Good news wrapped in a conundrum at Rainier Beach High School
The Seattle Times on Monday's front page wanted to know if Rainier Beach High School is headed, finally, for a renaissance – or at least a rediscovery by southeast Seattle families. The school is rapidly pushing WASL scores up for its primarily African American students. And, as Emily Hefter reported, African-American students at Rainier Beach are making WASL progress faster than African Americans enrolled in any of the district's other high schools. This is truly good news. RBHS is closing the achievement gap.
But that may turn out to be a real conundrum for Seattle Public Schools and the School Board as administrators and elected officials set out to make changes in the district's outdated assignment plan.
Rainier Beach is small – only 361 students – and that might be a big reason for the success. Hefter describes Principal Robert Gary Jr.'s deep involvement with many of the kids, and the small school's growing sense of itself, of community, kids talking about the importance of academic achievement.
It may be that right now RB's small size is working for it. There's not much in the way of electives, but the intimacy of the school – no one is lost in the crowd – could be just what's bringing out the best in the students. That's long been the case made by small-school advocates.
And there's the problem. The Seattle School District several years ago lost any real interest in small schools. Administrators are now driven by economies of scale. Small high schools cost marginally more per student; large high schools tend to draw more on centrally funded programs, according to a study a few years ago by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Cost-wise, it can be a toss-up, depending on how you structure the small school: core academic curriculum, limited electives, few sports – and likely you'll get the kind of results we now see at Rainier Beach.
Thus, one choice the district has is to keep Rainer Beach the way it is, a small school. Promote the academics, keep the signature sports, add drama, and limit enrollment to about 400. Spend a little more per kid but also give more individual attention to each one.
At the other end of the spectrum is this option: Dramatically increase enrollment to return Rainier Beach to its historic role as one of the city's large, comprehensive high schools. Money follows enrollment, so there would be funding for electives, all sports, drama, band, the whole deal. But under the district's enrollment plan, which allows families a broad choice of high schools, Rainier Beach, as Hefter reported, has been shrinking for years. It's been a weak school. That's why Gary's accomplish over the past couple years is so notable, though probably not enough to draw more students.
But a big enrollment jump for RB is only possible if the School Board, when it revamps the enrollment plan later this year, adopts a fundamentally neighborhood-based enrollment plan. Under that kind of plan, most of the 1,600 students whose closest high school is Rainier Beach would be assigned there. (Only 250 of those kids attend now.) Viola! Instant comprehensive high school, with all its virtues – supposedly a broad curriculum – and all its vices – a place where kids who need attention can easily get lost, or hide out.
I'm betting the School Board and district administrators take neither of these options. They'll shy away from the small-school alternative because of per-pupil cost and public pressure for a comprehensive high school. But they'll also shy away from neighborhood-based assignment at the high school level. That means they'll leave school choice mostly intact and build up academics at Rainier Beach (more AP courses and electives) with money from the "southeast initiative," a part of the assignment plan changes designed to balance school quality in the area with other parts of town, and strengthen the drama program to attract enrollment. This is good, but limited. It will be great for Robert Gary Jr. and the kids – maybe 400-odd – who even then will be the only ones to choose Rainier Beach.
But the board and administrators, not seeing the attractiveness of the small-school option, will consider Rainier Beach a failure as long as enrollment stays low, and that's too bad.
Comments:
Posted Tue, Mar 4, 8:52 a.m. inappropriate
Where's the Accountability?: The Southeast Initiative, touted in the Times article by Emily Heffter and again here by Dick Lilly, was supposed to include an accountability element.
The framework approved by the Board that authorized the Southeast Initiative included a long section on accountability that required the schools getting the money to meet three-year goals on enrollment growth, percentage of first choice for assignment, academic achievement, student and teacher climate surveys, and attendance. In addition to the three-year goals, there were supposed to be annual benchmarks. All of the goals and the benchmarks were supposed to be set by September 2007.
Get a calendar. It is now March 2008 and the goals and the benchmarks have not yet been set. Clearly the schools will not be held to the first year's benchmarks since the year is more than half over and the benchmarks haven't even been set yet. This is a prime example of a number of recurring themes at Seattle Public Schools:
1. The District staff feel no obligation to follow Board directives, let alone policies.
2. The Board is incapable of enforcing their directives or policies.
3. The Board isn't interested in enforcing their directives or policies.
4. The total absence of follow-through in the District leadership.
5. Accountability is a slogan word without actual meaning.
6. There is a lot of talk about accountability but no action on it.
7. Programs are created without data or rationale, implemented without stakeholder input, and continued without proof of effectiveness.
8. Internal politics drive all decisions.
Let's face it: the only way that there will ever be accountability is if the Board grows a spine and demands it. Given their shameful performance on Denny-Sealth, that appears highly unlikely.
Any rational person would conclude that it is time for the Board to cut the funding for the Southeast Initiative. Perhaps the loss of the money - or even the threat of the loss of the money - will motivate the staff to set the goals for the program.
There's a lot of talk about accountability at Seattle Public Schools, but very little action on it.
The District says that they want to attract funding from philanthropists, but who would put money into something like the Southeast Initiative when the District won't follow their own rules for accountability? They won't even write the rules.
Posted Tue, Mar 4, 10:34 a.m. inappropriate
Viola!! LOL (Or as the French say, Voila!): You put your finger right on the center of the problem in the Seattle Schools. Smaller schools enable the kind of more personal and intimate community in which teachers know the students and the students feel personally encouraged to do well. The result is accidentally apparent in what is going on at Beach. How embarrassing for the people running the system.
The refusal to recognize the value of smaller schools is one of many but perhaps the most important foolish decisions of the District. Do you want your elementary child in a school of 600 or 800 kids? The failure to understand learning settings for children is pushing them into those crowded settings.
Right now the word is that the north end schools are overcrowded, that portables are going to be necessary in several instances. Is there a memory here? Last year the foolish administrators overroad the manifold objections of the community and closed Viewlands Elementary, which now stands empty as portables are being dragged to over-loaded campuses. Does anyone else see the utter incompetence of the administrators running the District? If they have no understanding of the value of having students in smaller schools (I would say 300 is ideal), then do they have any understanding of what people see when they close perfectly good schools/buildings and then complain of over-crowded schools.
The Rainier Beach story is just a variation on the same theme. And you have pretty well nailed it down in this piece.
Posted Wed, Mar 5, 8:06 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Viola!! LOL (Or as the French say, Voila!): There is nothing magical about small schools. The results at Rainier Beach, don't support the idea that small schools work; they do just the opposite - Rainier Beach is one of the lowest performing schools in the District and has been so for years.
The small schools in the small school movement are intentionally small, not small because no one wants to enroll in them. And the movement's idea of a small school is not nearly as small as you would think. Nearly every school in Seattle Public Schools would be within the size range for a small school.
By the way, there are no public elementary schools in Seattle with enrollments of even so much as 600, let alone 600 to 800. So Spike's question about whether people would like their "child in a school of 600 or 800 kids" is meaningless. Interestingly enough, the schools in Seattle that are close to that size, such as TOPS (526), are extremely popular. So I guess the answer to Spike's question, as best as we can determine empirically, is an emphatic YES!
Do people want small schools or large schools? In Seattle, the most popular and desirable middle schools are Eckstein and Washington - the two largest. The most popular high schools are Ballard, Roosevelt, and Garfield, the three largest. Hmmm. It seems that people want large schools.
Learn a little something about the small schools movement before you spout off about the benefits of small schools. It would also be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the data. M L King was a very small school. Were that school's academic results representative of the benefits of small schools? High Point was a very small school before it was merged with Fairmount Park. Would you like to use High Point's test scores to demonstrate the benefits of small schools? The smallest of the traditional comprehensive middle schools is Meany with an enrollment of less than 500. Do the results from Meany demonstrate the benefits that automatically come with small enrollments? I don't think so.
Posted Thu, Mar 6, 8:18 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Viola!! LOL (Or as the French say, Voila!): I don't see that you are addressing the issue at all. I don't recall saying anything to the point that larger schools cannot be excellent. I don't believe that. Larger schools that are run properly can serve their students well, and the more popular schools you mention are generally good schools. They do not serve the same roles that smaller schools can serve, though. They do not offer the more personal environment, the closer awareness of the individual students, etc. that come naturally with smaller schools. (By the way, a poorly run small school can be a poor school, too.) The smaller size of Beach was not created by replacing the students with more academic kids from Roosevelt. The point is that in the smaller school the same students who have done historically so poorly are doing better and better. Good for them, and good for Beach that it is able to downsize the school and create an environment that serves them.
Your data seems not to include Broadview-Thomson, which is a grade school with just under 700 students. The point of my comment was that we are likely to be adding portables to north end schools (not very conducive to a school environment even when necessary) at the same time as we shut up perfectly good buildings in the same neighborhood (Viewlands).
I sense a myopia here in the Monster Schools movement. You cannot deny the value of smaller schools, as the benefits are self-evident. A strong school district will embrace the value of smaller schools and smaller classes; they just don't want to pay for the commitment that will result in the benefits.
By the way, I have no problem with middle schools being larger than grade schools and high schools larger accordingly. My own idea is that elementary schools should be around 300, middle schools around 600 and high schools around 1000. Not much larger though.
Excellent larger schools are just fine, though. The sad thing is that the animosity to the warmer and more personal environment of smaller schools seems to be invisible to people with your kind of commitment to large size.
Posted Thu, Mar 6, 10:30 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Viola!! LOL (Or as the French say, Voila!): Spike writes that the benefits of smaller schools are self-evident. No, they aren't. At least not in Seattle. The smaller schools in Seattle tend to be the lower performing schools. The most notable exceptions are Montlake and McGilvra, but I would suggest that the performance of those students is not a result of school size but of other factors.
Spike writes: "The point is that in the smaller school the same students who have done historically so poorly are doing better and better."
The local data simply doesn't support this conclusion. The Seattle public schools with the best results with students from historically low performing groups are Maple (enrollment 456) and Van Asselt (enrollment 509), neither of which is a small school by any measure. Check any school in the south-end that is beating expectations and you will find the school is not small. Check the schools with enrollments close to 300 and you will find schools which are NOT succeeding with those students.
For the record, Broadview-Thomson is a K-8.
Also, for the record, the Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools says that portables provide perfectly good educational environments. She said so at a Board meeting in response to a question exactly to that point. What expertise is Spike relying upon when he contends otherwise?
There is no animosity towards small schools, no monster school movement, and no commitment to large schools. The animosity, if any, is towards statements which are unsupported by facts and the commitment is to making decisons based on data rather than presumptions.
If Spike had and used data to support his statements rather than relying upon "self-evidence", he might have had a chance of being persuasive.
Spike writes that an ideal size for a high school is 1000, yet he sings the praises of the size of Rainier Beach, a school with an enrollment of 361. If Rainier Beach approached Spike's ideal size, with two or three times the current enrollment, wouldn't it no longer be the small school Spike praises? By setting 1000 as an appropriate size for a high school isn't Spike speaking against what he contends is good about Rainier Beach?
Posted Fri, Mar 7, 7:32 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Viola!! LOL (Or as the French say, Voila!): It is interesting how coolpapa sets up straw men to demolish. Most of what he argues has nothing to do with the points I have been making. I will say again: well run schools can be fairly large and still successful. Small schools can be poor schools. Neither of those truths affect the argument: smaller schools create more personal environments in which the adults and students can achieve in ways that larger schools cannot. Seattle's smaller schools are accidents, not policy of the District. District policy does not support them. In fact, when you have a very successful small school (Viewlands, for example), the District destroys it.
And here is a simple fact: Broadview-Thomson is a K-6 school, no matter what coolpapa says. That is an elementary school. It has just under 700 students. That is a large elementary school. The school is so packed that there are teachers in the building who have to share classrooms. The Viewlands building is a spit away from B-T: it is sitting empty. Why does Coolpapa think the situation is just fine?
Posted Sat, Mar 8, 11:59 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Viola!! LOL (Or as the French say, Voila!): And just to expand a bit -- Coolpapa speaks with such certitude that one is tempted to take his word. If you look into truth, you will find that Broadview-Thomson is a K-6 school. It has a population of around 680. Apparently it is scheduled in the future to be K-8, but that is not what we are talking about. Coolpapa could have found this out easily.
I have never meant my comments here to be taken as assertions regarding middle or high schools, though I do believe that Monster Schools can, when poorly run (and the Seattle district tends to run schools poorly), be just as bad for teens as for tots. My number of 300 as a good and reasonable target for a grade school is just basic math. 25 children in a section, 2 sections per grade level. Thus 6 grades time 50 students equals 300 students from 1-6. I think two sections per grade level is ideal, as it enables the teaching staff to be more flexible in placement of students for optimal teacher/student success. I also believe that more than 25 students in a class deteriorates the learning pretty much student overload by student overload.
My issue is narrower than coolpapa's. Seattle went through trauma after trauma the past two years as the various school communities tried to get through the thick head of the Board the consequences of their closure decisions. There was not the slightest sense that the Board as a whole listened to the communities (except for Soriano and Bass). I saw their disdain in person and watching the Board meetings on tv. One of the issues regarding Viewlands was that the demographics indicated that student population in that part of the city was going to require its continued use. The board ignored that crucial point (aside from other issues supporting Viewlands continued use), and shut the school down. Now the neighborhood schools are overloaded. There are shared classrooms in overcrowded buildings (B-T); there is talk of portables. Perhaps they will re-open Viewlands now that they have thoroughly destroyed the functioning community that existed in the building? All of this is serious business, it seems to me. At the core of it was a philosopical belief that smaller schools are dispensable; and that belief is part of what has destroyed the attractiveness of the Seattle elementary schools. The article on Beach underscored that point for me, hence my approving response to Lilly's words.