Mr. Lilly is so right once again.

Instead of focusing on the statistic (the achievement gap), focus on the reality: some students lack necessary skills.

Once you do that, the solutions become obvious. We need to identify the students who are lacking the skills and get them the help they need (it won't be the same for all of them) to acquire the skills. Is that such a difficult concept? Simple as it sounds, it has never been tried in Seattle Public Schools.

Seattle Public Schools has, for at least ten years now, had closing the academic achievement gap as its top priority and goal. Yet at no time has the District ever made a plan for how to achieve that goal. Think about that for even a minute and you'll get a sense of how deeply dysfunctional the district really is. Can you imagine any other organization of professionals who set such a clear goal for themselves, and who natter on about it incessantly, yet never made a plan for achieving their goal? It's unthinkable.

The District can close the gap. They haven't done it so far because they haven't ever tried.

Dr. Enfield and Dr. Goodloe-Johnson described Response to Intervention (getting students the specific support they needed when they fell behind) as part of the core work of the District. In the very next breath they said that they are looking for an outside organization to help them pay for the work. If it is the core work of the District then why doesn't the District give it a higher priority in the budget? What could possibly be a higher priority? The $700,000 spent on the District's new web site? The $1,000,000 spent to give a brand new Dell laptop to every student at STEM? The $750,000 paid to a consultant to help choose novels for high school students to read? The $50,000 spent on public relations for the new teacher contract? The $10 million spent on teacher coaches?

These education bureaucrats have blinded themselves with their own sophistication. They focus so much on statistics that they can't see the students anymore. The job isn't to improve the statistics, it's to teach the kids. Teach the kids and the statistics will improve. Dr. Goodloe-Johnson's primary method for improving school stats was to import higher scoring students into the school. Other improvements came despite her, not because of her. Real improvement will come when the focus is back on the students.

To "Coolpapa" Charlie Mas: You are one of the most informed and analytical district critics so I really appreciate the complement.The vision here is that if every third grader actually could read at grade level by the end of the year, many of the other problems facing schools -- and particularly our teachers -- would be greatly mitigated. We know high school graduation would go up. Not to mention that reading probably is THE key life skill that should come out of K-12. In grades 1, 2 and 3, each child's reading progress should be insured -- by a personal tutor if need be.
Dick Lilly

As coolpapa said, under Goodloe-Johnson, the district's strategy to dealing with the achievement gap, as measured by % of underperforming students in a school and average test scores in a school, was not to help the underperforming students, but to shuffle students around in school closures and program changes to import higher performing students into the schools. Managing the metrics might have made the short-term numbers look better, but it did nothing to help struggling students learn.

As Dick Lilly said, the superintendent and central administration can't teach kids to read; the teachers in the classrooms do that. The school district should deploy its to make sure each of those non-readers learns to read. To do that, district should cut its central administration spending from the current outrageous nearly 9% of budget down to the norm of 6% of budget of other school districts, pushing resources and authority down to principals, teachers, and classrooms.

Really heartening to see the Crosscut pieces, and ensuing dialogue, about the plight of Seattle public schools. Some really informed opinion being expressed.

Dick Lilly is right that we should not keep waiting for a superman or woman to take over as superintendent and immediately transform things.
On the other hand, there is never a substitute for knowledgeable, determined leadership at the top.

Public education used to be the place where we all pinned our hopes---the means by which everyone, no matter how humble, could be lifted toward opportunity and productive service. Now we are settling, in many school districts, for cutting dropout rates or pushing kids to a diploma, whether
prepared for the outside world or not. This is particularly sad in a highly-educated, relatively prosperous city such as Seattle.

Yes. Yes. Let's take our time.
When it comes to public education - that's just the way it is.
We've grown used to scandals and squandered funds being de rigueur.

After all, we never did anything in 2002 when Seattle schools came up with millions of dollars in unaccounted for funds. Why hurry to do anything now? The taxpayers will always pony up and pass another levy "for the children."

How soon we forget.

Remember when Joseph Olchefske was the superintendent of Seattle schools and millions of dollars were misspent, misappropriated, squandered, unaccounted for?

"When millions of dollars of an annual budget simply evaporate...The school board can only be held accountable by voters — let's remember that next year — but hard questions need to be asked of Olchefske's tenure now. Sadly, that's not likely to happen; as anyone who's ever attended a board meeting or retreat knows, lavish appreciations are the order of the day, and the warm fuzzies and edu-babble are just more ways to elude accountability." -- Seattle Weekly, "The Buck Slides by Olchevske," 10/23/2002.

Fast forward to 2011. More millions of dollars have evaporated. More ways to elude accountability. Fire the superintendent, sure. Then let's take our time. Let's form committees - perhaps even a "Blue Ribbon" commission. Appoint an interim superintendent. Yawn. All will be forgotten when the next audit reveals millions of dollars in property and funds have disappeared. And, the voters will sheepishly approve another levy to make up for all the squandered dollars. They will always vote "for the childurn" - won't they? Life goes on.

Thank you Dick Lilly for saying this outloud.

One thing that Charlie left out - that he says all the time and it bears repeating - we don't have struggling schools, we have struggling students.

Up north in Everett and down south in Tukwila, they get this. They have done direct intervention and case work with high school students just starting their downward slip (they don't wait for them to hit rock bottom). Result? Their graduation rates have steadily climbed, each to over 80%.

The next Families and Education levy features - guess what? - direct intervention and case management for struggling students. It's a great strategy and you have to wonder why the district doesn't do it.

As for Dr. Enfield, I am urging her to do NOTHING new. We need to calm the waters, sort out what needs oversight and fixing and get this district back on track. No fancy "data warehouses", no "performance management framework." We need to get back to teaching students and supporting teachers and principals in those efforts.

What seems to have always worked is smaller class sizes, especially for k-3rd grade. Parental involvement is just as important. We don't need to redevelop education, the model that we have had for the last 80 years or so has worked fine, when properly funded. However, our community seems to only want to fund the latest fad in education, if they want to fund anything at all. Funding, support, parental involvement - doesn't matter the method - without money and an enthused environment nothing will be achieved.

I suppose I understand Mr. van Dyk's faith in "leadership", but the superintendent, no matter how great a leader, isn't the person who teaches students to read or do long division. That work is done by classroom teachers. There's been a lot of nonsense talk about "teacher quality" by people who act as if it were a measurable quality - which it isn't - and that it is a major determinant in student outcomes - which it isn't. When teacher quality isn't a significant determinant of student outcomes, and it is the teachers doing the work, how much less a factor must "superintendent quality" be?

We don't need a superstar, not at all. We need the opposite: a competent manager and administrator who doesn't think that the District is all about the superintendent.

Dick, thanks for this thoughtful piece with a bit of old fashioned common sense thrown in. In their zeal -some of them do mean well- the ed. reform crowd has laid waste to common sense. It is that blind insistence that only way to improve public education is a wholesale upending of it. It is time to rethink that notion. The idea of a laser-like focus on reading competency(with tutors to supplement if necessary) is spot on and probably the best use of scarce resources.

It is time that the Board take a deep breath,not try to change anything,and try to remember that educating each and every child is the central mission of the District. As as coolpapa suggests(great name by the way,)find a good manager, one who understands that the real work does not happen in the board rooms of the the politcally well connected nor admistrative offices at the Stanford Center,but in every classroom.