Seattle Public Schools are a mess, to be sure, but do we really think Superintendent Denise Juneau is to blame?
The Seattle School Board will decide soon whether or not to extend Superintendent Denise Juneau’s contract, which is set to expire next year, and the process has given rise to a storm of unexpected questions and controversy around a leader who had previously been seen as strong and under-appreciated.
The Seattle chapter of the NAACP held a press conference in late October and called for Juneau, Seattle’s seventh superintendent since 2000, to resign. Multiple speakers accused Juneau of racism and sexism in as many words, complaining among other things about the “achievement gap,” and what they described as a recent “purge” of Black men from leadership positions in the district.
Seattle School Board directors, meanwhile, have been quietly questioning Juneau’s leadership, and it’s unclear whether she has the support needed to see her contract extended when the board votes on Dec. 16.
Juneau has been on the job since June 2018 — about two and a half years. As others have noted, she has not been a perfect leader, but she has posted some serious wins during her short tenure, too, and has often demonstrated the kind of bold leadership I have been pleading for since Susan Enfield left.
Under Juneau’s direction, for instance, Seattle Public Schools formed a brand new Office of African-American Male Achievement, modeled after the brilliant Kingmakers program in Oakland, Calif., and aligned its strategic plan to focus on the Black students and families who have been furthest from educational justice — and this all happened before George Floyd was murdered.
After Floyd was murdered, the district severed its ties with the Seattle Police Department. Juneau drew clear lines in the sand and sided with the abolitionists — not to mention acting swiftly for the safety of our students — at a time when the mayor, the police chief and the city council, among others, all positioned themselves against the people and against the movement that was swelling in their streets.
I agree wholeheartedly with the NAACP’s condemnation of Seattle’s educational opportunity gaps. Our schools are certainly racist and sexist. They are not serving Black and brown kids well, and they’ve been guilty of this injustice since their inception.
I agree that far too few Black men — and Black women, for that matter, not to mention too few Indigenous people, and too few immigrants, and too few Latinx people, and too many white people, frankly, for far too long — are in true positions of leadership within Seattle Public Schools. I agree that critical community perspectives have always been overlooked, and that this continues today.
I’ll take it a step further, in fact, and say that I believe schooling in the United States is fundamentally a system of oppression. As one of the largest public systems in a nation built on systemic oppression, our schools can’t be anything else until we’ve fundamentally changed the world in which they are situated.
I agree, in other words, with the NAACP’s complaints from the bottom of my heart. The current state of affairs is completely unacceptable, it has always been unacceptable, and it warrants swift, decisive, radical action.
But I struggle with seeing these system-oriented complaints leveled at Juneau. It seems, in fact, like folks are suggesting that things are worse now than they were under our previous superintendent, Larry “Lip Service” Nyland, whose equity toolkit was a joke in every sense. Or that things are worse now than under Nyland’s predecessor, Jose Banda, who used the Seattle supe job as a short bridge to retirement and routinely fell asleep during meetings. Or that Juneau is somehow more of a problem than Chris Reykdal, the white male career politician who got overwhelming and undeserved support this year on his way to a second term as Washington’s statewide superintendent.
For the first time in years, we have a sharp, experienced, equity-minded education professional working in good faith as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools. I’m sure she has her shortcomings, as we all do. Perhaps she is more of a visionary than a day-to-day operationalist, but to target Juneau — the first openly gay and first Indigenous person to serve as Seattle’s superintendent — instead of taking aim at the system is hard for me to understand.
Seattle, your school board… woof.
The Seattle School Board, meanwhile, has a national reputation for being dysfunctional, and this reputation is well-earned. It isn’t just that the current board is a problem, which it is. The board has a decades-long track record as an embarrassing hindrance to equity. It’s not just a problem of individual actors, but a longstanding systemic issue with complex causes and chilling effects.
As such, the Seattle superintendent job is already known nationally as an undesirable position specifically because it’s tied to this perpetually problematic school board. It is rightfully seen as a position in which you won’t be supported in accomplishing the equity work the job demands, and in which you are unlikely to last long enough to see your plans through to fruition. It still feels like a minor miracle that we were able to attract and hire Juneau in the first place, and if she is unceremoniously released this quickly, that only deepens the track record of volatility and, by extension, thins the pool of candidates even further.
Chances are very good that we have lost Denise Juneau already, and that her departure will happen quickly — that she’ll be gone well before the end of her contract. If so, an internal interim appointment is likely, and the bench, unless we hand the keys directly to Keisha Scarlett, does not inspire a great deal of confidence either.
And what’s the long-term play here? Do we really think we’re going to hire someone better than Juneau — and not only better, but enough better to be worth the time this will cost us?
We’ve been trying to reform our school system in Seattle since the 1950’s, and let’s be clear: I do not have faith that we can reform this system in time for my young kids and all the other school-age kids in the city, no matter who’s running the show. It’s a long, slow process to lead a system as big and bureaucractic as Seattle Public Schools through a change as profound as it would be to become a truly equitable, radically empathetic school district — perhaps the first in the nation?
It takes strong leadership over many years, in fact, to create lasting change — especially to a system as massive and traditional as our public schools. And usually that leadership has to weather a number of storms like this one, because periods of great change are almost always painful and unpopular.
And so we have two separate but connected issues at play here — we need lasting systemic change, and we need to protect the brilliance of our kids right now.
Knowing the change will be this slow in coming, we need to create our own family-centered, community-based alternatives. We cannot in good conscience continue to ask Black families, for example, to voluntarily send their children every day into a school system that is known to be a pipeline to prison — not until what’s promised is done.
But what’s needed to change the system itself is fortitude, and we are letting things devolve into a mess, which is what always seems to happen in Seattle Public Schools — especially when it comes to the board.
If we want to clean up that mess, I believe we start by giving Juneau a long enough leash to make the unprecedented changes we’re demanding — we renew her contract and follow through on the district’s exciting strategic plan —and then we move forward by holding the district and the entire power structure accountable, not just the new person at the top.