Brita Butler-Wall and her nutty delusions

Seattle School Board candidate Brita Butler-Wall, in an interview on local NPR affiliate KUOW, August 27, 2003

Interviewer: What do you think is the biggest problem facing Seattle schools right now and what would you do to solve it?

Butler-Wall: The biggest problem without a doubt is disproportionality. Our children of color are not being well served. We have institutional racism present in essentially every school and I think that with good professional development and a concerted effort we can solve that problem. A thousand other schools have solved that problem. We can solve it too.

Interviewer: What facets of Seattle Public Schools show you that it practices institutional racism?

Butler-Wall: I think pretty much ... if you walk in the door of most of the school buildings you do not see any literature in any other languages than standard English which has kind of an off-putting effect to all the many families who come here from a different culture. Of course they're eager to have their children learn standard English, I'm not saying they're not. But just in terms of creating that kind of a climate. There's really not much recognition that people come from a variety of cultures. And that's a simple example.

It might be tempting to some people to blame an abstract bogeyman like "racism" for the underachievement of some children. But Brita Butler-Wall either suffers from delusions, or she doesn't bother look at the school system's actual data, or both.

First of all, although the population of Seattle is only 8% black, about 25% of the school systems' administrators are black. If that's attributable to institutional racism, it's probably not the sort of racism that Brita Butler-Wall is fantasizing about.

Second, the school system's performance data [large PDF] indicates that by a number of quantitative measures (e.g. high school GPA, graduation rates, attendance rates, test scores, expulsion rates), Asian students (especially Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese) outperform white students, and Latino students are doing better than black students. How this is explained by a lack of "recognition that people come from a variety of cultures" or a lack of books in foreign languages, is a big mystery to me.

Brita Butler-Wall also makes all kinds of other grand statements without being able to back them up:

Brita Butler-Wall ... I think the schools right now feel that they get unfunded mandates without the resources needed to put them into place effectively.

Interviewer: Like what?

Brita Butler-Wall: Well, um, like what. I can't think of any example off the top of my head. Sorry.

Sorry.

And we'll all be sorry if Brita Butler-Wall is elected to the school board.

Brita Butler-Wall seems to be the front runner in her race against the incumbent Nancy Waldman. The good people of Seattle need your help to save our schools from Brita Butler-Wall. If you live in Seattle, please be sure to vote for Nancy Waldman. If you don't live in Seattle but know someone who does, please send them a link to this web page.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 01, 2003 06:06 PM