‘A decade of kids suffered for it’: Political consultant explains how Seattle Public Schools’ equity crusade went off the rails

Political consultant and former journalist Sandeep Kaushik spent six months investigating how Seattle Public Schools dismantled its top-performing programs in the name of equity, and wound up making outcomes worse for every student, especially the disadvantaged kids the district claimed to be helping.

Kaushik joined “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio to share the devastating findings from his research.

“It was really a tragic mistake, and a decade of kids in the Seattle School District suffered for it,” he said. “They misdiagnosed the problem, and they made it worse.”

Kaushik’s investigation, “The Decade of Decline in Seattle Public Schools: A Cautionary Tale About Forsaking Educational Basics for Castles in the Sky,” was published on Education Progress. It traces how district leaders gutted gifted programs, relaxed discipline, and proposed closing the district’s most popular schools.

Kaushik says district abandoned what was working

Kaushik found the district’s leadership abandoned an accountability-driven model that was producing results and replaced it with what he calls a culture of “identitarian belonging.”

“The theory took hold that the reason poor and minority kids aren’t doing well is we’re being overly harsh and judgmental towards them, and if we create this culture of belonging, that’s the key to improving their educational performance,” he said. “Then they will feel engaged, and then they will perform well.”

The achievement gap was a serious problem. In 2016–2017, Seattle ranked fifth-worst in the country, according to the Stanford Education Data Archive. Instead of doing the difficult work of reforming entry pathways and providing targeted support, Kaushik believes they took a shortcut: eliminate any program that disproportionately enrolled white or Asian students.

That meant gutting the Highly Capable Cohort gifted and talented program, targeting popular option schools offering STEM and language immersion, and putting the schools with the longest waiting lists on the chopping block.

District leaders declared war on their own gifted program

KIRO host Jake Skorheim read from Kaushik’s report detailing the moment the district declared war on its own gifted program. In 2019, then-Superintendent Denise Juneau publicly denounced the HCC as a program of segregation rooted in “educational redlining” and labeled Garfield High School “Apartheid High” and “the slave ship.”

When minority parents showed up at school board meetings in 2020 to testify in favor of reforming rather than eliminating the HCC, board member Chandra Hampson dismissed them as “tokenized fronts for privileged white parents,” according to Kaushik’s report.

“You have minority parents whose children were part of this HCC program who then go to the school and say, ‘Hey, this is a mistake,’ and then the school called them tokens,” he said.

Mississippi did it for a fraction of the cost

Kaushik pointed out Seattle Public Schools spends the 10th most of any of the top 100 school districts in the country.

“It wasn’t a resource problem at Seattle schools,” Kaushik said. “It was ideological.”

He cited Mississippi as proof that the boring, unglamorous work of early intervention actually delivers. That state identifies at-risk readers by second grade and floods them with intensive tutoring, individualized attention, and learning buddies.

“Mississippi’s gone from 49th in the country in educational attainment to 9th,” Kaushik said. “On one-third of the money that’s getting spent in places like here.”

Superintendent admits the district got equity backward

The entire saga reminded Jake of the Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” set in a future society where exceptional people are physically handicapped so no one outperforms anyone else.

Kaushik gave credit to current Superintendent Ben Shuldiner, who took over in February, for being the one who actually introduced the comparison.

“He’s the one who brought up that story to me,” he said. “He says, ‘That’s how we did it wrong over the last 10 years. We did Harrison Bergeron. We didn’t do equity the way you’re supposed to, of raising up the lower-performing kids.’ He brings that up all the time and says that’s not how you’re supposed to do this.”

Kaushik added that his six-month investigation was driven by two goals: to create a national case study for the many progressive cities where similar policies produced similar results, and to force an honest reckoning.

“The memory-holing of this stuff really pissed me off,” he said. “I just absolutely 100% believe you’re never going to do better if you can’t admit and examine what you did wrong in the first place.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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