The Power of High Expectations at Rainier Beach
/By Matt Halvorson
Just a few years ago, Rainier Beach High School had an enrollment under 300.
It had a reputation for being a basketball and football powerhouse, for being “dangerous,” and for lacking in rigor, and families in the neighborhood who had the political, social and/or financial capital to choose other schools were doing so. The school was close to being shut down on more than one occasion.
Then the community — led by the Rainier Beach PTSA, in particular — started building some positive momentum, laying the groundwork to bring in an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. (The White House, by the by, honored Rainier Beach High PTSA president Carlina Brown earlier this year as a "Champion of Change.”)
In 2011-12, Rainier Beach brought in principal Dwane Chappelle. Chappelle talked about raising expectations and coming together as a community. He talked to his students and the neighborhood about believing they were as “good” as Roosevelt, because that’s where the seeds of academic growth are planted: in high expectations that the student internalizes and believes. Especially if that comes with the backing of a community with high expectations to match.
Rainier Beach is also a school where an organization called Equal Opportunity Schools operates. They are charged with making sure that AP/IB classes are representative of the student body. The idea is that in every single school where there are advanced placement courses, white kids are the majority in those classes, and students of color are often under-represented.
Rainier Beach now has both a much higher enrollment and some of the highest graduation rates in the district.
During Chappelle’s tenure, the graduation rate at Rainier Beach increased 25 percentage points. The 79 percent graduation rate in 2014 beat the district average.
And that’s the power of high expectations, you know?
Kids’ psychological safety matters. Kids feeling love and compassion — and being challenged to be their best — matters. And Rainier Beach is meeting those needs for its students.
Of course, the district, for better and for worse, poached Dwane Chappelle mid-school-year to become the first director for the Seattle Department of Education and Early Learning (DEEL). Rainier Beach’s IB program is only funded through 2017. It will take more even than this years-long burst of admirable effort to permanently turn around this school. It will take the permanent commitment and belief of the community and the district in the students this school serves.
Conversations are beginning to bubble up again about Seattle’s segregated schools, and about desegregation and busing as tools for equity.
These are important conversations and important ideas. Our city rolled back Brown v. Board of Education just a few years ago, and I believe that as a city that wears its progressive identity as a badge of honor, we don't talk openly or often enough about race or racism.
Right now, our schools are segregated because our neighborhoods are largely segregated. Nothing is perfectly clean and simple. There are outliers on all sides, kids who beat the odds and kids who struggled despite privilege. That’s to be expected. Growing up is hard. Parenting is hard.
And it's hard to breathe in the smog of systemic racism and still hope to see the world clearly. I hope we take some clear and serious steps to desegregate our schools. I hope we talk openly about what is happening and why it’s necessary.
I hope also that we frame this conversation with stories like Rainier Beach in mind. The benefit of busing and desegregation for students of color and students from low-income families is not that they get to sit and learn with white students. It's not about escaping the ghetto or beating long odds. It's about having access to resources and high expectations.
And this is not a one-way street. White students are better off for studying and growing up in a truly diverse setting. Studies have indicated that this could be an even better predictor of future success than academic rigor or achievement. And history has shown us repeatedly that a breach of equity anywhere is a threat to equity everywhere.
Our collective choices and practices have created the segregated neighborhoods that created our segregated schools. Let’s start finding ways to change that reality, for everyone's sake.
