After 34 years of writing about education, I’m pretty convinced that everyone who volunteers their time to help run public schools starts out wanting to do right by kids, even if those good intentions sometimes go off the rails.
That is especially true in Seattle, where the middle class has long supported public education, despite this city’s unusually high rate of private school enrollment. Recently, that flight to private has been driven by the ballooning class sizes, slumping academic progress and general chaos that are now hallmarks of Seattle Public Schools.
Four years ago, in an effort to stem these problems, the school board signed up for something called Student Outcomes Focused Governance, an approach to running large, urban districts that promised to streamline operations and simultaneously improve student performance.
So far, it has cost Seattle roughly $300,000, including membership fees, conferences and mandatory trainings, provided by a Texas-based coach named AJ Crabill, who bills at $1,000 a day. (This may be a bargain; Crabill has charged other districts $650 an hour.)
First red flag: There are all kinds of management theories that groups can adopt without dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Second red flag: The Student Outcomes model directs Seattle’s unpaid board members to focus exclusively on big-picture policies, while leaving nitty-gritty details — like financial oversight — to the salaried professionals at district headquarters.
One result is that SPS administration leaders are now free to spend significant amounts of money — up to $1 million — without any public discussion or debate by the school board. The new governance model essentially pushes board members to the sidelines on finances, a risky move when you’re responsible for a $1.2 billion budget.
Back in 2021, the only board member to vote against adopting SOFG was Leslie Harris, who has since vacated her seat but remains an active observer. As she recalls it, the original pitch went like this: School board members were working at cross purposes, too much in the weeds and not focused on holding staff accountable for student outcomes.
Fair enough.
“But then you’ve got this cultlike silver bullet,” Harris said, referring to edicts from coach Crabill dictating how district practices would change. Holding community meetings with constituents was suddenly verboten. Harris says she was “publicly castigated” by other board members for doing so.
During work sessions with the board, coach Crabill often listened in by phone. “And then he grades you on the meeting,” Harris added. “What legislature or city council gets graded?”
Dozens, probably, since at least 30 districts across the country have jumped on the SOFG bandwagon, including Atlanta, Austin and San Francisco, where parents are rising up in revolt.
Back in Seattle, Crabill’s highhanded style put off mom Tara Chace enough that she began to do some digging. She found a charismatic young leader with a spotty education history who’d led efforts to close two dozen schools in Kansas City, Mo., when he was president of the school board there in 2010. He left in 2016, changed his name and took a position as the Texas Education Agency’s deputy commissioner for governance.
Crabill bills himself as an evangelist for students. He believes school systems exist solely for academic achievement, and suggests school board members should face “automatic recalls if student scores drop dramatically,” according to one citizen journalist who watched him at work.
In this model, anything not explicitly geared toward improved student outcomes is beyond a school board’s purview. For instance: student safety.
“School safety isn’t a student outcome,” wrote a perplexed board member in St. Paul, Minn., who attended a training given by Crabill that felt closer to indoctrination. “Culturally welcoming schools aren’t a student outcome. Small class sizes aren’t a student outcome. Healthy school lunches aren’t a student outcome. So many things that our community will ask us for are not considered student outcomes.”
He described SOFG as inflexible, harmful and “anti-democratic.”
Across the country in Seattle, Chace feels much the same.
“As soon as the board adopted SOFG, there was no discourse, just these unanimous votes,” she said. “I mean, if I’m electing a representative, I want them to represent me.”
Crabill is employed as director of governance at Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit that receives funding from the Gates Foundation, which supports charter schools. That’s rocket fuel to conspiracy theorists who suspect Crabill’s approach is actually a Trojan horse-style attempt to undermine traditional public education.
I’m not going to try and plumb the inner workings of Crabill’s mind, nor those of the board members who signed on with him. The question is whether to stay the course.
Outcomes so far suggest not. Remember the ambitious aims of Seattle’s Office of African American Male Achievement? The promise that Black boys in the seventh grade would jump from 24% doing math at grade level to 70% in four years? Those audacious, and frankly fantastical, benchmarks came straight out of the SOFG playbook. So did the board’s decision cut its two regular monthly meetings to one, raising questions about their commitment to transparency.
Whether or not Crabill is a huckster and the board members who threw in with him were duped, the question before Seattle now is when to cut bait. Academic outcomes have barely budged since the pandemic. Two kids were murdered on Seattle school campuses in less than two years, but parents say their ideas for improved security have been waved aside. (Remember, school safety is not a student outcome.)
To create “well-resourced schools” the Seattle School Board proposed shuttering 21 buildings — just like Crabill’s old board in Kansas City — then acknowledged that those remaining wouldn’t necessarily see improved staffing.
Seattle has a school board election coming up in November, where four of seven seats will be open. Voters should question candidates about their views of Student Outcomes Focused Governance and choose accordingly.
Maybe the big lesson here is to stop looking for gimmicky shortcuts. To get Seattle Public Schools back on track, it’s going to take hard work and good faith from everyone who lives here and cares about Seattle — not a management consultant flown in from Texas.
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