Seattle schools would like to break out in bright spots

When teacher Anitra Pinchback-Jones looked out at her class of 20 third-graders at Seattle's African American Academy two years ago, she saw the most challenging demographic for schools nationwide. All 20 were black, most of them boys, and most of them came from families in poverty.

Academically, they were already behind.

It's something educators call the "achievement gap," and Seattle Public Schools has made closing it one of its top priorities. All over the district, white students do better than students of color on tests. The 2006 scores on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning confirmed that there is still work to do: While Seattle fourth-graders overall made a slight improvement on this year's WASL, the percentage of African-American fourth-graders passing reading, math and writing fell by three percentage points. Pinchback-Jones stayed with her class through the fourth grade. As a class, they pretended to be a football team. Class was practice. Tests were games. The WASL, she told them, was the Super Bowl.

She got their parents involved. She kept students after school until 5:30 four days a week, and if they complained that other kids didn't have to work as hard, she told them: "Success looks different."

Of those 20 students, 18 — or 90 percent — passed the math, reading and writing sections of the WASL in the fourth grade. Districtwide, only 20 percent of African-American fourth-graders passed all three sections. Their class beat the district's average for all fourth-graders — 47.2 percent.

That class of African American Academy fourth-graders is one bright spot of several throughout the Seattle district. Another was celebrated Friday when the U.S. Department of Education named Maple Elementary School a No Child Left Behind — Blue Ribbon School.

Despite Maple's challenging demographics — 62 percent of students live in poverty, 92 percent are kids of color, 35 percent are bilingual — students at the Beacon Hill school have consistently done better than the statewide average on the WASL. Following a decade of consistent gains, more than 90 percent of Maple fourth-graders passed the reading portion of the 2006 WASL and more than 80 percent passed writing and math.

But the challenge Seattle Public Schools faces is duplicating such success, and even keeping it going at the same schools. Consider Thurgood Marshall Elementary, which starting in 2000 achieved huge gains in scores and gained recognition for its single-gender classes. Since 2004, though, Thurgood Marshall has seen its scores plummet, especially in math.

Despite gains here and there, Seattle's success in closing the achievement gap in 2006 was mixed, especially in the higher grades. At the African American Academy, a K-8, the percentage of fourth-graders who passed reading, writing and math jumped from about one-quarter to nearly half. But in the seventh grade, scores fell, and just over 3 percent of students met the standard.

That dip in middle school is a districtwide problem.

"Our challenge as an administration, if you will, is to make sure that those improvements become systematized," said School Board member Darlene Flynn, who chairs the board's Student Learning Committee. "We have the opportunity because we do see some of these pockets of improvement."

The district is working toward having a common curriculum among schools, said Chief Academic Officer Carla Santorno. That won't close the achievement gap on its own, she said, but it makes it easier for her to get schools to try strategies that work. Among them: teachers working together and comparing student work, using data to figure out exactly what kids don't know.

Data analysis was a strategy at Van Asselt Elementary, another South End school that did well on the WASL. "We know what to do," she said. "It's not magic. And what's cool about these schools is that they illustrate that if we put these best practices into place, we can make gains."

Pinchback-Jones thinks her method can be replicated. But she has left the school to become an assistant principal at West Seattle High School. Now African American Academy Principal Rickie Malone is left wondering: "How can you get everybody to teach that way?"

"I'm more than confident that if we have the right environment, leadership, highly skilled teachers, connections with the families, instructional material that is very excellent, every child — black, white, Asian — every ethnicity, will be able to succeed in our Seattle public schools," said Pinchback-Jones.

But Maple Elementary Principal Pat Hunter questions whether it's really that simple. Her staff is key, she said. Her teachers are "intentional," especially in the fourth grade, when students take the WASL.

But there isn't a curriculum she can point to. There's not a model other schools can follow to achieve the same result. A couple of years ago, she said, the School Board's Student Learning Committee asked her for her secret during a presentation and she showed them a staff photo.

The closest she can come? "Hard work."

"I think so many people who are not in the classroom think that you can just go in and bottle this and sell it," she said.

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com