Not Everyone is Welcome in Tukwila
Part II of the Borishade files
I write a lot, and this is a long post. It is also a bit esoteric unless you are deep into Saint Louis Public Schools (SLPS) drama, and it is a follow up to my last post (also not small). The media it is critiquing is an attempt by Blythe Bernhard (education reporter for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch) to smear SLPS's interim superintendent, Millicent Borishade, by constantly referencing a nasty letter written by a teachers' union in Tukwila Washington. I find the content interesting, but then I am deep into the drama. I attempted to make the commentary on journalism, race relations, public schools, and everything else as accessible and interesting as I could. I also saved my some acrimony for the very end.
Don’t go! At least read this real reporter’s stuff!
However, if that is not interesting to you but you do want the hard-hitting reporting, I am going to put the most essential item up front: the Tukwila school district and its teachers' union have a history of hostility to black teachers and administrators, and the letter that Bernhard is circulating is very arguably an artifact of a racist reaction to a black outsider challenging their power.
If you read only one thing, read this story from the Seattle Medium about Tukwila Public Schools. It is a well-reported piece about the district's problems, and it specifically references the teachers' union and the hostility to black administrators, which is extremely relevant to the letter criticizing Borishade. If you read this whole post, I will set the context and discuss it. If you haven’t the time, just read the quotes by Rita Green, head of the education department of the local NAACP, which are in the link and quoted later in this post.
Not pen pals
The letter, voted on by the Tukwila union asking Borishade to resign, that is getting so much attention was non-binding and was not covered at all in local Tukwila news that I could find. A previous letter from the union asking a superintendent to resign did get some coverage, but the local reporting discusses the nuances of the situation in a way that has been missing from Saint Louis coverage. While the union's letter accused the superintendent of many personal failings, the reporting I read pointed to deeper issues with the budget and the district that put the administration and the union at odds. Just as a reminder, a teachers' union is meant to be at odds with the administration. It is worth asking why SLPS's teachers' union, the AFT-420, is so aligned with the administration of SLPS. More on that later.
One last bit of context before I dive into analysis: this story is disproportionately important for its impact on SLPS school staff. Borishade is currently the superintendent, and every SLPS worker ultimately reports to her. Until recently, I was active on a Facebook group for SLPS staff and saw how workers responded to this coverage. My interactions on the forum were often contentious, and as a single SLPS administrator moderated it, I long wondered if and when I would get booted. The forum had increasingly become a spot for anonymous administrators and a few union reps to complain bitterly about Drs. Scarlett and Borishade and insult anyone who disagreed. I was one who disagreed, and my last series of replies were on a post by an anonymous staffer encouraging SLPS staff to follow in Tukwila's footsteps and write a letter asking Borishade to resign. I thought it was a pretty small disagreement compared to some I have had, but it was apparently enough to get me the boot.
SLPS staff are not organized and our union is not real, so I am confident that no Tukwila-style letter is coming—however, the urge is there and is being stoked by anonymous administrators and local journalists. Staff and the public alike are being encouraged to blame Borishade (and Dr. Scarlett and her “Seattle crew”) for the district’s problems, and to some extent, it seems to be working.
The most diverse district in the US (for students)
Tukwila was once the most diverse school district in the country. It has lost that title, but as a suburb of Seattle, it is still high on the list. The most recent data shows a school where no group has a clear majority and a high percentage of students speak a language other than English at home. I will spare deep analysis of the exact breakdown and changes over time since this is not an academic paper, but here is an easily searchable recent graph of enrollment diversity by ethnicity:
The white cohort is noticeably small (especially for Washington), but that tracks with trends at public schools elsewhere. The black population, at 18.5%, is higher than a representative student body would be but is still a solid minority compared with other groups. One way to see this is as a rainbow of identities that allows Tukwila students to interact with students from many different backgrounds. Compared to often highly racially segregated school systems (like Saint Louis's), there is a real positive side to this diverse student body, which is undoubtedly how the district wants to be seen. However, a cynic can quickly see how racial tensions could just as easily predominate, and there is ample evidence that is part of this story. To complicate the picture, consider this recent breakdown of the teacher demographics in the district:
This shows that in a school district that has only an 11% white student body, the teachers are 65% white. Meanwhile, the almost 20% of students who are black or mixed race are served by teachers that are only about 5% black. I am a white teacher at a majority-minority school district myself, and I am not condemning teachers for their race or suggesting that all white teachers are racist. However, I am suggesting that this disparity can lead to tensions and that people who actually know and care about Tukwila are aware of this and have been trying to address it for years. Millicent Borishade was one of those people.
While I did no original reporting for this story, I am not just saying what could be the case. I am relating these statistics to the very easily searchable stories about racial tensions in Tukwila schools that any reporter should have done before referencing the district in a story. For example, according to this story from 2019, racist incidents involving students and teachers were common in the local high school, and the administration and board were accused of not being responsive by the teachers and students. Consider the experiences reflected in this snippet from the story:
More details on these incidents are readily available online, but for now, I am not trying to do an exhausitve analysis of the district; I want to highlight that race has been an issue in the district for decades. Notably, the allegations from the story I cited were not simply that some students or teachers had said racist things but that the administration and the board ignored complaints repeatedly. I chose a 2019 story, but Googling around will yield many more that prominently feature racial tensions in Tukwila. Here are a couple of examples:
In 2012, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the superintendent of Tukwila (herself black) had racially victimized a group of black employees. Some of the employees claimed they faced retaliation when they reported it. https://www.kiro7.com/news/us-govt-tukwila-school-district-employees-victims-/246019162/
In 2015, the local NAACP accused the district of "racist hiring practices" and noted that "Currently 25 percent of the district’s teachers are non-white, compared to a student body that’s 85 percent non-white." They pushed the district to address this. https://www.kuow.org/stories/naacp-slams-tukwila-school-district-minority-hiring/
Both of these are older stories, but I believe knowing the history of an organization is crucial if one is to understand its present (this is not exactly ancient history, either). Millicent Borishade worked for Tukwila Public Schools for only one year, the 2022-2023 school year, and I am sure she was aware of the district's history when she took the job.
Borishade’s Tukwila Tenure
Dr. Borishade's role in Tukwila was as chief academic officer. I did not do a deep dive into her time there, but much can be learned just from looking at her role. School administrator roles are not uniform, but in Tukwila, the Chief Academic Officer is an expansive role that is directly under the superintendent. Here is an org chart showing her position in the administration and who reports to her (I zoomed in on her role; only the superintendent is above her):
Here's what I notice on looking at this:
Borishade oversaw two new antiracist roles that were never filled (I could not find a new org chart, but a staff search for the roles returned nothing)
She was in charge of the family and community liaisons to the various ethnic groups in the district
Alison Deno (also now at SLPS and accused of vague wrongdoing) worked under her as the head of multilingual services
Principals were directly under her, so complaints and issues that needed to be escalated past the building level would go to her before the superintendent
I hope you can see what a significant role this is and how an outsider filling it could easily lead to friction with established interests (like a teachers’ union). School administration includes some powerful and contentious positions and powers, and just glancing at Borishade’s responsibilities shows how hard it would have been to please everyone, even when things were going well for the district (they are not going well).
The unfilled antiracist roles suggest that she was meant to oversee a DEI-style initiative that never really got going, and that would have meant new administration hires even as the budget was in crisis. Any teacher who resented DEI on principle or who simply resented vague new administrative positions in a time of belt-tightening would have reason to resent Borishade. More fundamentally, as the supervisor directly above principals, teachers with complaints would have to go through her before getting to the superintendent. This role would have been a lightning rod for criticism regardless, so it is significant that the letter of complaint is almost exclusively about petty things like criticizing classroom library setups. A lot of people were looking for her to mess up, so if the gripes are minor, that is a mark in Borishade’s favor.
One prominent detail in Blythe Bernhard's characterization of the letter was the allegation that Borishade "ignored special education." This appears to stem from the fact that the Director of Special Education worked under Borishade, and when she took a leave of absence, all her duties fell to Borishade (this is reading between the lines, but check the letter to see for yourself). The letter accuses her of not answering her subordinate's emails and attending all the meetings that she would have. Considering her extensive list of responsibilities and subordinates, failure to fully take on someone else’s job while they are gone does not warrant such a claim being repeated in a major newspaper.
Believe it or not, I trimmed a lot of details I initially thought were interesting from my analysis. However, I am not a real reporter, and I can summarize only so many news stories without becoming a bore. Instead, I will return to the story I cited at the top of this post, in which a proper journalist, Aaron Allen of the Seattle Medium, interviewed a number of people for a story that was not about Borishade, but the problems facing the Tukwila district in general. This is a relatively current story, and it was posted in March of 2024, when Borishade had already relocated to Saint Louis.
What a real reporter does
The article is quick and interesting. It asserts that the district faces three major challenges: the board of directors, accountability for achievement, and racial tensions.
The board and accountability for student achievement could easily be headers for problems facing SLPS, but the issues are a bit different in Tukwila. In Tukwila, it is hard to get anyone to sit on the board at all, while in SLPS, the problem has more to do with the competence and honesty of those who do. However, the problem with accountability for achievement is almost identical to SLPS’s. Basically, the district is not performing well on most metrics (although it is miles better than SLPS), but no one wants to take responsibility for failing students and falling enrollment. Saint Louis knows the blame game and managed decline far too well.
The third problem identified by the article, racial tensions, is very different in Tukwila and Saint Louis. In Saint Louis, the students are predominantly black, and so is the administration. Issues still exist and nothing is proportional, but Saint Louis does not resemble Tukwila in terms of student or teacher diversity. While Tukwila is incredibly diverse with students from many different backgrounds, the teachers and administration are predominantly white. Any reporter connecting the two districts should note these differences in an honest article. Here is a snippet of the article with a few underlinings for emphasis
Basically, according to this reporter and the local stakeholders he interviewed, Tukwila has a specifically anti-black racism issue demonstrated by hostility to black teachers and administrators from the teachers' union. This has led to black administrators and teachers leaving the district, much to the frustration of the NAACP. I do not know if Rita Green (education chair for the local NAACP) was referring to Borishade specifically when she talks about black administrators leaving due to lack of support, but considering this story came out the year after she left a very high-level administrative position under fire from the union, it appears a fairly direct reference (a real reporter would reach out to Rita Green for comment). Basically, Dr. Millicent Borishade may well have been driven out of a famously racist district by a famously racist union, only to have that used against her by a white reporter in a majority-black city.