Why close a school that works?

Guest columnist
Why close a school that works?

By Kathryn Robinson
Special to The Times

My daughter, a sunny first-grader who is currently studying mathematical graphs and the life cycle of a pumpkin seed, is doing so at Montlake Elementary School. Last week, we found out that due to Seattle School Board budget restructuring, there will, after next year, be no Montlake Elementary School.

It is one of the 10 Seattle public elementary schools recommended for closure by a School Board looking desperately for ways to stanch its $20-million hemorrhage. The problem is real, insistent, complex and — requiring, as it does, cuts that will be painful for someone — a public-relations nightmare. The solution will hurt.

Let me submit, however, that the particular solution the board has recommended will do a lot worse than hurt. It will kill the very enterprise — the pursuit of academic excellence — we presumably entrust our schools with tax dollars to achieve.

To really understand the injury, one needs to look at the kind of academic environment Montlake provides. Built in 1924, the noble brick edifice sits atop a knoll in a leafy urban neighborhood that has in the past 20 years grown in affluence around it. Literally and figuratively, it is the centerpiece of a community that census figures say is among the top 10 child-saturated neighborhoods in the city. Over 30 percent of its 270 students walk to school; over 65 percent of its parent community volunteers in some capacity. It's an urban Mayberry.

The PTA prioritizes education, committing the bulk of its fund-raising dollars to reduced class sizes for the three R's, which helps allow Montlake's fleet of exceptional teachers under last year's peer-voted "Outstanding Principal of the Year" Claudia Allan to nurture the children to soaring academic achievement.

Last year's Washington Assessment of Student Learning results pronounced Montlake No. 2 in the city for its combined math, reading and writing scores, and one of the top 10 in the state overall. A gently firm civility policy enforces functional social dynamics on the playground; a special-needs inclusion program instills the value of difference. Kids who come to Montlake with special needs leave in the student mainstream. Kids of color who arrive with "achievement gaps" close them right up.

In an era of failing public schools, Montlake is, by every measure, stupefyingly successful. Which we parents naively assumed would be enough to protect it and other high-functioning programs — North Beach Elementary and Garfield's APP notably — when the inevitable cuts had to come.

But suddenly, mysteriously, the School Board dropped "academic excellence" as a criterion for saving schools. Suddenly, Montlake's extravagantly successful educational program was reduced to the matter of its antique building and small site. Suddenly, its WASL test scores were pronounced unreliable, reflecting, intimated the board, factors outside of a school's control.

Yes, this is the same body that promotes the WASL as the school system's prime accountability index.

"Ironic, don't you think?" quipped my daughter's teacher Joan McBride, a seasoned pro who knows more about teachable moments than the rest of us will learn in a lifetime. "They're all too ready to hold teachers accountable if the kids don't do well on the test — but now they're telling us that our kids' academic performance isn't about the teaching at all."

Touché. I suspect what it reveals is a School Board with a deeply conflicted attitude toward academic excellence. The higher the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood, the higher its test scores. It's a tragic axiom and one my husband and I know intimately, having wielded school choice to flee the academically wanting schools of our own Rainier Valley neighborhood to snag our child a desk at Montlake in the first place.

At the time, plenty in our cohort no doubt branded our decision selfish, elitist and a betrayal of our own neighborhood's promise. Indeed, no one would argue that Montlake's kids don't benefit from their neighborhood's ambient advantages of disposable wealth and parents with volunteer time. It's a complex and daunting issue.

And one that one can now only assume has instilled in the School Board an ambivalence toward academic excellence itself, as if it were merely an emblem of privilege instead of what it actually is: the ultimate goal of public education. If academic achievement is no longer to be relied upon as an authoritative standard for a school's performance, why the heck are we using the WASL at all? That was the question of the day yesterday, when a whole slew of Montlake fourth-graders who were scheduled to take the test instead marched in front of the school in protest.

But if academic achievement is still to be valued — a remarkable question to have to ask about a school district — then we obviously need to work harder to find a solution that doesn't destroy successes like Montlake, but uses them instead as models for raising all boats.

"Closing Montlake would be so much more than just closing a school," one fellow parent tearfully mused, to my (full disclosure) equally tearful assent. It's seven miles from my home and still it has wrapped itself around my family to become our community, too. But Montlake's no different from other schools in this respect: Schools build community. Every school currently on the chopping block represents a community about to feel emptied and anchorless.

What's different about Montlake is that, by the Seattle School District's own standards, it's the fulfillment of the promise: the successful, thriving, academically rigorous urban public school. The final irony, for my family, is that even if Montlake parents were to persuade the district to keep the school open, the district's new neighborhood assessment plan would disqualify my daughter from continuing there. It's a hard fact that nevertheless does not dampen my devotion to this place that is, quite simply, what every public school in America dreams of becoming.

If the superintendent's "Reshaping the Future of Seattle's Public Schools" campaign is about shuttering that, what, one wonders, is that new shape likely to be?

Kathryn Robinson is a Seattle writer.