Rise Up for Students

On a recent school visit, Washington State Superintendent Randy Dorn asked a Latino high school student if he was “legal or illegal.”

Sen. Mark Miloscia, a Republican from Federal Way running for state auditor, does not believe that racism is real anymore.

Sen. Mark Miloscia, a racism-denyer holding public office

These are men elected to positions that have a huge impact on kids in our state, and these displays of privilege and ignorance are happening in public.

According to Alan Preston, managing director of Real Change, Miloscia attended a workshop on race and class at the 2016 Conference on Ending Homelessness and openly disagreed with the presentation, with the idea that race and racism are still playing a role in modern American society:

"Some of the stuff you guys are saying about class is true," he said, "but I disagree with 90 percent of what you are saying about race. It might have been true in the 1870s, but it isn't true today."

This guy was conveying an opinion that an alarming number of Americans share. It's an assertion steeped in the invisibility of White privilege.

It dismisses the suffering of newly freed Blacks after abolition, the cruel segregation of the Jim Crow Era, and the current racist system of mass incarceration. His comment was completely ignorant of how racism is baked into our educational, judicial, financial, employment and other institutions, and how that renders people of color vulnerable to poverty and homelessness.

Further showing his privilege, of the two presenters, Miloscia specifically sought out the woman of color as opposed to Preston to whitesplain all the reasons she was wrong about race and racism.

Meanwhile, there’s so little else to tell about the Dorn story that there’s basically no way to sugarcoat it. From the Seattle Times:

During a visit to Raisbeck Aviation High School on Thursday, Randy Dorn, the state’s top schools official, asked a few students their names, grade levels and where they were from. Students come from all over the region to go to Aviation, so Dorn was curious about the students’ home districts.

One student said he first went to school in Mexico. The two talked about the student’s transition to the Tukwila school, then Dorn said:

“Now I’ll ask you under my breath, are you legal or illegal?”

As a KOMO News photographer recorded the conversation, the student replied “I’m legal, I’m half American.”

These are two elected officials putting these levels of ignorance on proud display. These are two privileged white men charged with protecting and advocating on behalf of our kids and families, and they’re operating with blinders on.

Miloscia is vice chair of the Senate Human Services, Mental Health & Housing Committee, which “considers issues relating to services to children and families, including child welfare, child protection, dependency, and foster care. The Committee deals with mental health treatment, chemical dependency, at risk youth, and juvenile justice. The Committee also considers bills relating to housing, including state assistance to low-income housing, housing authorities, and the Housing Finance Commission.”

He is also a member of the Senate Higher Education Committee, dealing with “issues relating to the state's public and independent baccalaureate colleges and universities, public community and technical colleges, and private career schools. Issues include governance and coordination of higher education, financial aid, tuition, and workforce training.”

That means Miloscia, in committee meetings discussing things like homelessness, foster care, at-risk and homeless youth, housing, and higher education, just to name a few, is advocating that race plays no factor. He is arguing in these meetings and in our state legislature that systemic racism is a myth.

Then, when presented with information that runs counter to his privileged belief system, rather than considering the possibility that he has something to learn, he seeks out the least privileged presenter -- an expert in her field -- to paternalistically explain she is wrong.

What voice do his constituents have with that approach? What hope do we have?

And then we have Dorn, the superintendent of a public school system that has a growing opportunity gap and that claims it's working on its disproportionate discipline problem.

As long as these are our decision-makers, how can possibly expect to do right by our students and families of color?

We elected this ignorance. If Miloscia and Dorn don't hear from us now, we are complicit. If we re-elect them, we are complicit. Let's not make the same mistake again.

If Dorn and Miloscia want to continue serving people of color, which is inevitable as an elected official, they should be forced to take an implicit bias test and publicly discuss the results. We must force them to confront their privilege or show them the door.

By Chris Eide

What if I told you that there is a public school in the Seattle area, funded by public dollars and overseen by an elected school board that rigorously screens applicants, is as well-appointed as any private school you are likely to find, and is so sought after that young people move from overseas just to have the chance to attend?

Would you expect the anti-charter, McCleary-first crowd to vehemently oppose this school’s very existence?

Well, they don’t. It never even gets mentioned in those types of conversations.

What if I also told you that the school’s population is not representative of the people who live in the area? Would you be surprised that this school has about three times the percentage of white students as the school district it calls home? Or that there are three times fewer black students, four times fewer Latino students, six times fewer students from low-income families, and seven times fewer students with special needs?

These are private school numbers driven by private school selection processes, and yet Raisbeck Aviation High School in the Highline School District has been consistently lauded by (predominantly white) legislators and school board members since its inception — lauded by many of the very people who have objected to charter schools, which hope to serve primarily high-needs students and seek to make their application process as sparse as administratively possible.

Aviation High School has long stood as evidence of how privilege influences public school politics.

Now, however, under the bold leadership that typifies Highline Superintendent Susan Enfield’s work, the school is moving toward a more equitable student selection model, using a lottery to choose its students instead of the highly exclusive process it had been using. From the Seattle Times:

“Though some students and parents have raised concerns about the new system, one thing is certain: The 105 students in next year’s freshman class will better reflect the population the school serves. In the Highline School District as a whole, nearly half the students are female, and three-quarters are racial minorities.

‘Being a public school system, you have to have an equitable and defensible system,’ Superintendent Susan Enfield said. ‘Because we have more students each year than we have seats for, the [school] board and I have to be able to look any parent and student in the eye and say, ‘You have an equal chance of getting into this school.’’

The decision also followed a complaint from the parent of an Asian student, alleging the interview process was discriminatory. Although the student had been in Highline’s highly capable program, her father said she didn’t receive enough points on the application or interview rubrics.

Enfield said district officials already had been thinking about changing the admissions policy before that complaint was filed last July, and she and the Highline School Board determined that no discrimination occurred in that case. But the move to the lottery system ended a state investigation into the matter.

‘The concerns signaled to us that we needed to find a solution, or that solution would be determined for us by an outside entity,’ Enfield said.

Since its beginnings in 2004, Aviation has been a selective school. As one of the few aviation-themed schools in the country, it shares resources with The Museum of Flight and offers mentors and internships in aerospace companies. It’s consistently ranked as one of the top schools in the state. And in recent years, it has received about three applicants for every seat, with its students coming from all over the Puget Sound region.

But under the old application process, the school has long had both a gender and ethnic imbalance. It also was never able to reach a goal of 51 percent of students coming from within the district.

School and district officials said no explicit or implicit bias affected past admissions decisions, but there was no way to be entirely objective when judging each student’s commitment to the school and whether he or she would be a good fit.

Each year, they said, many applicants have been children of people who work in the aviation and aerospace industry, so the demographics mirrored that industry, which long has been ‘a white male world,’ said social-studies teacher Troy Hoehne.

‘But it’s changing, and it’s appropriate that the school change with it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you would find a staff member who wouldn’t say we need more gender equality, we need to have a diversity plan that is more in tune with the population around us.’

Enfield said a lottery significantly reduces ‘the subjectivity to determine who gets in and who doesn’t.’

Along with changing the policy at Aviation, the district also changed its admissions process for two other schools that had used applications — CHOICE Academy and Big Picture.”

There is no question that Raisbeck Aviation High School is a great school and is working with students to excel in STEM fields. There is also no question that we need to provide high-quality STEM opportunities to students beyond those who already have access to great STEM education. We have brilliant young people all over our city and state, and they deserve the same access to opportunity as their more privileged peers.

Student demographics in Highline Public Schools and Raisbeck Aviation High School (courtesy of OSPI):