The National Education Policy Center reported on the success of a high school in Seattle that adopted the principles of “schools of opportunity.” Open the link for sources and other links. Valerie Strauss posted an article about the school here.
These Comeback Kids Don’t Bake Cookies: The Community-Based Transformation of an Urban School
You could call it the comeback kid.
In 2010, Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School was on the edge of closure. Just 320 students occupied a building constructed to serve nearly four times that number. Its on-time graduation rate of 48 percent was among the lowest in the state of Washington.
Fast forward to today and the picture has completely changed. Enrollment exceeds 700. The graduation rate is 89 percent. And, unlike many other school turnarounds that superficially look successful, the school has continued to serve the same families and community. At Rainier Beach, nearly three-quarters of the students hail from low-income families, and 40 percent come from immigrant or refugee backgrounds. The school’s diverse population is 49 percent Black, 26 percent Asian, 14 percent Hispanic, six percent multi-racial, three percent White, and two percent Pacific Islander/Native American/Alaskan.
In 2016, NEPC recognized Rainier Beach as a School of Opportunity, making particular note of the school’s rigorous but supported classes and its thoughtful and powerful community outreach.
Too often, transformations like Rainier Beach’s are attributed to external forces such as state accountability measures or the introduction of a new and charismatic leader.
But in a recent article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Educational Administration, Ann M. Ishimaru, an associate professor of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Policy at the University of Washington’s College of Education, uses interviews, document analyses, and observations to tell a very different tale about Rainier Beach.
Truth be told, some aspects of the Rainier Beach story are not out of the ordinary. It brought in new leadership. It struggled with and benefitted from the implications and resources associated with accountability-based reforms.
But another part of the school’s story is indeed unusual—and offers important lessons for other schools now struggling to improve. Professor Ishimaru traces the school’s transformation to a groundswell of activism led by local families, students, and community members. Working together with educators, these activists were able to benefit from structures of conventional schooling by transforming those structures to better suit their needs. As Ishimaru notes, these were practices and institutions often imposed on low-income, “majority-minority” communities—structures that often do little to engage those communities or respond to their voiced needs.
For example, activists leveraged the power of the PTA, using it to spark change. As one parent leader explained:
We don’t make cookies. We’re not here to fund raise for your school. We’re here to be transformative change agents for the school. We need you to deploy us to spaces that you can’t get to, like School Board meetings and the Superintendent […] No, we don’t make cookies. […] We infiltrate, that’s right.
Other community-based strategies Ishimaru identified included:
Participating in the accountability-based school turnaround/school improvement grant process;
Holding community “cafes” to build support for the school’s new International Baccalaureate program; and
Supporting academic and behavioral interventions (such as introducing Freedom Schools and hiring a restorative justice coordinator) that empower youth.
“This study is a testament to the changes that can unfold when parents and communities drive priorities and action in school change efforts,” Ishimaru concludes.
Still, she cautions that work remains to be done at Rainier Beach: Key community leaders have moved on. Parents worry that African American students are still under-represented in the school’s International Baccalaureate program. And there’s no guarantee that the program itself will continue to attract the resources it needs to operate.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting subject, but having some problems: NEPC link goes nowhere, & Ishimaru article costs $32 to read. However lots of info in your summary, thanks! & Strauss’s 2016 article was informative.
This community effort sure sounds different from what I’ve read of state-run “school turnarounds” [fire most everybody, bring in warm bodies to ratchet up drill-&-kill procedures – improve test scores “or else” i.e. school closes or is replaced w/a charter]. How great to see PTA used not as a fund-raiser lackey to school admin, but instead a vehicle for pressuring admin to implement community’s ideas for school improvement. Seems community was able to pool brainpower & come up w/specific ideas that were implemented, like IB curriculum for many of its students, & CDF Freedom School summer program.
Most interesting is that school doubled its enrollment in just a few years. I see that Seattle has open-enrollment-style school choice, which means they pulled the additional kids away from other Seattle public schools. A snarky commenter at the Strauss article suggested the school’s improved stats might just be due to adding a bunch of mid-mid performers, who would pull up the ave of the original pool of poor performers. But we know that “performance” means stdzd test scores, which just track SES– & the current sch pop is still mostly minority/ mostly poor… So something is happening right [I don’t trust raised stzds test scores, but 89% grad rate looks great.]
I just wonder about “open enrollment” & its effect on the nearby schools which lost hundreds of kids to this one: how are they faring? Are they supposed to take up the torch & initiate a similar community-pressure path to improving their schools & entice their locals back? Or just struggle/ close, or maybe seek takeover by a charter that offers some other competitive edge?
an essential observation: how often are we told that one school in a ‘choice’ system is doing very well but strategically not told about the school/schools paying the price for losing their most economically stable students
Seattle does not have open enrollment except for option schools. IB schools do enroll students living outside the school’s enrollment zone.
It’s great that the Washington Post did this story but it’s disappointing that our local paper hasn’t been as positive.
Thanks, Pat. So are ‘option schools’ like magnets, i.e., anyone in district can apply for available seats? Do those in the immediate zone of option schools get preference, or are option schools separate/ unzoned?
I taught at Rainier Beach High School for three of the seven years this article spans.
Yes, “option” schools function a lot like magnets in Seattle. Families who are web savvy enough to find the rules, and/or are connected enough to institutional power to be told, know how to transfer, and have the privilege to leave work during the day to submit the transfer request paperwork, can get their kids to “Option” schools if there are enough seats there. There are option / magnet high schools in the north, central district, and south areas that have been allowing kids to transfer in at parent request. Choice schools have often had more requests than seats, so parents who wanted to transfer their kids out of Rainier Beach High but couldn’t, sometimes then sent them to private schools or looked for other options. (Charters were a new thing in WA as I was leaving). But since 90% of the students in the neighborhood were literally bussing/driving out of it rather than going to this school, when I taught here, I’m willing to bet the neighborhood is coming back.
The link to the full article: http://familydesigncollab.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Ishimaru_2018_Re-imagining-turnaround-families-and-communities-leading-educational-justice.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1k6MD_YAxs3vZdPrT3Nf8tSAEebZT8ahuFpuQli8ql6NNFW-toeTYnWAw
Thank you, Diane Ravitch, Valerie Strauss, and of course Ann Ishimaru, for studying and publishing this article!