Anchor Lead:
More than ever before, public schools are being judged and funded based on test scores. That puts particular pressure on schools with below-average results. One of those struggling schools is Martin Luther King Elementary in Seattle. In a district where parents have a variety of schools from which to choose, none listed MLK as their first choice.

In the latest installment of our education series, "The Learning Curve" KPLU's Jennifer Niessen reports on the "school that no one wants to go to".

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School Seattle School District Pictures courtesy MLK Elementary .		JN: Martin Luther King Elementary is a small school in the leafy Seattle neighborhood of Madison Park. The rundown building holds 211 studentsÄ40 pupils shy of its enrollment goal. Butting up to its blacktop playground is the Bush School, a prestigious private institution whose annual tuition tops out at more than 15-thousand dollars. 15-thousand dollars is what some of the parents at Martin Luther King make in one year, Barry Dorsey is MLK's principal. DORSEY:"Good morning, good morning."

JN: Walking outside at recess, he towers over the children and his popularity is undeniable.

CHILDREN: "Principal Dorsey! Principal Dorsey! Principal Dorsey!"

JN: Kids clamor for his attention as if he were a celebrity and they his adoring fans. About two years ago he jumped at the chance of heading up MLK...a school in absolute chaos.

DORSEY: "That's how it was described to me. It was described to me as a building in chaos. In complete disarray with no direction. That's how it was described to me. Staff gave me the impression that there was no trust in the building."

JN: Almost all of the children who attend MLK are mandatorily assigned, meaning they're placed there by the district. Most are African American and poor enough to qualify for free breakfast and lunch. At any given time at least several of the students are homeless and are living in shelters. Parental involvement at the school is minimal.
On last year's Washington Assessment of Student Learning exam seven percent of fourth graders passed the math portion of the test. The district average was 51percent. Although Dorsey admits the scores look bad, he says it shouldn't be the only thing parents focus on.

DORSEY: "I think that if you just look at the scores and don't take the opportunity to look in the classrooms and see what's going on, you're impression is that "I don't want my child going to that school."

JN: "But that's what more than 30 mostly white middle class families from East Lake and North Capitol Hill did last year.
They weren't able to get their children into the Seattle Public schools they had chosen... so the district placed the prospective kindergarteners at MLK, where there was room.
Bob Geball and his wife, who live in East Lake were crushed when they found out their daughter didn't get into the popular TOPS Alternative school, which is in their neighborhood. At the time the only thing they knew about MLK was that it was about 2 miles from their home.

GEBALL: "We did then do some research about Martin Luther King and found that it was at the bottom of the barrel as far as elementary schools were concerned, if you use test scores and things like that as a metric. That certainly did not make us interested in, in pursuing it any further."

JN: They eventually decided to skip public school altogether and settled on a private school closer to home.
To try to reverse the poor opinion of King held by the East Lake and North Capitol Hill parents, Barry Dorsey reached out and invited them to see the building in person.

The students of classroom 5, February 2003

DORSEY: "We invited all the prospective kindergarten parents last year. I was going to give them a presentation and kinda share Martin Luther King and the direction that we're going ...and no one showed up. We sent out 37 letters and no one showed up." JN: The origin of MLK's problems can be traced back to the mid 1990's when Seattle stopped integrating schools through bussing. When that ended MLK became mostly minority with a high poverty rate. Then, under former superintendent John Stanford... a charismatic Army General...the district instituted its "Freedom Agenda".

School principals were given unprecedented authority over staffing and budgets. While this new approach has since strengthened many schools, it requires strong leadership skills on the part of principals. With a string of weak principals and low parental involvement, factions and infighting among staff began to emerge at MLK.
Pauline Hill is an Education Director for the district who oversees several elementary schools. Before Barry Dorsey, Hill says Martin Luther King's focus was not on students... but rather squabbling adults.

HILL: "When you have that, then you have a school that's not what I would call a healthy school, you don't have a healthy environment."

JN: Barry Dorsey is now going on two years as MLK's principal. He's never turned a school around before. Dorsey says the greatest change he's made is the curricula... moving away from rote learning to critical thinking.

DORSEY: "The has the "DISTAR" program, which is a direct instruction program, which is very prescribed, very repetitive. Doesn't allow for our students critical thinking, problem solving. I eliminated that and brought in a new reading program, a new math curriculum."

JN: Under Dorsey, the school has updated some basic maintenance. A new roof, a new fire alarm and a new intercom systemÄsomething the school never had before.

SOUND, INTERCOM: "The weather today will be heavy rain off and on most of the day."

JN: "Education Director Pauline Hill and some school board members say it's not only up to Dorsey to make MLK a better school; it's also the responsibility of the school's parents and the community at large. Hill is especially critical of white parents who bolt from Martin Luther King."

DORSEY: "I am disappointed that they didn't ask more questions that they prejudged. That they wanted to go to a place that was already what they deemed healthy. So are we as Americans are we as Seattleites going to always look for that which is healthy?"

JN: Ben Low is a parent who has two children at TOPS, the same school Bob Geball tried to get his daughter enrolled in. He agrees in the power of community involvement. He's doing volunteer work for King.
What Low is disillusioned about is the apparent lack of leadership from the district and the school board when it comes to Martin Luther King.

LOW: "It was mind boggling that a school could be like that and that a district could allow that to keep happening. And the fact that in our research we've found that they systematically would overfill the MLK Boat with assigned kids because they know they'd all leave."

MLK students on the playground

JN: Bob Geball says choosing a school is not an act of community service. He says it boils down to academics. The last thing he wants to do is to put his child in a poor performing school for the sake of social change. GEBALL: "I think it's a really difficult thing for a parent to do to say I'm going to send my child to a school that's a long distance away to a school that's having the struggles that Martin Luther King is.

And I'm going to do that in the hopes that over the next five or ten years things are going to get better because this is something I'm doing for society."

JN: The failure to attract parents like Geball, is one of MLK's biggest problems.
Enrollment determines how much money schools receive.
If the school continues to shrink in size, it will also lose vital cash.
On top of that, the school district is floating the idea of shutting down smaller schools to save money.
Despite all of this Dorsey says he won't be actively recruiting new students.

DORSEY: "It would be nice to have diversity in here because that's reflective of society. But I disagree that we need them, we need them. We are going to be successful no matter who walks in that door."

JN: The Seattle school district's attempt to place more of the burden on community groups and parents to turn around low-performing schools is like --bussing-- a social experiment that's meeting resistance.
Meanwhile Martin Luther King not only faces enrollment pressures, but a district deadline to close the achievement gap by 2005.

Jennifer Niessen, KPLU News, Seattle