The entire education system is the culprit, and Denise Juneau is part of it. So, what do we do?
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Denise Juneau has found herself on the hot seat just two-and-a-half years into her tenure as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, which seems to be the expiration date for this particular job. The Seattle School Board will vote Dec. 16 on whether or not to extend Juneau’s contract, which is set to expire in 2021, and some community groups are accusing her of racism and sexism and calling for her to resign immediately.
When I wrote about all of this a few days ago, I was still processing — the controversy surrounding Juneau had come as a bit of a surprise to me. I’ve been more distracted than usual this year, what with the world ending on top of being quarantined with four kids and whatnot, but I thought she’d been doing a pretty decent job, especially compared to our last couple of superintendents. So, I talked with several smart people over a few days and wrote about all the reasons it seemed to make sense to extend Juneau’s contract.
But something didn’t feel quite right, and I kept churning this issue over and over in my mind — I even dreamed about it a couple nights ago, in fact — while doing more research and talking with more and more people.
Honestly, I may have changed my mind, but not about everything. It’s complicated. Here’s the crux of it, in three parts:
Whatever opinions I may have, and no matter how exhaustively thought-about they might be, I made a personal commitment to myself a couple years back that my educational advocacy in Seattle would follow the leadership of the NAACP Youth Council as much as possible. Representatives of the Youth Council called for Juneau’s resignation during the press conference hosted by the broader Seattle NAACP on Oct. 20, and the group has remained steadfast in this opinion since then.
The status quo is completely unacceptable, and we have no evidence to support the idea that we can change it — we’ve been naming the problem and spinning our wheels trying to change reality in Seattle for 70 years, yet here we are. Perhaps Juneau is the best available “qualified” candidate for the superintendent job in Seattle. In my heart of hearts, I still don’t truly believe she is going to lead us in reforming this bloody System into the fully decolonized, joyfully equitable, radically empathetic schools we need. The System is doing what it was designed to do. Gun to my head, I don’t believe it can be fixed. I think it needs to be defeated, in all its forms.
And to make matters worse, The System in its current form is so bad, and so dangerous, that we can’t just promise to fix it. Our schools have to already be different before it’s reasonable to continue to inflict them on our kids. KUOW shared a story yesterday of a Black student being routinely locked in a cage at a mostly-white elementary school in the north end of Seattle. A few days before that, we were reminded of the glaring discipline issues in our schools — two families are suing the district for $2 million apiece because someone physically restrained, injured and scared the innocence out of their beloved children during a school day. In a system like this one, even if the trauma isn’t inflicted directly, it’s allowed all around our kids, which is quietly conditioning all students to be part of something disgusting. And so, if we have a leader who tells us change will take time, maybe we just say No, because waiting has never worked.
So, then I come all the way back around to the main point I was feeling a few days ago — yes, Seattle Public Schools are a mess, but do we really think Denise Juneau is to blame?
Juneau hardly seems like the greatest offender in the System, so to come down so quickly on her and nobody else has just felt off. It still does — especially since she is our first openly gay and our first Indigenous superintendent in Seattle, and when there are so many other obvious and deserving candidates for our displeasure.
Washington’s statewide superintendent, Chris Reykdal, and the Office of Statewide Public Instruction (OSPI) are the gatekeepers for so many things that influence the conditions and the reality of our schools — and, by extension, our kids’ ability to be safe, full-functioning, happy human beings — but we all blindly voted last month to give him four more years at the helm.
Where is the outcry against Reykdal? As just one example, we need a dramatically different school funding model that is not based on property taxes if we want to change the status quo. We already have one of the nation’s most regressive tax structures. But we have a politician in the superintendent’s office, and Reykdal won’t champion a different funding model because its political sabotage.
Reykdal is not a leader when it comes to race and equity — he’s just trying to keep up — and his bottom line is maintaining his electability, not doing whatever it goddamn takes to fight for the kids and families who need things to be radically different. He doesn’t even understand what that means.
So, I’m not sure we need to retain Juneau, and I’m not sure we need to let her go. I just feel that it only makes sense to let Juneau go if we are fully committed to being this hard on every part of the System — only if we are finally we are committed to transforming everything — right now.
In the face of obvious evidence that reform won’t get us where we want to go, we remain too afraid of more “radical” solutions to try anything truly different, too afraid of our kids missing out to force any real change. And we keep failing generation after generation of kids because that fear paralyzes us.
If we can’t get it right, then we have an obligation to stop playing along — to stop wasting our belief on spinning wheels while we give our children to a system that’s designed to track, sort, separate and oppress, and provide the workers that capitalism needs.
If we terminate Juneau’s contract, then the rest of the education system also finally gets no leash. No more patience. No more waiting.
No kids in schools, virtual or otherwise, until we have already transformed our curriculum to include integrated ethnic studies at all levels, and a holistic experience that is truly decolonized and not just labeled as such by a handful of well-meaning white women.
No kids in schools until we have already transformed our discipline practices.
Until we have already transformed not just our hiring practices, but cleaned house and transformed our existing teams, such that BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, neuro-diverse and other historically underrepresented groups are, if anything, overrepresented at every level of Seattle Public Schools — in classrooms, in positions of leadership, in administration, and everywhere else.
Until every employee at every level of every school district, ESD and OSPI have already gone through extensive implicit bias training and demonstrated deep buy-in to a new world of racial equity in our schools.
Until we have already established more authentic community leadership, acknowledging that the existing school board has never been what we’ve needed it to be.
Until, for that matter, we’ve already revolutionized our approach to school board selection such that we can’t replicate the mistakes of the past.
Until we have already established a new school-funding model not tied to property taxes.
Until we have already abandoned the archaic practice of forcing students and families into one-size-fits-all boxes and embraced educational pluralism.
There is no neutral, and good intentions aren’t enough.
Photo by Matt Halvorson
At all times, we are either anti-racist, or we’re perpetuating racism. There is no middle ground, and neither side is a label you get to keep. To live in a racist society is an active process, and our role relative to racism depends on every choice we make, on everything we have done and left undone.
In the same way, if we’re not able to put kids first at all times — to radically center the needs of the most oppressed — because of how people will perceive us, or because of our career, or because we’re too darn comfortable to fully understand that we need radical change, or because the solution is beyond our imagination… then we are making the active choice to harm children and families and communities. There is no neutral.
I wrote when Seattle hired Juneau back in 2018 that she seemed like the best candidate for the job, but that she wasn’t going to bring the radical change I felt we needed. She was going to come in, learn the ropes, meet the folks. We needed somebody to come in and flip the tables and draw lines in the sand and say, “No. It stops now.”
Now, I still believe we need the same thing. We need a leader who’s willing to say that we’ve gotten this entire thing wrong, and that every effort to fix it has not led to broad, sustained positive outcomes. We have not created systemic change, and so we do not have the loving, high-functioning, child-centered schools that we need for our babies. It just hasn’t worked. Philanthropy hasn’t figured it out. The non-profit industrial complex hasn’t solved it. Electing liberals hasn’t worked, and neither has electing conservatives. Ranting on a blog hasn’t worked, and neither has electing new school board reps or hiring new superintendents or creating new strategic plans.
Nothing that any of us is doing has solved the problems we seek to solve, because we have been unable or unwilling to lean into the real root causes, which are systemic in nature: racism, classism, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, extractive capitalism and militarized colonialism.
And if we actually do lean into those as the deeper causes behind the problems in our schools, giving ourselves a fuller view of the obstacle before us, it dramatically clarifies the steps we need to take and changes the way forward.
Even in a national context that normalizes superintendent churn, Seattle has a reputation as an outlier. We go through superintendents at an absurd rate, even by the standards of an absurd system. If we just keep participating and doing the same thing — thinking we’ll find someone else now who will be different — then we need to pause and consider changing direction, because we are starting to fulfill the definition of insanity.
We’re in the midst of a pandemic that has already upended everything. We have so much more flexibility and incentive than ever to do things differently.
So, sure, kick Juneau out. But if it’s Juneau, it’s everybody. And it starts right now and never lets up.
Matt Halvorson is a writer, musician and dad living in Seattle.
