Simple, steady is way to win

Sometimes what isn't in a story is as revealing as what is.

Many people probably saw the account last weekend of how the Everett School District impressively boosted its once-abysmal graduation rate by 30 percentage points in seven years.

That's no small feat. The district has 1,400 students entering high school every year. So the improvement means a whopping 400 more kids per year now earn high-school diplomas than seven years ago.

For one district, that's a lot of promise from what was a dead-end.

The article, by our education reporter Linda Shaw, was excellent and full of detail about how Everett pulled off what seems like a miracle.

But here are some of the many things that were not part of the story:

Charter schools. Vouchers. Anything having to do with school choice or free-market competition.

There was nothing about merit pay. Union seniority rules. Or holding teachers accountable based on standardized test scores.

Nobody in the story came in busting ass and firing teachers. There were no businessmen raining down cash along with think-tank studies. Or federal programs reinventing anything.

There also were no super-teachers; no paradigm-shifting principals; and no chops-busting ex-military superintendents who had barnstormed into public education to finally make everybody fly right.

There was no mention of money in the story at all.

All of this is because what Everett did broke no new educational ground, wasn't radical and didn't cost all that much, says Everett's chief academic officer, Terry Edwards.

"To even call what we did a 'program' is probably overstating it," he says.

What did they do? The main thing is the oldest trick in the school playbook. They hired people to trail the kids around and care.

These "success coordinators" work one on one with the kids most at risk of dropping out. They ride them to come to class and do their homework. If a kid drops out, they track them down and nag them to come back.

One was described as using MySpace and Facebook to find dropouts and cajole them into signing back up for school.

The district hired eight of them. They aren't certificated teachers, and so make only about $35,000 a year.

Everett ramped up other things that have been around for eons, too. Such as tutoring. Catch-up classes. Free summer school.

They toughened graduation requirements, such as requiring a third year of math. Since 2002, the district's 10th-grade standardized test pass rates went up about 30 percent in reading and writing (though only 15 percent in math).

Edwards said the education industry tends to talk about sweeping "shotgun reforms," in which problems like low graduation rates are tackled through big restructurings.

"We didn't have the resources for that, so we focused on what we could achieve," he says. "We decided to make it about direct interventions with specific kids. To get involved with them, by name, one on one."

Seems obvious, doesn't it? The story here is that there is no miracle.

I'm not saying that all the big reforms being bandied about, many through President Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative, have no merit. I'm open to them, especially raising academic standards. But it's got the feeling of a magic-bullet gimmick. Like change for change's sake.

Because we already know what works in education. It isn't complicated. But it also isn't efficient, like a business. It isn't glamorous or quick.

"I like to say our story is an overnight sensation that took seven years," Edwards says.

There is no "race" to the top. Until we get that, I'm not sure we have much chance of winning it.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.