How Safe Is My Child at School? New Interactive Map Allows Seattle Parents to Compare Classrooms
Over the past two years, The 74 has published a special series of maps compiled by Max Eden, all looking at the critical information contained in school climate surveys and mapping out responses to those surveys in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. (Click on the city names to see the maps, and read more about what Eden says he learned in surveying the safety data.) In this latest installment, Eden looks at school safety in Seattle based on surveys of students. NYC, L.A., Philly, and Seattle are among only a small number of major districts that conduct the surveys and make their results public. In a separate essay, Eden argues that all districts should do the same.
Five years ago, facing pressure from a federal Department of Education investigation, Seattle Public Schools launched a policy initiative to curtail school suspensions. Three years ago, the district announced a one-year moratorium on out-of-school suspensions for elementary students and created a districtwide plan to further reduce suspensions in middle and high schools. Last year, Washington state followed suit with a legislative initiative to decrease suspensions statewide.
To discipline-reform advocates, this is great news. But no one stopped to see what Seattle’s students thought about what was happening in their schools as suspensions were dramatically curtailed. Unfortunately, as fits a national pattern, Seattle students say that most of the 102 schools in the district have become less safe, less respectful, and less supportive places to learn.
So long as the district was being pressured by the government to press forward with discipline reform or potentially lose federal funding, student voices mattered little. But now that the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter on school discipline has been rescinded — and that threat has been lifted — there is finally an opportunity for the voices of students, teachers, and parents to be taken seriously.
Seattle Public Schools is one of a small number of major districts that administer an annual, consistent school climate survey, asking students a range of questions and making the results publicly available at the school level. In order to inform the parents of Seattle students — and the general public — about how school climate changed as the district aggressively lowered suspensions, I pulled answers to questions concerning safety, respect, and fairness from the first year that results are available until the latest school year (2015 to 2018).
Continue reading the entire piece here at The 74
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Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here
This piece originally appeared in The 74