Mizrahi, Clark and Song for School Board

My guest co-author today Robert Cruickshank is an organizer with All Together for Seattle Schools. Like me, he is a public school dad. 

It’s July and few of us are thinking about school. (Especially our kids. Don’t ask them about school right now unless you want whines and scowls!)

But as voters get their primary ballots in the mail, it’s time to start thinking about Seattle’s public school district. Public education is a crucial component of any healthy urban neighborhood, and our district is struggling.

Last year’s mass school closure plan, which is thankfully on pause, shattered an already low level of trust the public had in SPS. Other issues facing SPS include enrollment struggles, mismanaged finances, student safety concerns, and an effort to impose a one size fits all curriculum on students. 

A turning point election

This is a turning point election for our schools. There are four school board seats up for election, with three on the primary ballot (because there are only two candidates for the fourth seat, that one is only on the general election ballot). That’s a majority of the board–control of the board is on the line. That board will likely hire the next superintendent, which raises the stakes even further. The outcome of this election will determine the course of public education in Seattle, and the way our city grows and thrives, for years to come.

We’re both supporting Sarah Clark, Joe Mizrahi, and Vivian Song because they have proven they are going to do the right things to fix our schools. They bring the experience, skill, and insider knowledge that is necessary to build a great public school system for a great city. They will stop a mass closure plan from returning, support the academic success of all our kids, fight to protect our students and schools from Trump, fix the district’s finances so that more resources go directly to the classroom, and rebuild broken trust.

These candidates are aligned and working together to fix what’s gone wrong with SPS, along with current board president Gina Topp. 

It is important to note -  this group doesn’t neatly match up with the way the editorial boards of either the Stranger or the Seattle Times have endorsed. But it does line up with the recommendations by the parent advocates at All Together for Seattle Schools, who successfully stopped the mass school closure plan. 

We’re writing this not only to explain why we back Clark, Mizrahi, and Song. We’re also writing to explain how the politics of the SPS board works, and why Clark, Mizrahi, and Song are the right choices for Seattle’s kids and families.

Major Issues - including school closures - are still on the table

Closure Mania

Last year SPS proposed a disastrous plan that would have closed up to 21 of its public schools. This included a dozen neighborhood schools, and nearly all of its option and alternative schools serving students in grades K-8, including dual language immersion programs.

This wasn’t primarily because of declining enrollment. Though SPS enrollment did drop in the early 2020s, the decline had slowed by 2022, and the student population began rising slowly in 2024. As Seattle soars past 800,000 residents, it is clear we’re not facing the same problems as San Francisco or other cities with a shrinking population. This also means that–where we have struggled with enrollment - the problem is rooted in the management of our schools, not migration trends.

In any case, SPS leaders openly admitted that they weren’t closing schools due to enrollment decline. Nor was there much of a case that they were doing it to save money – thoughtful analysis by an SPS parent showed it wouldn’t save much money at all. Instead, the SPS board believed that there should be fewer, larger, cookie-cutter elementary schools. With a budget deficit, such consolidation would not have meant more resources for these schools. 

The remaining schools would have been farther from where students live, ripping a core thread from the fabric of so many neighborhoods. This would also mean fewer kids would walk or bike to school. Many would be driven by their parents. This is absurd for a community that seeks to be a sustainable, progressive, 15-minute city. 

One of the defining progressive public school fights in the 2010s was the resistance to Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s closure of nearly 50 public schools.The results of Chicago’s closures were devastating: student learning was permanently harmed, the school district didn’t save money, and communities were hollowed out. Other mass closures around the country similarly hurt students. Why we would seek to follow suit boggles the mind. 

So Seattle families rose up against the mass school closure plan. Polls showed the public strongly opposed it. SPS initially scaled back the plan to close just four schools, then in November 2024 announced they wouldn’t close any schools at all – for now.

But this is only a pause. Some school board directors, led by Liza Rankin, strongly believed we should proceed with the closures in 2024. Rankin has suggested at recent board meetings that SPS should close schools. The problem with the 2024 closure plan, in her estimation, was that it was done poorly, not that it was an inherently bad idea. We strongly disagree. 

This issue may have receded from parents’ minds, but it could come back with a vengeance depending on who wins the school board elections. One indication - not long after the closure debacle, a related controversy erupted. SPS announced it was changing the rules and would no longer process waitlists in the district’s extremely popular option school program. That program allows students to apply to attend a Seattle Public School other than the one they’re assigned to due to their address, as long as the school they want to attend has capacity for more kids. These frozen waitlists strangled projected enrollment at option schools in particular–schools which had been targeted for closure under the previous plan. It looked like a setup for future closures.  

In any case, undermining option schools was deeply inequitable. Shrinking and closing option schools would disproportionately harm students in South Seattle, which has the highest density of school choice applications and thus would have paid the highest price. It also happens to be where most of our most marginalized communities are concentrated. SPS seemed hellbent on making it so the only way to pursue an alternative education model is through expensive private schools. 

Former City Councilmember Tammy Morales, who is well-known as a progressive stalwart, spoke out against this at a school board meeting and in an op-ed in the South Seattle Emerald. Here again, polls show the public disagrees with SPS and supports options and choices within the public system. 

Remember, these are students whose families want to remain enrolled in SPS, rather than go to a private or a charter school. But rather than meet this demand and provide more option schools in south and west Seattle, SPS tried to starve schools of enrollment by refusing to process these student waitlists.

Under immense public pressure, SPS relented, red-faced, yet again. 

Other serious governance issues

On top of all this, the district appears to have mismanagement of finances, and has embraced an undemocratic board governance model that abandons most fiscal oversight and shuts the public from participation in board decisions.

SPS has a budget of a billion dollars. There’s no doubt SPS is underfunded by the state legislature, as are public schools across the state, and that we need to tax the rich to provide those funds. It is so bad that even our wealthy neighbor Bellevue has been put under state oversight because its shortfalls have put it in an untenable position. 

But SPS has compounded the problem.

Seattle Public Schools’ spending habits are shrouded in mystery. This lack of transparency and accountability means students likely have fewer resources in the classroom. It also angers legislators, who use it as a justification to withhold money from SPS.

Albert Wong, a parent who has done a deep dive into SPS budget issues, concluded that as much as 30% of the district’s budget has gone unexamined, spent under a vague category of “district office,” with little oversight or accountability. It’s possible that this money could help keep teachers in the classroom and get more resources to students. Wong also argues that SPS’s opaque accounting has fueled big cuts in recent years. 

The school board doesn’t closely track this, because in the last few years it has deliberately chosen not to do basic fiscal oversight. Under the leadership of Liza Rankin, SPS has adopted a board governance model known as “Student Outcomes Focused Governance” (SOFG) in which elected school boards cede most of their power to unelected bureaucrats. The idea is to avoid micromanagement. But reality has looked a lot more like the abandonment of basic oversight and accountability.

The SOFG model reduces the role of a school board to hiring and firing a superintendent, approving a budget without close review, and monitoring test scores. That’s it. Other concerns, such as student safety or enrollment trends, are considered to be out of bounds for the board, something for the administration alone to consider.

Under the SOFG model, the school board eliminated its standing committees – including its committees that provided close, detailed analysis of the budget. No longer would board members spend weeks doing a deep dive into district spending. It got worse: in 2024, Rankin as board president eliminated one of the two monthly board meetings. This means school board directors have even less time to monitor the district’s budget.

Robert (one of the two authors of this article) wrote an op-ed in the summer of 2023 drawing attention to the problems of the SOFG governance model, and urging the school board to change course. But it wasn’t until the 2024 school closure plan that most parents began to notice how SOFG had systematically silenced families of all backgrounds all over the city, and excluded them from the governance of their own public schools. Even the Seattle Times came out swinging against SOFG earlier this year.

The combination of a mass school closure plan, district hostility to families who want options within the public system, and a governance model that turns the board into a rubber stamp that no longer effectively oversees district finances has shattered public trust. And it’s the backdrop to this year’s school board election.

Seven directors—two blocs of three, plus a swing vote.

There are currently two blocs on the school board. Please note - they do not align neatly to Seattle’s usual Seattle Times/Stranger political divides. 

One bloc includes former board president Liza Rankin, Evan Briggs, and Michelle Sarju. Sarju is not running for re-election this year, and Rankin and Briggs are not up until 2027. This bloc supported the mass school closure plan, has been hostile to option schools and alternative programs like the highly capable cohort, and strongly backs SOFG.

The other bloc includes Sarah Clark, Joe Mizrahi, and Gina Topp. Clark and Mizrahi were appointed to fill vacancies on the board in April 2024. Topp is not up again until 2027. They opposed the closure plan, support the option schools and alternative programs, and want them expanded with an equitable assignment plan. They also want to scrap SOFG and replace it with a more democratic governance model. Vivian Song is running and is aligned with this bloc as well. All three have endorsed each other in the 2025 election.

The seventh board member, Brandon Hersey, represents District 7 (South Seattle). He is a swing vote and not strongly aligned with either bloc, preferring to emphasize the needs and views of South Seattle. Hersey is not running for re-election this year.

The blocs are evenly balanced right now. If the pro-closure folks win one more seat, they can revive the mass closure plan and stop other reform efforts. But if the Clark-Mizrahi-Topp bloc gets an additional ally on the board – Vivian Song – then not only will they stop the mass closure plan from returning, other important reforms can proceed with confidence. They can also hire a superintendent who will bring much needed change to the district office, restoring a sense of community partnership instead of the top-down command-and-control model that has alienated the public.

About the candidates

It’s not enough to support a slate of candidates because they’re aligned with what we want. They have to also be good candidates, qualified for the job in their own right, with proven track records, and be better than their opponents. 

Sarah Clark, Joe Mizrahi, and Vivian Song all exceed the standard.

Unlikely allies

Sarah Clark and Joe Mizrahi are two school board members whose alliance may surprise you. Both were appointed to fill school board vacancies in spring 2024. In the year that followed, they became leaders against the school closure plan and in championing equitable choice and options for SPS students.

The surprising part is that Clark is the policy director for the Chamber of Commerce, and Mizrahi is the Secretary-Treasurer for the politically progressive UFCW 3000. Normally these two organizations and their representatives are at loggerheads, to say the least. At SPS, Clark and Mizrahi have formed a refreshing alliance. And we need Song to join them.

Sarah Clark

Sarah Clark has been a standout so far on the board, showing a serious independent streak , where she works in her own personal capacity, not as a representative of the Chamber of Commerce. (This, I suspect, has something to do with her surprisingly strong stances!) As I wrote last November:

Clark brings the perspective of a Black woman from a foster family who attended Seattle Public Schools her whole life, and overcame a lot of adversity along the way. She was in the highly capable program and graduated from Garfield High School before going on to earn a degree in education policy at UW. Clark was the first board member to speak out against the closure plan, writing the fantastic op-ed I highlighted above.

Sarah Clark is running in District 2. Her main opponent, Kathleen Smith, is a data scientist at Microsoft. Smith is new to SPS issues, and has two young kids about to enter the public schools. The tea leaves suggest Smith is aligning herself with Rankin’s closure plan and SOFG orientation. She recently told the Rainy Day Recess podcast that she “looks forward to working with Liza Rankin,” and hedged on school closures, saying that the issue was that it wasn’t done well. The name drop offers a hint about which bloc she will align with. Either way, the closure comment is a big, red, disqualifying flag. Vote for Clark.

Joe Mizrahi is a first-generation American and a person of color who also attended public schools as a kid. As mentioned above, he is a labor leader in one of the most active union in the state. His wife works in public schools on the Eastside. Since his appointment, he’s proven himself to be responsive to the public, meeting with parents and school communities to address concerns. 

In May 2025 Mizrahi coauthored an an op-ed for The Urbanist with Clark laying out the progressive case for moving school waitlists and honoring student choice applications, helping keep students in the public school system while calling for reform of the process.

Mizrahi’s main opponent is Laura Marie Rivera, who ran for school board in 2021 and sought the appointment that went to Mizrahi in 2024. Rivera didn’t support closures either, and has good values on the other issues facing SPS. But this is where a proven track record matters. Mizrahi has demonstrated in office that he will fight for our schools against austerity and for student needs. We don’t see any justification to fire him. Instead, he has earned four more years.

Vivian Song served on the school board from 2021 to 2024. In that time she showed herself to be a smart, persistent, insightful leader who pushed back hard against the fiscal mismanagement and governance changes that eroded public trust. Song resigned her seat in District 4 after she had moved back into District 5, and is running to represent that seat this year.

Song, a former PTA leader with deep expertise in financial management, opposed elimination of board committees and called for greater board oversight and involvement in the budget. She was concerned that resources weren’t making their way to the classroom as they should, and that the board wasn’t properly doing its job to straighten out the finances so students got the help they needed. I (Ron) should confess that I know Song personally–but I think this only strengthens the case for her. I know her to be brilliant, competent, thoughtful and kind.

Unsurprisingly, Vivian Song brings a list of detailed policy proposals to address inequities, fix district finances and bring transparency to district operations, support differentiated learning, and address student safety.

Song’s main opponent, Janis White, is a a strong advocate for special education. That’s extremely important work and a strong reason to hear her out. But as with Clark and Mizrahi, Song has already shown she is a strong, effective ally on the school board. As with those other two elections, we don’t see any reason to pick someone else when we already have a proven champion in Vivian Song.

Together Clark, Mizrahi, and Song will help tackle SPS’s problems by partnering with the public to build a great school district for Seattle – in a moment where we urgently need to defend, support, and improve our public schools.