There are mild spoilers below, so skip this piece if you’ve got Adults in the Room in your podcast queue and want to listen to it with a totally fresh ear.
Adults in the Room is a popular podcast from KUOW, Seattle. The unique bit is that it’s two women who were student reporters around the turn of the 21st century, re-investigating a story of alleged sexual abuse in their Seattle high school. One of the women, Isolde Raftery, is now a reporter for KUOW. Her friend, Ella Hushagen, is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. It’s a good podcast, and unlike so many in the “true crime” genre, it has a clear conclusion. But I don’t want to write about the crimes themselves — instead, I want to look at this aside from the second episode:
Decades before, in the Garfield gym, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an early version of his I Have A Dream speech.
According to lore, MLK said that Garfield…
with its racially diverse student body…
… was that dream.
But it was a trick of the light.
At the assembly, we were together… but in our classes, we were apart.
Garfield is in the Central District, Seattle’s historically Black neighborhood.
But I was bussed in from the city’s north end…
for Garfield's “Advanced Placement” program.
We were called the “AP Kids” for short… most of us white or Asian.
In contrast, almost all the Black students were in the quote unquote, “regular classes.”
Kids in the regular classes often didn’t get textbooks...
But us AP kids got one book for our lockers…
One for home…
And one for the classroom.
The regular class kids got photocopies of our books.
What she’s describing is essentially de-facto segregation, if not completely by skin color, at least mostly, and certainly by economic status. My guess — I know nothing about Seattle schools — is that Garfield’s “ranking” in the district was based on the overall test scores of the kids who attended there. To get the AP kids there, the school had to provide all kinds of special attention to them. The podcast details two specific programs: a really good school newspaper, and an outdoors program that gave kids experiences like climbing a glacier or exploring Maui. I'll also assume that those experiences were too expensive for lower income kids. That seemed pretty obvious by her description of the kids in both programs, who sounded mostly white and mostly well-off. (The newspaper kids often worked late into the night, something that a kid who needed an after-school job or babysat for younger siblings couldn’t do.)
Part of the “special sauce” at Garfield was the quality and dedication of the teachers. It probably won’t surprise you to know that some of these “super teachers” were also guilty of sexual harassment at the least, and child molestation at the most. And the parents and kids closed ranks to protect those teachers, because they were “special” — I’m sure part of it was the grooming of experienced sexual predators, but the other part of it was the combination of fear that your kid won’t get their slice of the pie, and the feeling that the means justify the ends as long as your kid is getting a “great” education.
The whole thing is a glimpse into some of the ugliness of “magnet” schools in cities with large income disparities. This wasn’t the main topic of the podcast, but there’s another podcast (or dozens of them) that could be made about it.
