The Seattle School District’s Supreme Day

As most know, the Supreme Court is hearing a case based on the Seattle School Districts use of race as a "tiebreaker". The case originated when a group of parents sued the school because their children were not allowed to attend Ballard High School, their neighborhood school, which also just happened to be the brand new rebuilt school with all of the new facilities. The school district wanted to make sure the ethnicity of the kids at Ballard matched that of the kids in the district as a whole. The reason the district gives is that a diverse population is an important part of the education process. Now a little background, the Ballard area of Seattle is historically the Scandinavian section of Seattle. You can not go a block without seeing a Scandinavian flag, Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc. The area is overwhelmingly white and also overwhelmingly liberal. The Republican Party does not even bother running candidates for state offices that cover the Ballard area. I happen to live just North of Ballard, drive through it on my commute to work every day. In addition, my son’s neighborhood high school would be Ballard High if we were still in our house in another 7 or 8 years. I also had a relative who worked at Ballard High up until recently. I know Ballard and yes it is true, people in Ballard do not know how to drive.

A couple of points…

I always question when something like this is used as a "tiebreaker". I would be curious to know what constitutes a tie. This is a bigger issue when you are talking college admissions and you are truly looking at each candidate and comparing GPAs and SATs and outside activities but still, when are two potential students considered tied where race would be used?

As I have mentioned before in a previous post, this strikes me as a situation where both sides simply want the best school for their kids. I am reasonable sure that if Rainier Beach was rebuilt tomorrow with all of the latest and greatest programs, parents from Ballard would be fighting to get their kids in at Rainier Beach and Rainier Beaches neighborhood parents would be fighting to keep the Ballard kids out.

The one really, really odd thing to me is a much under publicized fact that in the district program being reviewed, often the minority child that ended up going to Ballard, did not have Ballard as their first choice. In effect both kids were being denied their first choice in order to make Ballard more diverse.

Another fact that you are not hearing about is that the racial balancing that the district deems so important is only being used at over subscribed schools. There was not a plan in place that would make the schools kids did not want to go to be more diverse. It was just the popular schools were affected by the plan. So if a school had more desks than kids, the Seattle School District was not doing anything to change the underlying racial makeup of those schools. This fact seems to undercut the district claim that diversity is an important element of the education process.

Another problem is the existence of the African American Academy. While the program under review covered just high schools, the African American Academy is a K-8 school that was specifically created to lessen the achievement gap between white and black students. Now if you were to look at the most current test scores, it is painfully obvious that the achievement gap is not being narrowed by the existence of the AAA. 5th grade, 2%, 1 out of 50 students, meet the minimum WASL standard for all 3 subjects.7th grade, 4%, less than 1 out of 20 meet the minimum for WASL.  8th grade, 3%, 1 in 33 meet all 3 minimums. This is one of, if not the worst, performing school in the district and is also by far the most non diverse school in the district, 94% African American, 3% Hispanic, no other group above 1%. I would be interested in hearing a school district representative’s response if asked why is it important to bus kids across the city in order to make the student body diverse yet there is a school specifically designed to be segregated? It would be one thing if test results from the AAA were above average but when they are at the very bottom for all schools, that is going to require some explaining. Like I said, it would be interesting to know, I have asked and can not seem to get a reply. I would also be interested in finding out why a parent would send their child to a school that is doing such a poor job of educating the children.

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