Case Study: The Rainier Beach Story

Claudia Rowe’s coverage for The Seattle Times rallies constructive, inclusive response

Solutions Journalism
The Whole Story

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Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times

“Rainier Beach, once considered the worst high school in Seattle, now has graduation rates that top the district’s.” So began Claudia Rowe’s front-page story in The Seattle Times on March 16, 2015. It explained how, over the course of two years, a nearly-defunct school in one of Seattle’s poorest communities had put in place a rigorous college-prep International Baccalaureate curriculum. The results? Projected enrollment higher than it’s been in a decade, dozens of students on track to leave with college credit for advanced studies, and a 25-point increase in graduation rates.

Public reaction to the piece was startling. It wasn’t just the volume of comments, but the tone: In a city where discussion of school issues historically has been fractious and mean-spirited, the thread that emerged around the Rainier Beach story was constructive and inclusive. Wrote one reader: “I don’t have a stake in this, heck, I don’t even live in the city, but I’m smart enough to know that when something is working you support it, you improve it and you celebrate it… Make it better. I’m going to call them and ask how.”

Indeed, donations poured into Rainier Beach, including one from a parent who promised to divert her usual contribution to the “fund-raising machine” at her kids’ wealthier school. Public officials rallied behind Rainier Beach. Proposals emerged to provide state funding that would preserve the International Baccalaureate initiative. Amid the flood of reactions to Rowe’s feature article, Washington State Senator Sen. Pramila Jayapal proposed a last-minute addition of $205,000 to the state’s education budget to keep IB afloat at Rainier Beach for two more years. “When we’re talking about one of the highest-poverty schools in our state and we’ve seen this kind of success, we need to do everything we can to continue to fund those programs,” Jayapal said. [Read this article for a May 2016 update.]

The response was so overwhelming that it prompted the reporter, Claudia Rowe, to run a follow-up piece describing all that happened subsequent to the publication of the original piece. Legislators are sorting through the budget, and there’s no guarantee that funding will come through (update: Seattle Public Schools and the Alliance for Education announce a deal to continue funding the IB program), but Rowe’s story has left its mark: the conversation around Rainier Beach, and about education, has been altered in important ways. Poor kids can do well at school. A challenging curriculum can drive higher performance. Public schools can, in fact, be fixed.

The story…generated more response than any other story I know of in Ed Lab. A former Seattle Mayor tweeted about it, as did an NBA basketball star. Local business groups and venture capitalists alike have chimed in. At last count, the story had generated 169 online comments, innumerable emails, and more retweets than I can count.
— Claudia Rowe

(Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)

Rowe’s story was a product of “Education Lab,” an ongoing collaboration between The Times and the Solutions Journalism Network. “Education Lab” is anchored in rigorous, intensely-researched stories: Instead of shining a light only on wrongdoing or focusing primarily on problems, Seattle Times reporters explore pockets of success and innovations that show promise for improving schools.

We talked with Claudia Rowe about her approach to this piece and what about it triggered such a staggering response. She talks about the ingredients of this particular solutions story, what she feels ultimately contributed to its success, and what components were strategically left out to cause a bigger stir. What emerges are some key insights behind crafting a solutions story with teeth and traction.

I really try to think about what galvanizes a reader, what are the ingredients that make a story gain traction. I think that it’s not enough just to say, “here’s something promising,” and it’s not enough to say, “here’s the evidence for why it’s promising.” I think it needs to be placed within the context of a larger question.

— Claudia Rowe

SJN: When did you first get wind of this story? How did it emerge?

Claudia Rowe: In 2012 I was working on a freelance story for The Seattle Times about a different high school in Seattle that had been similarly maligned and written off, seen as kind of a chaotic gang-ridden place. I had heard that suddenly the school was incredibly desirable and the second most-requested on the district list for enrollment. And I was interested in what was driving that turnaround. That school attributed a lot of the turnaround to bringing in the IB program. During the reporting for that story I learned that Rainier Beach was now going to pursue something similar. That is when I began… so I happened to catch them at the very beginning of that process because I was looking at another school further down the line…

Then, when I came on here as part of the Education Lab team, I always had in mind to see, well, how’s it going? And I did a couple blog posts last year, just checking in… It was still pretty fledgling at that point. But enough so that other schools were interested — could this high-poverty, long struggling school make this change by using this approach to inquiry in a broad array of topics? Could you demand of kids who came into high school with below-grade-level skills, could you demand extra-high rigor of that cohort and see an improvement? I’ve been watching it for a while and then this year said, “Okay it’s time to do a real story.”

SJN: The piece raises the issue of the pending expiration of funding for this IB program. There’s no explicit call to action, nor do you mention any initiative on a policy level to do something…

CR: There is no district official quoted there in their kind of standard boilerplate response going “Yes, we’ll be thinking about that.” And that was a decision. It’s not that we didn’t have that material. We did. But I felt that the story was stronger, that the teeth were sharper and the challenge to the district stronger without the “he said, she said” district response that would normally be in a story like this. That doesn’t exactly add much. All it does it put somebody’s name out there who can be attacked. It just didn’t really seem to further anything.

It was a conscious decision and I went back and forth on it. If you have that sort of standard boilerplate statement there… there’s a chance that it gives the reader kind of a false sense of comfort. Somebody’s dealing with it… someone’s on the hot seat. And then they don’t have to really do anything else… But without that it does sort of say, “Alright, well what are you gonna do?” I think it makes the challenge harder. Counter-intuitively you would think if you have somebody there to frame then you’ve done it, but actually, in this case the reaction suggests to me that there might be more traction gained by not going the usual route, at least in this case.

SJN: What were the reactions to this story. How has the response been different?

CR: I think that when a story runs and you immediately get a Twitter notification that an NBA basketball star is tweeting this (because an NBA star is a Rainier Beach alum)… I started getting a couple of signals that there might be a little more going on here than the standard education story. Huge numbers of comments on the site — that’s great — and unlikely folks from around the country weighing in… More tangibly, the state senator who represents that district of Seattle has made kind of a late-in-the-game ask in the state budget process to make ensure that Rainier Beach gets more funding — of course the answer to her ask is still an unknown, but it’s kind of indicative of what I would call a real groundswell in the response.

I also heard yesterday that the chief academic officer of IB International, who is stationed at The Hague in the Netherlands, has seen this story. So this has gone international… The school told me that they had received more than $10,000 in donations directly as a response to the story, to get more students covered for an IB trip to Barcelona this summer… I also heard that alumni of the school — some are pretty well-known national-level athletes — are beginning to talk about creating a permanent foundation that would fund efforts at Rainier Beach. Really, I can’t think of any significant negative response to the story, even from some traditional quarters.

SJN: How do you explain this response? What was it that made this piece so galvanizing to readers?

CR: I think this story is doing three things. I think it’s focusing on a potential solution to lagging achievement. It is putting that into a broader thematic context about advanced learning and equity… and then it has a very strong implicit challenge to the district without directly flogging anyone… making it very plain that there’s an enormous question here and you need to answer it… I really try to think about what galvanizes a reader, what are the ingredients that really make a story gain traction. And I think that it’s not enough just to say “Here’s something promising,” and it’s not enough to say “Here’s the evidence for why it’s promising.” I think it needs to be placed within the context of a larger question.

I think that when people hear about solutions journalism they immediately assume it’s soft or it’s advocacy or it’s fluff stuff, and I think this piece goes a long way toward dispelling that. I think this is how you could do solutions journalism with a real hard edge. It was not exactly a fluffy story when you’re putting it in the context of a historically underfunded school, and a cohort of students that rarely get access to these kinds of programs or approaches to learning. I think that is why it generated such a response, because it’s not simply a good news story. It is saying something not so good at all: “You have a possible solution right in front of you and you are failing to recognize it.”

SJN: Were there any other components which strengthened this piece?

CR: There’s tangible success here in an unlikely place (#1); there’s kind of an interesting thematic question about advanced learning and equity (#2); there’s the sort of outrage factor and the implicit challenge of a more traditional hard-edged news story (#3)… but there’s one other thing that I didn’t mention, and that is the role that Rainier Beach as an institution kind of historically has played in Seattle… That’s part of what needs to be considered when you’re doing these solutions stories and looking for some kind of impact: the community context.

Rainier Beach means something to Seattle, and even if it’s the school that people… some found it a convenient scapegoat or punching bag, but others find it this kind of athletic powerhouse. It’s a character in the city of Seattle, and it’s a very historic school… It is completely changed demographically, but it really occupies kind of an anchor position in some ways in Seattle’s understanding of itself around race issues — good and bad. It has kind of its own role in the story, and I think that when you’re doing solutions stories that’s a factor. Even during the reporting, it’s just a very polarizing figure. The school itself was a character, and a character that elicits very strong reactions from people, positive and negative, and emotional. That is clearly a driver in the response.

(Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)

“Education Lab” has been one of the fastest-growing blogs in The Seattle Times’ history: within a year it was the fifth most-read news blog on seattletimes.com. Its stories have been republished in newspapers and blogs around the country. “These stories don’t back away from the problems of the public schools — but they also offer some hope,” says Times education editor Linda Shaw. “People are hungry for that.”

Many of those stories have produced tangible changes in public funding, school district policy, and legislation. The state’s public education department asked to use “Education Lab’s” coverage of discipline during a conference in March, 2015. A program at a low-income school that “Education Lab” wrote about won a federal grant of more than $4 million. And a local nonprofit has received grants to build a parent engagement program modeled on one from Chicago that “Education Lab” spotlighted.

Within The Times itself, the solutions approach has achieved firm footing. Times editors are committed to sustaining “Education Lab,” and have begun expanding the practice to coverage of economic equity, human trafficking and other issues. Rowe and other Times education staffers have been invited to speak about the solutions approach to professional journalist groups such as the Education Writers Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and their work has drawn attention and some envy from peers across the nation. Wrote one reporter in California, “I just got on the education beat and was blown away to see all the great stuff you are doing with the ‘Education Lab.’”

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