Educational Equity

The stay-at-home order issued on March 23rd due to COVID-19 forced Seattle Public Schools to abruptly go online and have the whole structure of education shift. According to an Epidemic Intelligence Service (E.I.S) member, “thousands of kids relied on schools for breakfast and lunch, or received medicine like insulin from school nurses. If schools closed, some of those students would likely go hungry; others might get sick, or even die.” In addition, parents were expected to help their kids with schoolwork, many of whom didn’t have the skillset, time, or home environment to do so.

The divide between public and private schools and South Seattle schools (the highest percentage of students living in poverty) and North Seattle schools (less ethnically diverse and more affluent), has been amplified dramatically as teachers and students alike are expected to continue learning from home. The speed at which schools have been addressing racial inequality in the Seattle school system has been painfully slow in the past, and it has become very clear that the school system needs to be fixed, not the kids struggling at the hands of it.

Here are a few steps to curb educational inequity that are cited in a Seattle Times article: having PTAs share their funds with poorer schools, putting more people of color in positions of power, and doing anti-racism training for teachers (this last one is especially important because 88% of teachers in Washington are white and only 50% of students at public schools are.) During this time though, the philanthropic Seattle Foundation donated $100,000 to PTAs of seven different schools to give to struggling families’ covid relief.

Quarantine Compliance

Before there had been even a dozen COVID-19 fatalities in the US, Microsoft and Amazon both went online. The CEO of Microsoft commented as quoted in an article for the The New Yorker, “King County has a strong reputation for excellent public-health experts, and the worst thing we could have done is substitute our judgment for the expertise of people who have devoted their lives to serving the public.” When these big companies, who employ a hundred thousand Seattle residents, go remote, it further legitimized the need to stay at home.

Seattleites have confidence in their healthcare workers and experts. In an article titled “Study: Seattle is one of the most quarantine-compliant cities in the nation” for Komo News, they found a 81.89% decrease in public transit ridership, the starkest decrease of any US metro.  UW research and biotech companies further earned their stellar reputation by being one of the earliest to develop a promising vaccine.

Native Americans

In a Native American History class I am taking this semester at Pomona, one of the first exercises we did was a “land acknowledgement,” in which we researched what Native American tribe(s) lived on the land we were Zooming in from and if there was a treaty involved in the ceding of the land to the colonizers. I found that the Duwamish people live in Seattle, and there are many other tribes nearby. I also found that there was a treaty signed in 1855 called the Treaty of Point Elliott which was signed by many people, including Chief Sealth (the namesake of Seattle). It was supposed to guarantee fishing rights, healthcare, and reservation land. Some of the tribes received their end of the deal, but the Duwamish did not.

During Covid, these communities suffered disproportionately. As quoted in a Seattle Times article, the “Indian Health Service reported nearly 200 cases of COVID-19 in Indian Country as of Friday. Of those, almost 10% are in Washington state.” Native American Health Care is notoriously underfunded, despite the promises made by the federal government in the Treaty of Point Elliott. The Urban Indian Organizations in Seattle have to use their limited funding to help with COVID-19 support and have reported a projected monthly loss of $734,922 a month during the pandemic.

Seattle Freeze

As sociologist professor Jodi O’brian sums up, “the Seattle Nice/Ice phenomenon is rooted in a historic intersection of Nordic-Asian reserves. It may be the influence of weekend mountain men or the influx of socially disinclined tech workers. It could be a trapping of mid-sized citydom — small enough to manage on your own but too big to care about your neighbors.” Another theory is that the glum, overcast skies cause seasonal depressive disorder and affect people's moods.  A final theory is that, because Seattle is a “transplant city,” amplified by the presence of large corporate employers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing, there is a lack of familiarity and social cohesion (US census). Only 3/10 of Seattle adults were born in WA, 5/10 were born in another state, and 2/10 were born in another country. Not every Seattlite feels like they experience the freeze--- some believe it is just confirmation bias.

Luckily, during covid, a new poll found that “88% of residents in Seattle believed they had good neighbors with ⅓ of them citing the reason for following covid guidelines. The emphasis is on respectfulness over “warmth.”

Redlining

Redlining is the act of sectioning off historically “desirable” areas, using property deeds and community covenants, and results in excluding individuals on the basis of race and ethnicity from owning homes there. (Click here to see a map of redlining in Seattle).

In 1927, Capitol Hill Residents asked other homeowners to put language in their deeds to exclude non-white and specifically black people. They succeeded in restricting 183 blocks in the neighborhood for white people only. Later, in the 1960s, when the population of Seattle was 92% white, with 90% of the African American population in the central district, Seattlites voted against “open-housing” policies which would, in theory, allow anyone to live anywhere. Finally in 1968, after the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr., the open-housing ordinance was passed. A law being put in place did not mean that change happened immediately or that white Seattleites accepted people of color into their communities.

In addition to causing housing segregation, redlining affects where kids can and can not go to school, and what type of education they are able to get. It also affects racial inequality in health care. Black people nationwide are less likely to be insured and to be granted sick leave. In addition, The Seattle Times reported that less than 20% of all African Americans can work from home as many are essential workers. The Department of Health revealed in 1945 that Seattle’s hospitals (including Providence Hospital, Swedish Hospital, and Virginia Mason Nursing School) all refused to treat African Americans in the community.