Transcript - A Forensic Analysis of SPS with Vivian Van Gelder, Part 1

Rainy Day Recess, Episode 62
November 11, 2025

[00:00:00] Jasmine Pulido: In 1995, Seattle hired a retired army general to run its schools.

[00:00:05] Christie Robertson: He wasn't an educator, but in three years he reshaped the district. And the ghost of John Stanford is still felt in our schools today.

Part 1 Intro

[00:00:15] Jasmine Pulido: Welcome to Rainy Day Recess, where we study and discuss Seattle Public Schools. Today we are beginning a three-part series where we're unpacking a report called “Left to Chance: Student Outcomes in Seattle Public Schools.”

[00:00:29] Christie Robertson: This report was written by researcher Vivian Van Gelder and released earlier this year. It traces 30 years of reforms, conflicts, and turning points in Seattle schools. You can read Vivian's full report on the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition website. And a transcript of this episode on rainydayrecess.org.

[00:00:49] Jasmine Pulido: We'll walk through the story in three parts, the sweeping reforms of John Stanford, the wave of educational entrepreneurs who followed, and the cycles of governance and accountability that still shape the district today.

[00:01:03] Christie Robertson: This is part one.

Our story begins in crisis. In 1990, a state commissioned audit found Seattle public schools nearly ungovernable – a district paralyzed by poor governance and competing interests.

[00:01:19] Jasmine Pulido: Just a few years later, the board turned to an unlikely leader, retired Army Major General John Stanford.

[00:01:28] Christie Robertson: In only three years as superintendent John Stanford brought sweeping reforms that reshaped how schools operated. He redefined school principals as CEOs tied funding to enrollment and gave families open choice across the entire district.

[00:01:45] Jasmine Pulido: His approach was bold, cut short by his sudden death, and it left a legacy that still reverberates through Seattle schools today. That's the story we are covering in part one of this series.

[00:01:57] Christie Robertson: Before Stanford though, came the Cresap audit- the document that first declared the district was broken.

[00:02:05] Jasmine Pulido: Let's bring in Vivian Van Gelder and transition to the interview we conducted with her earlier this year. 

Welcome to Rainy Day Recess, where we study and discuss Seattle Public Schools. I'm Jasmine Pulido

[00:02:20] Vivian Van Gelder: Hi. I am Vivian Van Gelder.

[00:02:22] Christie Robertson: And I am Christie Robertson

[00:02:25] Jasmine Pulido: In today's special episode, we will walk you through the report Vivian released on March 24th called Left to Chance Student Outcomes in Seattle Public Schools. It's a 43 page forensic history that spans the last 30 years of SPS from 1990 to 2024.

[00:02:45] Vivian Van Gelder: Yes. I'm the lead researcher on the report we're going to talk about today. And I'm happy to work with you both.

[00:02:50] Christie Robertson: And Jazz, let's tell our listeners why we wanted to cover this report

[00:02:54] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, I've been covering the school board for about a year now. Andone of the things I have learned is that the district is really hard to understand. But I have found that understanding the history of the district and the different roles that shape it and the people who move in and out of the roles and all of the national forces that impact them, make it all make a lot more sense.

[00:03:18] Christie Robertson: And even though I've been following the district closely for years before you even dug in, Jazz, so much is still really obscure to me. But when I read this report, it really gave me some perspective. We think that the historical information in this report is really important background information for all of our listeners.

[00:03:32] Jasmine Pulido: So, that's why we're covering this report on SPS history. And then just tell us a little bit more why you wrote this report, Vivian.

[00:03:48] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, so from when I first began observing SPS to getting to the point of putting words to paper, this report took me about 10 years to write. And I don't think this is the definitive word on the history of Seattle Public Schools, but I do hope it will serve as a skeleton for maybe a reconstructed community history.

And one of the reasons I wrote it is because I've noticed that what's changed recently is that we no longer have the organic transmission of information between families that we once did before the pandemic. 

So pre-pandemic, if you're a kindergarten family just coming into the district, there would be families of older kids who could tell you how things work in Seattle public schools. So that when you needed to advocate for your student, it was usually with some historical awareness of what happened before, what went away or why things are the way they are now.

And what I noticed after the pandemic is that this crucial transmission of history in our advocacy was cut off or at least greatly diminished.

And without that history informing our advocacy, we really risk exacerbating existing problems, because we're targeting the symptoms and not the root cause. I want folks to have the historical knowledge as they advocate for whatever it is that they're advocating for what feels really a crucial moment in Seattle public school's history.

[00:04:54] Jasmine Pulido: And one of my hopes is that by the end of this episode, listeners will have thoughts on which things are symptoms and which are root causes.

[00:05:18] Christie Robertson: You can reference Vivian's report, which has lots of footnotes as well, you can also follow along with a historical timeline that's up on SESEC’s website 

[00:05:04] Vivian Van Gelder: Southeast Seattle Education Coalition.

[00:05:18] Christie Robertson: sesecwa.org.

[00:05:22] Jasmine Pulido: And I just wanted to add that this report is historical, but to me it really read a riveting plot, the way you wrote it, Vivian.

[00:05:30] Christie Robertson: I, like, could not put it down. And what I found particularly poignant is that out of all of those 30 years of history, you identified who were really the key players in a way that makes the complex system of relationships a lot easier to follow and understand.

And for listeners, as we go through this report, one thing I'd recommend paying attention to is each of the major roles. So we've got the school board, the superintendents, senior central office staff, the teacher's union, and then at times community leadership comes into play.

[00:06:09] Jasmine Pulido: Agreed. And getting to know the key players as they move in and out of these roles and how the relationships shift between them are all kind of like watching Old Game of Thrones episodes, or Succession, in my opinion.

[00:06:23] Christie Robertson: A hundred percent.

[00:06:24] Jasmine Pulido: I noticed too that there are also some cyclical patterns that emerge repeatedly that are actually coming up again in present times. So I'll point those out along the way.

And are there any other reasons that you wrote this report, Vivian?

[00:06:38] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, when I first wrote the report, people asked me what I wanted to happen with it. And initially I thought of this as an intervention. Like, we get everybody in a room together and we're like, "We all love you, but you can't go on this." And then as I went along, part of me felt it's an exorcism of the ghost of John Stanford.

[00:06:55] Christie Robertson: So John Stanford, you mean the guy that the central office building is named after the “John Stanford Center for Educational Excellence”.

[00:07:05] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah. And who is John Stanford? How did his name get on our central office building? I think that's a perfect starting point to go into this report.

Of course at the beginning of every story, we need to figure out where to start. And I feel this history really starts with the... is it Cresap Audit?

[00:07:15] Christie Robertson: Cresap audit? How do you pronounce this, Vivian?

[00:07:30] Vivian Van Gelder: I think it's Cresap. But I don't actually know because I've never heard anybody pronounce it. But I'm guessing nobody else knows either.

[00:07:38] Jasmine Pulido: And, what was this audit, Vivian, and why was it done?

[00:07:42] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. This was an audit done by is a firm from DC called Cresap Consulting. And they started in early 1990, and the report came out in November of 1990. And this was an audit that was commissioned by the state legislature, actually at the behest of then Representative Gary Locke, who went on to become the governor. And he and other legislators wanted an evaluation done of Seattle Public Schools.

[00:08:04] Christie Robertson: And I assume that was because they didn't feel that things were going well.

[00:08:09] Vivian Van Gelder: I think so.

[00:08:10] Christie Robertson: Now we didn't call out the legislature in the list of roles, because they generally are quite hands off when it comes to school districts. But there are a couple of times when they feel that things are going astray and they make demands on SPS specifically.

[00:08:27] Jasmine Pulido: And then what did Cresap find Vivian?

[00:08:29] Vivian Van Gelder: They found a district in crisis, Jas. The Cresap auditors believed that this was because Seattle Public Schools lacked, “a consistent focus on what was in the best interest of all children in Seattle.”

[00:08:41] Jasmine Pulido: And did Cresap have a guess as to the root cause of this crisis?

[00:08:46] Vivian Van Gelder: There were a number of factors, but they boiled it down to the function of the school board. At this point, instead of providing a unifying direction through policy to district staff, they were instead undermining the superintendent by taking on his management role themselves, and essentially catering to the wishes of individual constituencies.

[00:09:02] Christie Robertson: So basically, and tell me if I have this right, the report said that the board was acting a bunch of individuals, giving contradictory directions to the superintendent about goals for the district. And then also as individuals meddling in district operations in response to what they heard from their individual constituencies, like, their individual regions that they represented.

[00:09:27] Vivian Van Gelder: Correct. According to the audit, it had become quite difficult for district staff to set priorities and manage their responsibilities in any unified way. The audit actually uses the word “impossible” when describing central office and its inability to function with any type of coordination.

[00:09:28] Jasmine Pulido: I read that the Cresap audit went so far as to suggest that the legislature consider stepping in to switch the system to governor-elected positions if the board didn't figure out how to carry out effective board governance.

[00:09:58] Christie Robertson: Or if the board didn't start making decisions with the entire community in mind instead of favoring individual interest groups.

[00:10:05] Vivian Van Gelder: Yes, and you'll actually see this come up again a little further down the track. But the audit did recommend considering governor-elected positions or, ultimately, electing through citywide elections only and not through smaller district elections. Today, by contrast, what we do is these hyper-local district primaries first, and then we have a citywide election for board directors.

[00:10:25] Christie Robertson: I assume the reason it was done that way was so that everybody doesn't come from one region of the city. Yeah. So, we have a problem of having a really big dispersed city, and we want to make sure we get representatives from all over the city. 

[00:10:39] Vivian Van Gelder: Right. 

The auditor stated that the central problem for our district was governance, and they said that the board needed to focus on making policies that supported identifying goals for student achievement and then to take on the job of regular progress monitoring of those goals.

[00:10:53] Jasmine Pulido: That sounds familiar. So, we were talking about implementing student-centered goals and progress monitoring as far back as 35 years ago?

[00:11:02] Christie Robertson: In some ways it seems basic. Like, I think any functional board sets goals and then measures if they're meeting their goals. We talk about Student Outcomes Focused Governance now. But that's just one instance of this basic concept.

[00:11:23] Jasmine Pulido: So, this was in 1990 and did the board shape up in the years that followed?

[00:11:28] Vivian Van Gelder: The short answer is no. That board didn't make much progress.

[00:11:33] Christie Robertson: But somebody in the community was listening. And they decided that what the district needed was a board overhaul. Something that seems to happen a few times over the three decades you've covered in your report, Vivian.

[00:11:45] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. For the following election after this report came out there was a push by a group of local business leaders. And when I say local business leaders, this includes some of our local multinationals, like Boeing. So we're not talking about your community mom-and-pop stores. And they came together and created this initiative called “Step Forward" that was aimed at recruiting change oriented community members to the school board.

One of those board members was a very successful businessman by the name of Donald P. Nielsen. He had a Harvard MBA and a very strong business orientation, and he worked to get his fellow board directors to believe in his vision, which was that what they needed was a great leader and that was the only way to successful schools.

[00:12:22] Christie Robertson: So the business leaders pushed for a new school board, and the new school board decided that they needed a transformational figure. A superintendent, right?

[00:12:31] Vivian Van Gelder: A superintendent. They conducted a national search, and in 1995 they found retired Army Major General John H Stanford.

[00:12:41] Jasmine Pulido: And John Stanford was not an educator, right?

[00:12:44] Vivian Van Gelder: He was not. And that was exactly why they wanted him. He was an African American combat veteran, and he had been the former executive assistant to Casper Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense.

[00:12:54] Jasmine Pulido: And I hear he was quite charismatic.

[00:12:56] Vivian Van Gelder: Yes. You'll still hear people talk about him and his charismatic affect today.

[00:13:01] Christie Robertson: And why did they specifically want someone who was outside of education to run schools?

[00:13:06] Vivian Van Gelder: The way that director Nielsen put it at the time, he said “if you want to transform an institution that has been stagnant for decades, the last place you look for a leader is inside that institution.”

[00:13:18] Christie Robertson: I have to say some folks are expressing the same sentiment since our current superintendent announced his resignation. Although I haven't heard a lot about wanting to make sure we don't hire an educator. So those are two ways of being insiders/outsiders.

[00:13:34] Jasmine Pulido: Totally. The difference here is that they wanted someone completely outside the entire industry of education at this time, and not necessarily about being inside or outside the district.

Chapter 1: John Stanford's Wholesale Reform of the District

[00:13:50] Christie Robertson: And here's where we get to John Stanford's radically different approach to education starting in 1995. And we're going to spend some time diving into this because this reform still impacts SPS today – what John Stanford did in his short three year tenure from 1995 to 1998.

[00:14:13] Jasmine Pulido: Yes. it's going to be the major through line of this entire report, I would say.

[00:14:20] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah well, Stanford, he described himself during his interview process with the school board as bringing a business leadership approach to solving educational problems. And John Stanford believed the problem with schools was centralized bureaucracy. 

And back then, students and funding and basically operations in general were directed very centrally by the central administration. And individual schools were guaranteed enrollment. Regardless of quality or customer satisfaction, they would get funded at the same level year after year. 

And his solution was that what was needed was decentralization. So, to move control away from the central office and instead give individual school buildings and their principals more control to do what they wanted.

[00:14:57] Christie Robertson: So the board ceded operational power to the superintendent, John Stanford and the superintendent ceded operational power to the principals? Is that about right?

[00:15:07] Vivian Van Gelder: More or less. Yeah.

[00:15:09] Jasmine Pulido: And this was responsive to a nationwide movement.

[00:15:12] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. His perspective was informed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the political theory that was very popular in the eighties and nineties, or started to be popular then. And it essentially called for deregulating markets as well as extending market style management principles into public centered institutions generally, to make them more more effective and efficient.

[00:15:15] Christie Robertson: The idea being to give more freedom to allow entities to be creative and to thrive? Or to fail.

[00:15:40] Vivian Van Gelder: Exactly.

[00:15:41] Jasmine Pulido: So, are we saying that John Stanford wanted to restructure school districts to operate like businesses?

[00:15:46] Vivian Van Gelder: Yes, that's exactly right. Stanford's plan was to massively shift our district to what he called “a market based system of schools”. And in the system, principals would basically be the CEOs of their schools. They would operate CEOs. They would do all the hiring, firing. They would manage their own budgets. They would develop their own programs, their own approaches to curriculum instruction. And in a way that would attract customers.

[00:16:08] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, ok. So the customers were kids, or rather families with kids?

[00:16:13] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, Seattle families with kids. 

And to make this market-based system work, families had to have the power to choose between schools that were essentially competing for their business. And that meant that Seattle Public Schools had to completely redo its system of school assignment. And under John Stanford, Seattle families were given free choice to apply to any school in SPS.

At the time that he entered as superintendent, SPS had a system of busing for racial integration. It had degraded over the years. It had been in force for about 10 years. There were lots of outs for families that didn't want to participate. And that in itself had become controversial.

But one of Stanford's first moves was to eliminate that busing program altogether and replace it with a system of district wide open choice.

[00:16:55] Christie Robertson: Like, all the way from the top to the bottom of the district. You could pick any school.

[00:16:59] Vivian Van Gelder: Yep. You wouldn't necessarily get transportation, but you could pick any school you wanted.

[00:17:04] Jasmine Pulido: I see. There was also an accountability aspect to this, right? If a school failed to attract customers?

[00:17:11] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, exactly. If you weren't satisfying the families you served, you lost enrollment.

[00:17:15] Christie Robertson: And then if you lost too much enrollment, it basically meant your business was failing, right? Like, by definition, under John Stanford’s system, the district would eventually close your school if you lost enrollment below a certain threshold.

[00:17:30] Vivian Van Gelder: Yes, they wanted to condition school funding based on market success. This was the core of the system and the way that it was supposed to function. So, one of the first operational changes that was made was a change in the formula that the district used to allocate resources to schools.

And this was designed by John Stanford's Chief Financial Officer, a man named Joseph Olchefske, who had been an investment banker before he joined the district. A cute little story is that he became the CFO after meeting John Stanford in their apartment building in the gym. And this is very soon after Stanford came. I think Olchefske was Stanford's first hire. They got chatting and Stanford was like, “why don't you come work for me?” And Olchefske did.

Olchefske and Stanford designed a different way of allocating resources to schools, based on student characteristics. But there were two dimensions to it. The first was that the money would move with students rather than be allocated for staff. An observer at the time, a professor at the Harvard Business School who wrote a case study about what Stanford and Olchefske did, described this as essentially an in-district voucher program. And what that meant was that if a school lost enough students, it would also lose funding. Because the money attached to those students would then be moved to whatever school those students went to.

And that formula, which was designed in 1996, actually set out very clearly thresholds for enrollment. It says in that 1996 document, "If any school falls below these enrollment thresholds by the 1999-2000 school year, it will be closed.”

[00:19:08] Christie Robertson: Wow.

[00:19:08] Vivian Van Gelder: And this immediately raised a lot of concern among schools with small enrollment, enrollments under those thresholds. And all of the funding for each school was supposed to be generated just by students. Per student.

And a lot of the small schools got together and said, “look, if you just fund us based on the number of students we...” Essentially you would get X amount of money per student. And they said “if you multiply the number you're allocating as per student times the number of students we have, that isn't enough money to run our buildings. We just won't be able to function at all.” 

So they retrofitted this formula (this was supposed to be a temporary fix) to add something they called a “foundation allocation”, which meant that it wasn't based on enrollment, it was just an operational amount of funding that allowed you to run the basic operations of the school.

[00:19:53] Christie Robertson: Like hire your principal, run your building, yeah.

[00:19:57] Vivian Van Gelder: Right. And then you would get funding on top of that.

[00:19:58] Jasmine Pulido: With this new way of doing things, did creating a district where students can go to any school in the system disrupt the racial integration efforts that were happening at the time?

[00:20:09] Vivian Van Gelder: For sure. And this was actually a concern that was raised by a lot of people when busing was abolished. A lot of folks pointed out that because Seattle is segregated residentially that schools would then revert to being quite racially segregated as well. 

And Stanford and Olchefske's answer to that was to create this thing called a “weighted student formula”. And this is something that was pioneered in Edmonton, Alberta in the 1970s. And so Olchefske and Stanford basically took this and applied it to Seattle Public Schools. But this was the first district in the United States to do this. So Seattle was very cutting edge in this area. 

They applied this formula that essentially assigns a base amount to each student, and then a percentage of that amount is added to the amount allocated for each student, depending on their characteristics. I think at that time the characteristics were whether a student had an IEP or a disability. And it had tiers to it if a student was eligible for free or reduced lunch, and I think the other one was receiving ELL services. Yeah, multilingual learners. And then I think the final one was with test scores in the lowest quadrant of scores on the state standardized test at that time, or some, I dunno exactly what the test was, but it was academics.

[00:21:22] Christie Robertson: I hear people calling for that system today – a weighted student formula instead of weighted staffing.

[00:21:28] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, this formula was used for about 10 years here. And there are districts in the US that did go on to adopt it. There's not that many. It's actually a minority of school districts that use it today.

[00:21:38] Jasmine Pulido: Because we're shifting to the building carrying a lot of the control, and principals are taking central roles in that shift, what role does central administration play?

[00:21:48] Vivian Van Gelder: Certainly not the role that it played previously. So it's supposed to shift to more of a support role. It's supposed to be the level of the organization that ensures quality assurance across the organization. It's supposed to take care of equity concerns and make sure that the level of quality being offered at each building is the same. But it's supposed to sit back, not be proactive, but more, in a sense, reactive. Observe, monitor, and then support where necessary.

[00:22:12] Christie Robertson: Not interfere in the creativity and drive of the schools.

[00:22:15] Jasmine Pulido: What I read in the report is that this was actually happening in districts everywhere at the time. And it was reflective of something bigger. Is that right?

[00:22:25] Vivian Van Gelder: Well, Seattle was an early adopter of this idea, but the whole idea of decentralization of central office wasn't an accident. It wasn't John Sanford's idea. It was really reflective of this wider push at that time towards school-based management. And the concept of school-based management essentially combined modern business management theory, so this sort of neoliberal business management theory, with education research. And we can really trace this concept all the way back to 1983 actually, and a publication called “A Nation at Risk”.

[00:22:54] Christie Robertson: Oh yeah, I remember that publication. It completely freaked everybody out about our education system and triggered a ton of reforms across the country.

[00:23:04] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, it was basically the big bang of modern education reform. So Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency on a platform of abolishing the Department of Education, which had actually been established just the year before by Jimmy Carter. And his education secretary was a guy named Terrell Bell. He wanted to hang onto his job and didn't like the idea of abolishing the Department of Education. And so he convened a committee of experts from across the country. And their job was to report on the state of American K-12 education. And he thought of this as a way to hold onto his job. 

But the report was really damning, and it produced some very juicy quotes that are still famous, decades later. One of them was, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

And this kicked off the long arc of education reform that really culminated in that federal “No Child Left Behind” era, which you can read more about that history in the report.

[00:23:59] Christie Robertson: And so basically this is this guy Terrell Bell saying, “You need me. You really need me.”

[00:24:04] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. It's crazy. You could do a whole episode just on that report. 

But suffice to say, these wider influences were at play. Stanford set his attention on decentralization of central office and making principles the executives of their buildings.

[00:24:18] Jasmine Pulido: So if principals were getting more control of how their school was run and their own budgets, then how were funds distributed differently compared to previous centrally controlled funding?

[00:24:29] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. Under the market based schools model, buildings were supposed to get... initially buildings would get just over a third of all district funds – just go directly to the buildings for them to decide on how to spend. Before this, it was around 2%. And the goal was to get somewhere close to 100%.

In Edmonton, Alberta, which was the pioneer district that did this, they got to somewhere around 96%. That was the goal.

[00:24:54] Christie Robertson: Oh, before that, we're all staff just hired by the central office rather than by the buildings, like how janitors are employed by the central office now.

[00:25:03] Vivian Van Gelder: Yep. That's how it was done.

[00:25:05] Christie Robertson: Huh.

[00:25:06] Vivian Van Gelder: And the plan was to eventually place, as I said, almost all district funds under direct school control. And this was in order to support unleashing the innovation and creativity of educators and administrators.

[00:25:17] Christie Robertson: Wow, ok. So, we've got the role of the school board and they were ceding power to the superintendent. The superintendent is ceding power to the principals. The president of the school board, Nielsen, and the superintendent, Stanford, were team-working on all of this.

And what about the role of the teacher's union? They must have had something to say about all of this.

[00:25:41] Vivian Van Gelder: Amazingly, the teacher's union president was part of the reform team as well.

[00:25:46] Christie Robertson: Wow. I am trying to imagine a world where the board, the superintendent and the teacher's union are all collaborating on something this big.

[00:25:55] Vivian Van Gelder: It happened.

[00:25:56] Christie Robertson: Ok, so we're adding another role to the mix – the teacher's union. And there are actually a bunch of teachers unions in SPS, but the main one is SEA, the Seattle Education Association, which represents certificated teachers among other roles.

[00:26:15] Jasmine Pulido: And the player that you bring up is Roger Erskine, the Union Executive Director, and he was involved in the reworking of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

[00:26:26] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. The Collective Bargaining Agreement with the Seattle Education Association. And Roger Erskine had actually been sent to Seattle by the National Education Association. And at this time, the National Education Association was going through an identity crisis. And that was because of this neoliberal education reform movement and where it had got to by this point. 

The teachers unions that are affiliated with the NEA had traditionally approached things in a kind of adversarial, industrial union kind of way. “We're here to bargain for wages and working conditions. Everything else is not really that's not what we're here for.” And the NEA was seeing the writing on the wall and trying to shift to the idea of being co-management, in a sense. 

There was this pressure to reform schools that had come out of that 1983 report. And so they were really feeling this pressure. And the head of the NEA around this time said, “If we don't change the way we operate, then schools are going to be privatized. We're actually going to lose our public schools. So we need to be part of this conversation. And we need to change the way we work, because we'll just be ignored, and we'll lose our public schools.”

Roger Erskine had been involved with this reform movement at the National Education Association. He had come to Seattle from working with the NEA and had been pushing for this reform for a while, even before John Stanford arrived. And when Stanford arrived and was very open to the idea of reforming schools along these lines, they worked together on something called a “trust agreement”. John Stanford actually said that he wanted to “burn down the teacher's union contract”, that he just hated it so much. He said it wasn't child-centric – it was really all about adults, and it needed to be completely burned to the ground and rewritten to support the kind of district that he wanted to see. 

And the model that they had for this trust agreement was an agreement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers that had been signed in 1985. So Saturn was a new model of car that GM was producing. And because they were opening a new plant, UAW and GM decided together that they would run it very differently.  

The traditional UAW contract with General Motors ran to I think 600 pages. It provided for every possible contingency. And they decided that they wouldn't do that for this particular plant. What they did was, they figured they had mutual interests in producing something good that would sell. Because if the product didn't sell, then the workers wouldn't have jobs. And, obviously, on the management side, if they didn't sell their products, they wouldn’t make a profit.

And actually the NEA toured, they sent lots and lots of folks to tour this plant. And this was something that the NEA was super interested in.

That was the model for this agreement that Erskine and Stanford were able to put together - what they called a “trust agreement”. A 30-page trust agreement in place of this insanely long contract.

And essentially what it said was, “We both have the same interests. We both want the same outcomes. We want to work together in a spirit of trust. And to that end, we're not going to spell out every possible contingency and bind each other to very specific things. We're going to just work as mutual partners. And here's the way we'll work things out if they go wrong.” 

And that was more or less what was in that agreement. The trust agreement essentially said, “We're going to renegotiate the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the union and the district along these lines: We want to create this new system of site-based management and we want to do that in a relationship of trust. And that's something we're going to have to build over time. But this is the container for those negotiations, if you will, and for that relationship.” 

And the interesting thing about the contract negotiations that followed from that (this was in 1997) was that the bulk of the contract actually didn't change that much. So, he didn't burn it to the ground. He didn't manage to do that.

But what did change was there was a clause added to allow buildings to hire staff directly. Before this, the district would just place folks in vacancies in order of seniority; the buildings had no say in it at all. After this, we moved to a site-based hiring system, which we still have today. And that of course was very consistent with that idea of principals being CEOs and schools having control over their operations.

And then the other groundbreaking clause that was added to the contract was called “site-based management”. And what it did was, it created “building leadership teams” for every building. And these building leadership teams actually were intended to be a co-management committee that would work with the principal and would be co-CEO to manage the operations of the building. And that was a real innovation.

[00:31:22] Christie Robertson: Yeah. Wow.

[00:31:23] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. So, at this time, because this structural change was meant to be developed within this relationship of trust, it didn't spell out in great detail which decisions were supposed to be made by whom and how. So, within building leadership teams, that decision making process was meant to be left up to each building, they would decide how they would make decisions.

And then, you were asking me a little earlier about what was the role of Central Office under this new system. Overall, in terms of which decisions belonged to buildings and which decisions belonged to the central office, it really wasn't spelled out. It wasn't spelled out anywhere, because it was meant to be something that was going to be built in this relationship of trust between the district and the union.

[00:32:05] Christie Robertson: I'm seeing a little bit of this today in the BLTs that still exist – the Building leadership teams. This weird mishmash of what's left over from John Stanford. I'm on the BLT for one of my kids' schools, and there's only a couple of decisions left that it has to make. And even those, you can see how it's not spelled out. There's turnover of the people on the board every two years, and everybody is looking at each other, looking for guidance for how to make those decisions. 

So for example, our team of mostly teachers, the principal, a couple parents meets an hour every other week, and they're supposed to design eight weeks of professional development, like, from the ground up. And... yeah. It's very strange.

[00:33:00] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, it is. The original contract spelled out three things that BLTs might want to consider doing, but it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. And the three things were: 

1) to oversee the building's budget, 

2) to oversee the building’s what at that time was called an academic achievement plan, that has evolved into what we now call “Continuous School Improvement Plans”, or CSIPs. 

3) And the other one was the professional development calendar, or the professional development process that the building would go through. 

So those are vestigial things that are still in there, which makes sense in the context of a school that has control over its budget and all of these other things. But it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list. But those are the things you'll see BLT still focused on to this day.

[00:33:44] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, so, I would say that the BLT is... we'll talk about it later, but – the last remaining remnant of what John Stanford put into place.

[00:33:54] Vivian Van Gelder: Yep.

[00:33:55] Jasmine Pulido: And so, like, you, Christie, on the BLT are still haunted a little bit by John Stanford's ghost.

[00:34:03] Christie Robertson: Yeah, because John Stanford died just as he was getting started.

[00:34:09] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, really sadly. In late 1998, he died.

[00:34:12] Jasmine Pulido: And what did he die of?

[00:34:14] Vivian Van Gelder: He was diagnosed in, I think it was April, 1998, with a really aggressive form of leukemia. And he passed away that November.

Chapter 2- Educational Entrepreneurs

[00:34:26] Christie Robertson: And this brings us to chapter two in the story. We spent a bunch of time on that first chapter because I think it's really important for people to understand what John Stanford was trying to do, as we are seeing his ghost today.

Chapter one was Stanford's wholesale reform of the district. And, Vivian, you call this next phase "educational entrepreneurs". And this is what happens in the five-year period after Stanford's death, right?

[00:34:55] Vivian Van Gelder: Correct.

[00:34:56] Christie Robertson: Ok, so, how far had Stanford gotten in his market-based schools plan at the end of his term in 1998?

[00:35:03] Vivian Van Gelder: Not very far. He essentially had pretty much created the initial structure and the relationship for developing it further for flushing it out. Essentially they were in the process of uprooting what had been, like what the district's old way of decision making was. But they hadn't yet really rebuilt it. They hadn't built what would replace it.

[00:35:20] Christie Robertson: So, they kind of had a structure, but no execution.

[00:35:24] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, very little executed. Very little on the ground. And actually, folks at the time observed this. There's a book that came out in, I think, 2000, which, part of it looked at these reforms that Stanford had proposed and began to implement. And they observed there was very little that was obvious on the ground at the time after he passed.

And, he was incredibly collaborative and charismatic. Like, that was really his hallmark. A lot of this work was done, my sense is, through sheer force of personality. And that meant that that “market-based system of schools” plan was anchored by the trust that Stanford personally developed. In the personal relationships that he held. Like with Roger Erskine, for instance.

[00:36:01] Christie Robertson: Right, symbolized by that trust agreement.

[00:36:03] Vivian Van Gelder: Exactly. So without Stanford at the helm, for example, not long after he passed, Erskine was replaced with union leaders who were far less open to these kinds of changes. And remember, Erskine had come from the NEA to bring this national push for education reform to Seattle.

[00:36:18] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, and what about his relationship with Chief Financial Officer Joseph Olchefske, who helped him develop the student funding formula?

[00:36:26] Christie Robertson: Yeah. So, another role in this big collaboration, we've got Nielsen on the school board, Stanford, the superintendent, Erskine from the Union, and Olchefske, who is going to continue into this chapter, who is on the senior district staff.

[00:36:41] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, Erskine had risen from the position of Chief Financial Officer and was Chief of Staff. And when John Stanford became ill, he was appointed Acting Superintendent.

[00:36:52] Christie Robertson: Can I jump back for a second? I'm confused about – you said that not much had been executed, but they had implemented the whole district-wide school choice. That seems a big...

[00:37:01] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. That's true. It's really confusing, because there's two things that were going on at the same time. There's the market-based system of schools and then there's site based management. You can have site based management without this market aspect of it. And a lot of districts have done that and still have that. 

But he put those two together. So, the open choice part is much more connected to the market based aspect of the reforms. And that was in place. That was the first thing he did. But the site-based management structure was really just embryonic. They'd put, kind of, the foundations in place. But it hadn't really begun to operate.

[00:37:47] Christie Robertson: And he left to Olchefske the second phase of the market-based too. Which was closing schools.

So it's 1998, Olchefske is acting superintendent, and this was one of the many superintendent searches that you describe in this 30 year history. 

One of the things I was struck by reading this was how often a superintendent search in this district has come up either empty or with only one candidate remaining. 

[00:38:23] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. There was a national search for Stanford's replacement. And they came up with no one, and instead they appointed Olchefske to the permanent superintendent role.

[00:38:33] Christie Robertson: Ok. Olchefske had been a collaborator with Stanford, so did he just basically continue the reform that Stanford had started putting in place?

[00:38:42] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, I mean, he was a former investment banker, so he was also strongly philosophically committed to this idea of marketizing schools or introducing market forces into education. And Olchefske’s sense was that the structures for doing that were in place already. So if they stopped the reforms at this point, they had cut schools loose in a sense and told them, “Go your own way.” And if they didn't follow that up with guidance and oversight, that would really create chaos, with nothing to replace it. And he figured that these schools now had the structures they needed, they had the directions they needed, they had autonomy, they had funding, they had all the things they needed to address their students' needs. They just needed this other part.

[00:39:20] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, so, the fact that Stanford died early during this process was completely unprecedented. What would have happened if he was able to carry out this plan and the relationships that he had built?

[00:39:32] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. There was actually some growing backlash to what he was doing while he was doing it.

[00:39:38] Christie Robertson: Oh, that's so interesting because you'd never hear about that. You just hear of it as this wave that everybody was riding on.

[00:39:45] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. I think we have complicated grief here around John Stanford. I think because he died before he really was able to implement anything and see how it worked, he's almost been canonized. I want to be really clear – everyone that I've spoken to who had anything to do with him or was aware of him at the time just describes him as an incredible human being, an amazing leader. But I really do think his legacy is complicated. 

And especially at this point in time, where we've come to in terms of education reform, we still have this default to: “Stanford wouldn't have done that,” or “Stanford would've done a better job,” or “Stanford would've fixed it.” And you see this even today. 

I think we have to be really careful about pinning the entire state of the district on one person. It's obviously massively important who is in the leadership. That's a key role, right? But what, does it matter if we have somebody in that role who's really effective if we as a community are divided?

[00:40:47] Christie Robertson: And do you think it's because of these reforms that we are so divided?

[00:40:51] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, I think so. I think the reform reforms baked these really perverse incentives into this already broken down system. The system was really not functioning before these reforms were implemented. And it's created a vicious cycle.

[00:41:03] Christie Robertson: Perverse incentives. So, tell me what were the perverse incentives that Stanford put in place and Olchefske continued.

[00:41:12] Vivian Van Gelder: For Olchefske in particular, it was more... It’s not quite the right word, but it was more punishment than incentive. And this was doing No Child Left Behind before No Child Left Behind was cool. The state had actually come up with a set of learning goals for students – things like math and ELA – very specific learning standards. And each district was supposed to incorporate these in some way and align their curriculum. And so that work happened under Olchefske. 

His model, he didn't call it this but he described it this way to when you're speaking to a group of teachers, he called it “Educational Entrepreneurialism”. And what he essentially said was, “We've given you all the resources that you need. We've now outlined learning goals for students. You’re the entrepreneurs; you go out and make it happen. And we're going to hold you accountable for doing it.” That was pretty much the model.

[00:42:10] Christie Robertson: So teachers were accountable for the student outcomes, you're saying?

[00:42:14] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. Teachers and principals, mostly principals. But then the central office was pretty much hands off. And in hindsight they really didn't provide adequate district wide support and resources for principals and teachers to meet these goals.

[00:42:27] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, and I read that at most there was some grant funded teacher training, but it was voluntary and not necessarily aligned with district standards. And applied unevenly across the district. So principals complained about the fact that they were set up under this model to be over-capacity and under-resourced.

[00:42:46] Christie Robertson: So you tell principals that they're responsible for managing the school's budget, staffing and general operations, and for producing these student outcomes, and then you don't give them the tools or the trained professionals to carry those out. And you're holding this big stick. That sounds frustrating.

[00:43:05] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, they were frustrated. So under this model, schools that were struggling were susceptible to being taken over by the district. In the way that our district would be taken over by the state if it went bankrupt.

[00:43:17] Christie Robertson: Binding conditions for schools.

[00:43:19] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah.

[00:43:19] Christie Robertson: There's a story I want to hear.

[00:43:21] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. Can you imagine? But yeah, I think they started realizing that they weren't going to be able to fire their way to success after Olchefske publicly fired four principles for failing to reach these standards. So this initial very punitive kinda approach, which actually was pioneered under Stanford, after he passed, they kind of smoothed out the edges, and they called it a “support initiative”. And it was supposed to be kinder and gentler.

[00:43:45] Jasmine Pulido: Ok. So they moved to a support initiative, and then suddenly a lot of schools needed support. And in unearthed the fact that the district was under-resourced itself.

[00:43:57] Christie Robertson: Yeah. So, for the central office to provide support, they're going to need people, and money, and a plan.

[00:44:03] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah, the district also established a thing called the “Central Office Transformation Task Force” to develop this plan. 

And this was actually at the behest of the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation was a big financial supporter of SPS at this time, mostly through that relationship with Stanford, I think. And they were like, “Hey, how about you try this?” The task force was supposed to help the district implement the “characteristics of high performing districts” in terms of what Central Office did. Not much what the schools were doing, but what the central office was doing. So it was supposed to rebuild the central office.

[00:44:36] Christie Robertson: Can you give a quick reference for the characteristics where those come from?

[00:44:40] Vivian Van Gelder: Gates was really into education at this time. They had this “Small High Schools” initiative that they were trying to push... And then the other thing was this “High Performing School District Central Offices” project. And this was part of that.

[00:44:52] Christie Robertson: And now they're supporters of charter schools, probably not surprisingly, right?

[00:44:57] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. They've actually pretty much butted out of education. But they were really heavily supporting various initiatives at this time. 

So they had this task force. But feedback from the principals was that the task force really hadn't made much of a difference. And it didn't last very long either. It kind of died off. And anyway, educators felt kind of under-supported as well.

[00:45:17] Christie Robertson: So they've got this kind of sink-or-swim system, and they can't figure out how to help principals and educators who are starting to drown.

[00:45:27] Jasmine Pulido: It sounds like you're saying that principals were sold this idea that they'd be CEOs, which means they would get more power, but not really, because you weren't giving them the training or resources to support them. So really you were setting them up to fail from the very beginning. Same as educators.

[00:45:43] Christie Robertson: And of course, when schools are under-resourced and under-supported. It's going to be the students who are already the most marginalized who feel it the most. We see that over and over.

[00:45:54] Jasmine Pulido: And this was right around when busing for integration was ending. And they had a racial tiebreaker at that time for school choice for a couple of years. And how were families of color feeling about these school reforms, Vivian?

[00:46:06] Vivian Van Gelder: Well, families of color were really wary. And they had been since before these reforms were implemented. around 1994, which is when the district was first talking about this idea of decentralizing schools. Even at that time, they were really worried that these kinds of reforms would really exacerbate the marginalization that their kids were already experiencing. BIPOC kids had been failed by the system for years. And then a few years into this reform, there was still no science that all this upheaval and all this change had actually even lessened the disparity in outcomes by race at all.

And we see in 2000 there was a coalition of community organizations that raised the alarm and they pointed to continuing racial disproportionality in things like discipline, program access, and academic outcomes. And in 2001, the Seattle chapter of the NAACP actually threatened a 14th amendment lawsuit against the school district for failing to address these persistent issues.

At this time the district actually launched a couple of initiatives to stave off the lawsuits. But because the system had been reformed to push those operational strategic decisions out to schools, each school was in charge of how they wanted to adopt these initiatives. If at all.

So that was happening. But at the same time, during this era of educational entrepreneurialism, the district also racked up a $33 million budget deficit that came out of nowhere. It was completely unexpected.

[00:47:27] Christie Robertson: So it wasn't improving disparities, there was a lack of support for buildings, and they have a budget deficit

[00:47:35] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah. And so where did the deficit come from? How did they figure out where it came from?

[00:47:39] Vivian Van Gelder: At first they honestly didn't know exactly where it came from, because at this point central oversight of school finances was minimal, to say the least. It was essentially non-existent. And an external audit was done after this happened. And that audit found that a lot of the problem had arisen because the central office was so disconnected from schools operationally that they actually lost budgetary control.

And this, as you can imagine, created a massive outcry. People were feeling a kind of way about these reforms already, and now you've got this huge budget hole. And so this was the straw that broke the camel's back. And you saw both the teacher's union SEA and the Principal's Association of Seattle Schools, they both passed no confidence votes in the superintendent at this time.

[00:48:30] Christie Robertson: Olchefske.

[00:48:31] Vivian Van Gelder: Olchefske, yeah.

[00:48:32] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah. And the community groups threatened to oppose the levy, which also sounds really familiar.

[00:48:39] Christie Robertson: Yep. There were people organizing to oppose this past levy. And I think having a budget deficit just imbues some distrust in an organization. If the district can't balance its books... especially when it was unexpected as it was back then.

[00:48:57] Vivian Van Gelder: Yeah. And despite those no confidence votes, at this point, the school board was still supportive of the superintendent. To them Olchefske was a business guy doing businessy things that these business focused people on the school board thought with the right things to do.

[00:49:12] Christie Robertson: Ok, I'm trying to keep track of what went wrong in the aftermath of the Stanford reform. For our audience, we've got: lack of support for struggling schools. We've got the budget deficit. And the third one I want to add here that I'm seeing you define in your report is a lack of role clarity.

[00:49:29] Vivian Van Gelder: So you have lack of role clarity, you have lack of support for schools, and now this huge budget deficit. 

And so facing all of this in the spring of 2003, this is maybe six months after this budget hole arises, Olchefske resigns. So he’s four years into his term, he says it's not because of the budget deficit, it's because he sees that the district won't be able to make any more progress if he stays in the role that it's not helpful anymore. So he steps down.

Part 1 Outro

[00:49:57] Jasmine Pulido: That's the first chapter in our three-part look at "Left to Chance student outcomes in Seattle Public Schools."

[00:50:04] Christie Robertson: We've traced how a nationwide educational crisis set the stage for John Stanford's sweeping reforms on the local level- reforms that continue to shape the district even decades later.

[00:50:16] Jasmine Pulido: In our Part two, we'll return to our conversation with Vivian Van Gelder to explore what happened after Stanford's death, as educational entrepreneurs took the reins.