No victory for school reform backers in levy defeat

There are at least four “school reform” constituencies in Seattle, as well as the hard-core body of voters who habitually vote against any tax measure, including special levies. Unless three of the groups of reform voters combine, the special levy for regular maintenance and operation swill fail next Tuesday. How the levy goes, moreover, will affect the future of all kinds of school reform.

Note that there is no sizable constituency for business-as-usual in the school district, because nearly everybody acknowledges that public education is in trouble and needs to change. the problem is in deciding what kind of change and how to achieve it.

The first reform group is the school establishment, made up of state and district education officials, the teachers’ union (Washington Education Association) and the organized business community. In an alliance that is sometimes uneasy, the WEA is willing to cooperate with business and the crusading new Seattle District superintendent, John Stanford, to increase accountability for curriculum standards and greater site management (school control at the school level) in return for assurance that nothing too radical will disturb the power of the union. The education establishment reformers, calling themselves “Schools First,” back the levy strongly.

A counter-levy group has organized around People for Ethical Government (“PEG”), a title that suggests, I guess, that everyone else is unethical. This group has taken a fair shot at wasteful practices of pas school management and is not prepared to concede even sincerity to former Gen. Stanford as he tries to improve things. “No more money until they account for past spending!” the “PEG” campaign demands.

The trouble is, we know from a similar experience 20 years ago that a final failure of an M&O levy is not likely to stimulate analysis of past actions by the school district, but a crisis, with huge increases in class sizes, reductions in hours of classroom instruction and the furloughing of hundreds of teachers and counselors, plus curtailment of while programs in language instruction, arts and music.

This brings us to reform group three, the backers of school vouchers, embracing among others the large number of parents with children in private school, including some minorities. A different (and sometimes over-lapping) reform group consists of backers of charters schools, who want to retain the public school system but allow parents and teacher groups to organize neighborhood and specialized schools without the day-to-day direction of district headquarters. Proponents of vouchers and of charter schools differ on their prescriptions, but they share the same diagnosis: The central bureaucracy and the teachers union have confused what’s good for them for what’s good for the kids.

How big are these structural reform groups? Well, an Elway Poll in February showed the charter school idea with a majority support (51 percent to 38 percent) among Seattle voters. Voucher backers will have Initiative 173 on the ballot this fall. Charter school proponents have Initiative 177 up at the same time.

However, you would think, given the growing support for these structural reform ideas, that the education establishment might have been willing at least to allow the charter schools proposal to be adopted by the state Legislature on a modified basis. And in the recent legislative session they were, but only in the Republican House. In the Democratic Senate the teachers union made sure that the compromise was killed the only “charter school” bill the WEA would sanction was a Trojan horse that borrowed the “charter school” title while assuring that no real change would take place.

The temptation must be very strong for the structural reformers to sit out the levy. Many believe that the media and business community will fail to back the structural reform until failure of the system is incontestable, as happened with mandatory busing. But, in fact, backers of structural reforms probably will go to the polls and vote for the levy. They must know that you cannot destroy the system to save it.

You do not have to look back 20 years to see how failure breeds failure; just look south today to Portland. There the state government made bold promises of education improvements five years ago, but forgot to instate the financial measures to implement them. Meanwhile, concurrent state tax and revenue cutbacks forced the Portland school district to drop its budge from $351 million to $304 million over four years. So instead of realizing Oregon’s high-sounding reform aims, parents are seeing increases in class size, big cuts in kindergarten and special education programs and most ominously, as the the Associated Press reports–middle-class parents placing their children in private schools or moving to the suburbs.

What Portland has absorbed over four years, Seattle will have to accomplish in one year if the levy fails. The chance to get school-based budgeting to support children, not the system, will not be advanced in the midst of such mayhem. It will be killed.

The PEG group express the fear that passage will be interpreted as a sign that all is well with the Seattle schools and that improved accountability is not necessary. Some, indeed, may make that interpretation, but if they do it’s a terrible mistake. In f act, the present weakness of voter backing in Seattle should be a wake-up call telling district and state official that serious and deep reform cannot be delayed.

Reformers who want either vouchers or charter schools in the long run are best advised to go resolutely to the polls Tuesday and support the levy. But after the levy passes it ight be helpful if some of the education establishment made more of an effort to listen to what the structural reformers–backed by a growing body of experience in other states–are trying to tell them. Reform doesn’t have much of a chance if the reformers are divided.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 22, 1996