No Quiet Exit For School Reformer -- Budd Scarr Spent 36 Years Trying To Change Systems

KIRKLAND - Bud Scarr has ticked off a lot of people during his 19 years as head of the Lake Washington School District.

He's dictatorial. Autocratic. Stubborn.

He also knows exactly where he stands. He started changing Lake Washington schools long before "school reform" was on everyone's lips, and he did it with a single-minded vision that got him results and, yes, made some enemies.

This month Scarr, 63, retires from 36 years in public education. He leaves his post as head of Lake Washington schools to golf, become a consultant and run his Montana cattle ranch.

"He's kind of a legend in his own time," said Terry Bergeson, head of the state Commission for Student Learning and a candidate for state schools superintendent. "People either love him or hate him."

"He has a very strong personality," said Larry Swift, executive director of the Washington State School Directors Association. "That has its pluses and minuses. Some people admire him greatly, and others don't. . . . That's characteristic of someone trying to move any large organization."

What has this suburban radical learned in 36 years of trying to change schools? According to Scarr:

-- We are in the middle of a social revolution, and schools are changing much too slowly. Slow, incremental change may be politically palatable, but it is meaningless.

-- Political correctness is the death of school reform. "We have democratized ourselves into paralysis."

-- Money won't solve education's problems; the public till has run dry. For change to occur, schools must be reorganized in dramatically different ways.

-- School districts need decisive superintendents who aren't afraid to take chances. If the superintendent doesn't work out? Fire him.

Lots of people have wanted to fire Bud Scarr, but he took his licks and kept going. In 1991, Scarr was named top school administrator by the Washington Association of School Administrators. Last year he was one of four finalists for National Superintendent of the Year award given by the American Association of School Administrators.

"In his time at Lake Washington, many of the district's programs have become models that have been implemented at other districts in the state," Swift said. Bergeson says Scarr's dedication to teacher training was ahead of its time.

A native of North Dakota, Scarr began his tenure at Lake Washington in 1977 when he took over a district in financial turmoil and turned it around.

He began an investigation into what students would need to know in the future. Based on that research, he started a staff-development program that focused on continuous, long-term training and an assessment program to measure how students were doing.

The payoff: Test scores started to rise.

But his 19 years have also had low points, including a 1990 teachers strike and several levy failures. Critics said Scarr's management style was dictatorial - he was moving too fast with changes, not listening to what the community wanted and not hearing teachers' concerns about workload and the pace of change.

The district's strong core of conservative school activists has been suspicious of Scarr's changes and critical of the amount of money he's spent to achieve them.

In 1992, Scarr made an unsuccessful run for state superintendent of public schools, pledging the "moral equivalent of a war on education."

If he'd won, Scarr said, he would have focused more strongly on the needs of students. He would have cut bureaucracy, beefed up teacher training and started a statewide assessment program. He would have taken off the limits on class size, dumped a policy allocating money to each student on an even basis, and made all districts follow a model technology plan instead of trying to create their own.

The state office is "too damn political," Scarr says. "We know what's best for children. We need to worry less about political correctness and more about students."

Ask him about his educational philosophy, and ideas tumble out so rapidly it's hard to keep up.

On parents: Scarr thinks we're stuck on the idea that all families resemble the Ward-and-June-Cleaver model. Even on the Eastside, more than half the children come from double-income families, while many others are being reared by single parents. About a quarter of all students in King County are being raised by someone other than both biological parents.

"We need to work with the family," Scarr says. "We need to organize dramatically differently." That may mean opening the schoolhouse doors at 6 a.m. and keeping them open all summer long.

On students: Youngsters "get a bad rap in the newspaper," but most come to school eager to learn. Scarr thinks schools must treat each child as an individual and provide a support system for those who really need it: "Giving equal treatment among unequals is the most unequal treatment in the world."

On teachers: "Teachers are doing a better job of teaching than they ever have, without any question." Yet "it's more difficult (to be a teacher) than it's ever been at any time that I've been involved." Disruptive students who come to school without social skills are making the job harder.

On principals: "Show me a good principal, and I'll show you a good school." Good principals have been given good training - which will become the focus of Scarr's consulting work when he retires. Scarr says good principals know what they stand for, have long-term goals, are in charge of their own time, have vision and a sense of mission, and are able to assess their own skills and shortcomings.

On superintendents: "The superintendent needs to be visionary, a strategist, a leader. If the community doesn't like it, they should fire him."

On public perception: Scarr thinks schools have made a lot of progress in recent years, but the public hasn't caught on and continues to accuse schools of delivering poor-quality education.