Seattle has the No. 1 big city school district. We should act like it

When Seattle's new school superintendent got to town, from the Midwest, he seemed aware that the reputation of our city and our schools has been hypernegative, especially on social media.

"It's like that old Mark Twain quote, I think the rumors of your death have been greatly exaggerated," Ben Shuldiner told the School Board in February.

So Shuldiner set out to do a sort of newcomer's evaluation of Seattle's schools. He visited 35 of them in the first month. He took a fresh look at local and national data. He asked a basic question: Is it working?

What he found will probably come as news even to parents with kids in the district.

"In the aggregate, Seattle Public Schools is among the highest performing school systems on the entire West Coast," a surprised Shuldiner told the board at a retreat in March.

He listed all the ones that Seattle outranks.

"Everett, Portland, San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Francisco, San Jose, uh … Tacoma, Kent, Sacramento, Fresno, Oakland," he said, pointing to a list. "Federal Way - that's around here, right? I'm sorry, I'm new."

The list included Bellevue, at the top, "so Seattle is No. 2, of all these cities. That's amazing."

A new report on math and reading scores in 10,000 districts around the country shows Seattle in an even better light. According to Stanford's Educational Opportunity Project, Seattle ranks in the top 12% of all districts in the nation, including rural, urban and well-off suburbs. Among districts in the 25 largest U.S. cities, we're No. 1.

Second place among big cities is not close, either.

Seattle's math scores are in the 85th percentile of all districts, with reading at the 88th percentile. The next best big city district, San Diego, is at the 57th percentile in math and 68th for reading.

The report is the gold standard of school analysis, as it combines state and national testing data. It looks at third through eighth grades and covers 42 states plus D.C., though not all states have comparable data from the latest year. (Among the biggest cities, it excludes New York.)

I had assumed that educated, high-tech-oriented cities like Boston; Austin, Texas; or San Francisco would have comparable schools to Seattle. But they don't. Out of 10,000 school districts, Seattle ranks about 5,000 districts ahead of Boston, 4,000 ahead of Austin and 3,000 ahead of San Francisco.

Seattle also outranks smaller city districts like Boise, Idaho; Minneapolis; and Madison, Wis. A close match to Seattle is, astonishingly, Ann Arbor, Mich. - a university town of 125,000 people with less poverty than any of the big cities.

"I don't think you get enough credit for being, really, such a high-performing district," Shuldiner said.

Why don't we? It's a Seattle tic, perhaps an old modesty holdover from our Norwegian days. We're the Eeyore of cities. We have the No. 1 big-city school district in the nation, and not only does nobody ever talk about that, but much of the public conversation is about how much we suck.

The Stanford report focuses on how America's schools are in an overall "learning recession," with falling test scores accelerated by the pandemic. It found this happened in Seattle, too, though the district is bouncing back from the pandemic better than most. It ranks Seattle in the 88th percentile for "learning rate" during the 2022-25 period, a measure of how much students' scores have advanced compared to grade level.

Seattle is roughly back to 2019 prepandemic levels in math, though still lags behind about a third of a grade level in reading.

Overall, Seattle students test about 1.25 grade levels above the national average. At the district's peak 10 years ago, Seattle was a bit higher than that, from 1.5 to 1.75 grade levels above average.

The report also highlights Seattle's biggest problems. They're related to the splitting of the city that I keep writing about.

Kids from low-income families in Seattle test 1.7 grade levels below the national average. "Nonpoor" kids are testing 2.5 grades above the average. The difference, or gap, is a yawning 4.2 grade levels. This means that when the nonpoor kids are entering high school, their low-income classmates, of the same age, are academically still back in fourth grade.

The gap between Seattle's Black and white kids is even wider - 4.6 grade levels. If that persists through high school, it means that when the white kids are graduating, their Black schoolmates are, academically, still back in middle school.

Shuldiner zeroed right in on this. The city's learning gaps are so wide "you can drive a truck through."

It isn't just a Seattle problem. The report found that San Francisco's Black-white gap is 5.75 grade levels, while Austin's is 4.9 grades, both even wider than Seattle's.

Mike Preiner runs The Math Agency, a local nonprofit dedicated to eliminating these gaps in math. He's got a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford, as well as 100 math tutors working in five schools in Seattle and Bellevue, so I asked him what Seattle might do now.

He said it's crucial to keep accelerating academic offerings, such as advanced learning, otherwise the district may continue to lose families to private schools. For kids who are behind, there are three main things that could help them catch up - "tutoring, summer school, mentoring," he said.

"Washington is a relatively weak state for tutoring, which is a shame, because it's an area that's proven to work," he said.

North Carolina, for instance, established a statewide tutoring program coming out of the pandemic that gets funding from the state Legislature. We should do this; we should have already done this.

The report also notes that Seattle's students are chronically absent from school at double the rate from before the pandemic. Nearly a quarter of Seattle students miss more than 10 days. (For all Washington state schools, it's even worse, at 29%.)

There needs to be a districtwide effort just on getting kids to show up.

So the new superintendent obviously has a ton of work cut out for him. This column hasn't mentioned the budget deficits. Nor have I dwelled on all the administrative screw-ups from the recent past, like that malpractice proposal from two years ago to close most of the top-performing schools in the city.

Despite it all, Seattle's got the No. 1 big city school district in the nation; one of the "highest performing school systems on the entire West coast."

It says something about the power of Seattle's culture of criticism and self-doubt that it took an outsider to tell us what we've got. Now that he has, we should drop the Eeyore shtick and fight for it.

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