City Councilman Burgess: 'You'd think the district would be horrified'

Seattle city councilman Tim Burgess has a vision for closing the opportunity gap, and it starts before students ever step foot in the classroom.

The man behind the program that provides free preschool to low-income kids in Seattle is using student and school performance data to try to convince Seattle Public Schools that they have a problem. That they need to address certain inequities in a different way.

From the Seattle Times:

“You’d think the district would be horrified,” he said in an interview, noting that Seattle’s worst-rated elementary schools have clustered in the south end of the city for years and all of its best are located up north. Overall, the city’s white students outperform the state on math and language tests, while black children here do worse than those in other districts.

“It’s a systemic evil,” Burgess said. “We think of education as our springboard to getting out of poverty, but when the system isn’t adequately serving students, we’ve just built another barrier.”

The councilman, an architect of Seattle’s program to provide free preschool to low-income kids, is focused on Seattle’s youngest citizens because research suggests that any effort to improve public education without addressing early childhood is as productive as trying to fill a bathtub with an open drain.

People have been up in arms in the past about the fairly silly idea that the city is angling to take over Seattle Public Schools, and you could make this fit that narrative if that’s your goal.

Instead, let’s stray from paranoia and possibility to focus on what’s irrevocably true: someone is talking loudly about educational inequity and is trying to do something about it. He's asking about the district's role in that inequity, and he's working on solutions.

And he has some amount of political power, some ability to actually make things happen.

Let's stay focused on kids as this moves forward, even as it's tempting to take sides and talk politics.