices, staff and related overhead is about a million dollars out of the school budget every year. The cost to the City would be about half that under what I was thinking and could well be funded out of the levy - at least to start.

There is also the idea of independence. School board members being paid out of the same pot of money as the superintendent are more likely to go along to get along. Separating the money for these individuals helps with independence.

Relying on the same governance system has got us nowhere for a couple of decades. The Board has continued to be kept in the dark and continued to not be aggressive enough in their review. Multiple iterations of Boards have not changed this appreciably. As I note in the article, that's at least partly because they don't have any independent source of information and no full-time help.

Thanks for the comments so far and I hope there will be more. There are clearly structural governance problems at SPS and we absolutely need to have this conversation. I would not be concerned in the least if we don't end up anywhere near the conversation I started in the original article, as long as we (a) do something and (b) that "something" isn't a minor variation on past efforts that have produced no change.

David Miller

The board is not kept in the dark, David. They choose to be in the dark.

People like Sherry Carr, Peter Meier and Steve Sundquist were elected by obscene amounts of money from outside this city. They ALWAYS vote the Broad Academy "strategic plan" block. That's why those people made those contributions...so Sherry, Peter, and Steve will vote their way and they do.

The math book fiasco is a great example. The UW / Gates says alignment of fuzzy math is the way to got so vote it dammit and they do. It doesn't work. The people have to go out and pay tutors for what they should get at school - explicit math instruction. If they can't afford KUMON, they just fail. The NMAP 2008 National Math Panel's Foundations for Success - the most definitive science on the topic to-date and instead of using it as a guiding document, they tell me reasonable people disagree. Well I say, NO. Reasonable people do research.

If I can do it with a full time job, they can do it. The science is not hiding. It's out there if you're looking for science and not marching orders from your puppeteer.

KateMartin,

I would like to correct your suggestion that there was no public input for the Families and Ed Levy. In fact, Mayor McGinn led a major effort to collect public comments for the levy and with his Youth and Families Initiative. Over 3,000 people participated in this public process with 6 large public meetings and over 160 smaller-community or neighborhood-based meetings.

Oversight and its impostors:

" By contrast, the Seattle City Council has a professional and experienced central staff and members can rely on this group’s independent research to confirm or poke holes in assertions made by the executive branch."

Alas, the central staff that earned that well deserved reputation has retired or soon will. What passes today ranges from a) checking to see how many other places are doing something that may well be stupid, to b) hiring executive staff to do the "asserting" in-house. Both varieties play to various vested interests, exactly what rigorous analysis was to minimize, if not preclude.

A profession as essential as policy analysis deserves licensing. Whereas, as times and matters get more complex, the function of oversight becomes less clear and the need increases. Vicious circles are resolvable, first step however, is seeing them.

The Port of Seattle Commissioners also are paid virtually nothing but a per diem stipend of $4,800-$6,000 annually and of course the travel junkets. They used to have no inside staff help assigned to them. In the last few years, the Commissioners have somehow gotten staff to assist them in their part-time job. Mr. Miller's call for more administrative overhead should not merely add non-teachers to the overall school payroll. Hiring more bureaucrats and creating more board seats will not solve the problem.

@animalal - This adds nothing to overall District payroll. That's the point. It's always attractive and easy to say, "Get rid of the bureacrats" but someone has to run the store. The district has evidenced no ability to do that for a decade or so and the School Board hasn't been able to do anything about it. SOMETHING has to change.

If you've got a specific idea on a durable idea of how to make that happen that isn't just a variation on what we've been doing before (i.e. voting in "better" Board members isn't a valid solution), I'm all ears. the whole point of the article was to start a conversation.

David Miller

I'd like to see the city hire and pay for an internal auditor position in SPS

The most recent internal auditor of SPS recently proved himself to be incompetent and corrupt, and, who knows, he may have been hired exactly for those characteristics.

Let the city hire and fund an auditor and we can be guaranteed his independence and autonomy from the SPS bureaucracy.

Such an auditor wouldn't just help guard against the next financial scandal.

He could also work to make sure that all the information provided to the board is accurate and complete, something Goodloe-Johnson had problems providing even beyond the Potter affair.

The Board has two staffers who, until recently, were mostly clerical (and both did a great job). That got reorganized and now one staffer was hired for her expertise in analysis and so WILL be doing critical work for the Board. The Board sought this change themselves.

Two, more Board members will not solve anything. Pay the Board for its work but bringing on new people who come to the Board from a different direction (i.e. not elected) and you will have more problems. You probably would see better results from a Board that does not have to worry about one job while trying to do another. For a district our size, they should be paid.

I agree with Parent Skeptic - the City should hire and oversee the next Internal Auditor. Clearly, the district in unable to carry out this duty themselves.

Kate Martin is right. The board is not kept in the dark; they choose to be in the dark.

The Board had plenty of independent information that they chose to ignore. It came from well-informed members of the community. It was members of the community who pointed out the misinformation the Board have been given about NTN schools. It was members of the public who told the Board about how they had been misled about the terms of the NTN contract. Nevermind the fact that the Board members themselves had been provided with a copy of the NTN contract - a contract they approved without, apparently, reading it. It was the public who made the Board aware of the misinformation on the CSIPs. It was a member of the public who informed the Board about the district's spending on "coaches".

The Board is willfully ignorant.

Director Martin-Morris, at the November 17 board meeting, scolded his colleagues for checking the truth of a statement by Dr. Enfield. The statement proved false, but Director Martin-Morris said that the Board should believe it anyway because it came from the staff.

If these people are in the dark it isn't because anyone has to work hard to keep them there.