From Tukwila under fire
A new outsider superintendent, a new line of attack
First, here's a quick update on my last post: I have not yet lost my bet! Headlines aside, Dr. Scarlett remains SLPS superintendent on paper, if not in fact. The board voted 6-0 to fire her based on a report given by an unnamed investigator in a closed session. While that sounds like being fired to the layman, she is still employed and paid by the district. Why? They cannot fire her without a hearing unless she gives up. She has decided to fight. I wish her luck.
While I am defending my betting record, I will admit this is not how I saw things playing out. I was surprised by the vote and very disappointed that no information about the cause they found was forthcoming. I wondered if it was something new and interesting or if, rather, they cut some deal where they could fire her for cause, give her a juicy NDA deal, and move on with their lives. It turns out something else is happening, and I cannot pretend to know what. Rather than making any more pretend bets on her situation or commenting on the press coverage (it is pretty bad), I am going to write a bit about a different aspect of this drama: the new SLPS superintendent, Millicent Borishade.
Who is Millicent Borishade and why is everyone talking about her?
Dr. Millicent Borishade moved to Saint Louis from Washington, along with Dr. Scarlett, in 2023. She is often described as Scarlett’s "best friend," and I am just going to assume that is true. Less kind people like Bill McClellan at the Post-Dispatch have called her a "buddy hire." Knowing who a superintendent’s best friend is seems strange, but there is a reason it is relevant: the ouster of Keisha Scarlett has been publicly blamed on her habit of hiring friends.
The board has not yet commented on the cause that led them to fire Dr. Scarlett, but in the past two months, plenty of people have weighed in on why she should be fired. Hiring friends to public roles does have a touch of corruption to it, and the ever-influential Blythe Bernhard confidently assured me that the mere presence of hires from within her network was a guarantee of corruption. Whatever the unnamed investigator told them in that closed-door work session, many observers believe there is no need to speculate. Hiring friends is corrupt; Keisha Scarlett hired friends.
Wait, how long has she worked here?
The difficulty, then, is explaining why Borishade’s hire was not seen as a problem until now. It also makes it hard to explain why she now has the board’s support to take on the permanent role of superintendent. If the board booted Scarlett for buddy hiring, why are they promoting her buddy? I do not have the answer and will not make any new bets until my old one is resolved.
I heard very little about Borishade during the year she was an administrator at SLPS. I believe she visited my class twice; both times, she seemed nice and left little impression. I remember hearing some people off-hand saying nice things about her, but she was upper administration and far removed from my day-to-day.
Something changed, and now some of the anti-Scarlett forces have moved on to Borishade in inexplicable lockstep. At least in part, I find that imagining that SLPS is having an immune response to outsiders explains a lot of this. While I do think this metaphor is helpful, I think there are other, more direct and timely reasons Borishade is now under attack.
The culprit? Really bad reporting. Again.
This truly was never supposed to be an anti-Blythe Bernhard blog, and I worry sometimes that readers will think me a man obsessed. Maybe they have a point, but there is a reason she keeps coming up: she is setting the tone of local coverage. Other reporters have point-blank told me this, and if you look through other outlets, you will see traces of Bernhard’s reporting all over.
Any references to criticisms of Borishade or her lack of a certificate (too dumb for me to comment on, but a big gripe of Bernhad), the source is actually Bernhard’s reporting, no matter the outlet. I have plenty of issues with non-Bernhard reporters, but usually, my criticism is that they are blindly repeating stories that Blythe has broken. This is an excellent case in point.
Millient Borishade's Linkedin shows that she is an accomplished educator. Referring to her mainly in terms of her friendships is an insult to a woman who has worked in education most of her life, filled many administrative roles, and helped jumpstart more than one school district. At a glance, she has the exact CV you would expect from a qualified superintendent. It would also give an investigative reporter tons of places to reach out for information on her prior work experience. However, a single item on her resume caught Blythe's attention, leading to a tragic spiral in public perceptions.
Where the heck is Tukwila?
Just before her move to Saint Louis, Dr. Borishade was the chief academic officer at Tukwila School District, which is just outside Seattle. It is one of the shortest tenures on her resume, and unlike most of her other roles, she does not bother to describe her duties and achievements there. If you have ever heard of Tukwila, it may be because it was once labeled the most diverse school district in the country. More recent coverage of the district is mostly negative. It is facing a funding crisis similar to many school districts with declining enrollment and it is churning through administrators. It has trouble getting anyone to sit on its board and may face a state takeover soon. It is depressingly familiar reading if you keep up with the state of public schools.
This context is not included in Blythe's piece, and maybe she thinks it is unimportant. I think it is, and I am going to do a whole second part on this post because when I did a quick search of the district, I fell down a number of rabbit holes and found a lot of interesting and relevant things (get ready for racism). That will be in the next post, though. For now, I will just briefly describe what Blythe thought was newsworthy.
Hit me Blythey one more time
On August 2, Bernhard published a story titled "Interim superintendent of Saint Louis Public Schools left previous job under fire." The story is paywalled with no free preview, and if you are not already a subscriber, I cannot really recommend signing up just to read this story. The piece is under 1,000 words and contains very little new information. The second half of the article is not really about Borishade at all but refers back to criticisms of other hires, with a particular emphasis on the much hated Phoenix Jackson, who was hired to head SLPS communications, but then publicly dragged and had her offer rescinded when it was discovered that she had two houses and was into astrology (a bit ironically, Bernhard wrote the hit on Jackson that started this mess, then wrote a story complaining that there was no one filling the position that Jackson was hired to fill). These hires were made by Dr. Scarlett, of course, but are linked to Borishade by virtue of them also being "recent Seattle-area hires."
The "under fire" in the title refers to a letter written and voted on by the Tukwila teachers' union that asked Dr. Borishade to resign from her role. The vote was non-binding, and the allegations were anonymous and quite vague. You can read the letter here, and I especially recommend the "Addendum - Members' concerns" to get a feel for the kind of "fire" she was under. The union helpfully bolded the most damning stuff, starting with this:
My close reading expertise tells me the most important part of this bolded statement is "listen to those who have been serving this community for more than a year." That reads to me as a slam on her for being new. The actual allegations against her are pretty light, but "rigid directives and micromanaging" stand out to me as complaints that, while real, are pretty general. God knows I am not the person to give out advice on brevity, but I feel this could have been rewritten as, "She is new and bossy." That sounds way less professional, though, so I understand the verbosity.
The "addendum" of bulleted complaints does not up the seriousness. It is one page, and is basically a list of gripes riffing on the original bolded section. My favorite is this one:
I am truly not hating on these teachers, whose complaints may well be justified. I can imagine a situation like this and being deeply bugged by it. I have had to deal with aggressive administrators before, and I wish I had a union that responded to my concerns like this one did. When I tried to get my union (AFT-420) to take action after an administrator called security and told them I was dangerous so they would kick me out of school, they flatly declined to intervene (more on that in a future post). My point here is just that this letter is no slam dunk or list of crimes, it is an artifact of a teachers' union standing up to a new administrator who was unpopular with teachers. That is basically the job of the union, and perhaps Borishade was not a good fit for the district. It should be noted that there is no hint that Borishade retaliated or complained about the letter, and she did indeed leave at the end of the year.
However, this letter and those anonymous complaints do not represent the whole situation fairly or completely. Again, the district's financial issues and general malaise are not discussed in the piece at all, and if Bernhard reached out to anyone to learn more about the situation in Tukwila, those conversations did not make it into the piece. Instead, this is how Bernhard characterized this letter:
It’s salacious, but is it news?
My readership is much smaller than Blythe Bernhard's (for now) but also much smarter. I encourage you to read the letter, which is not long, and see where she is getting each of these points. Even if you think the characterization is fair, you will notice she chose not to include allegations of classroom library setups, but folded that into "insulting and demeaning staff." Her summary of the letter makes it sound much more grievous than what I read. I once tried to get Blythe interested in some allegations of wrongdoing at SLPS that involved the child abuse hotline and multiple outside law firms. She was entirely disinterested. I guess I should have told her about the time my principal told me to put up more posters. She could have written that an administrator demeaned the staff’s decorating abilities.
Blythe did briefly transition from the letter about Tukwila to complaints about Borishade from SLPS staff. Specifically, she stated, "One principal posted anonymously to social media that Borishade belittles staff and “doesn’t value collaboration, but instead creates impossible conditions for us to work under.”' I will just say that this quote comes from an anonymous post on a Facebook group Blythe manages and that it, like almost all the other anonymous quotes in her articles, is from an administrator, not a teacher. I will leave it to you to decide how relevant and newsworthy it is. If nothing else, an anonymous charge of “not valuing collaboration” is very hard to defend against.
I find this article very dumb, and if I were an editor at the Post-Dispatch I would have killed it. Perhaps you disagree, and I admit that in isolation, the article is more of an eye-roll than an affront to journalistic integrity. The letter is real, and I have no doubt that co-workers, past and present, have complained about Borishade, who is now in a position of power and open to criticism in the press. That said, in my opinion, without more substantial complaints than these, it is not worth dragging this woman's reputation in our paper of record over something like this, which did not make the news in Tukwila at all, where you might have thought it would have been a bigger deal. My next post will cover the reasons why that may be beyond the obvious pettiness.
This is what an echo chamber looks like
Whether you agree with what I have written or not, I am going to end this post with a collection of quotes I snipped from Bernhard's articles posted in the month and a half after she published this piece (I am writing this on 9/26). Just consider how fair this writing is, even if you found the original story newsworthy.
As mentioned, I actually have a lot more to say about this letter (brace yourselves. Org charts and the NAACP are involved) and will start to work on my next post immediately. In the meantime, enjoy your free preview of the quality journalism you could enjoy with a subscription to the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. Each of these is from a different article by Blythe Bernhard (actually, one is by another writer referencing her) written between August 2nd and today. I want to believe that good writing and reasoning are persuasive, but I worry that repetition has a much greater impact.
PS: The stuff about not having a Missouri superintendent’s certificate is too dumb for me even to discuss. She has a Washington and Illinois certificate, and her Missouri one is processing. That has not stopped Blythe from mentioning it incessantly and certain people from getting weirdly angry about it.