Opportunity in high school for minority and low-income students breeds achievers in college

Critics harping about the undue influence of private and philanthropic money in public education might uncoil a bit if they talk to Jennifer Rance.

She is a University of Washington graduate with a degree in Spanish who now works as UW admissions counselor. Rance is upfront about the fact that were it not for a program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bob Craves, a co-founder of Costco, she would still be at home in Yakima and a college degree would be a pipe dream.

Instead she is an appropriate bragging point for the College Success Foundation, created by Craves and a partner and for the last decade doggedly working to improve the rate of minority and low-income students going to college.

A $118 million boost from the Gates Foundation fueled the foundation's creation of the Washington state Achievers program in 16 schools statewide. Each year, 500 students are chosen for intensive mentoring and college preparation. Nearly all, 97 percent, graduate from high school and 68 percent graduate from a four-year college.

"I knew I had the potential," Rance says. "But the University of Washington, I didn't even think that was a possibility."

Nationally, the percentages of low-income and minority students getting a college degree is embarrassingly low. Just 20 percent of African-American adults and 13 percent of Hispanics have a four-year degree. For low-income adults, that statistic is 10 percent.

Such low statistics qualify as a national emergency.

For me, improving educational outcomes for these students is only partly about building a skilled work force and much, much more about the moral imperative to offer every student the opportunity to be anything they want. Just as education creates opportunity; its absence constricts it.

Teachers are more often than not the heroes in student success stories, but not always. Rance relates the story of a teacher who criticized her lackluster grade in the class, going so far as to tell her she was "not going to do anything" in life. She challenged him to prove she had fallen short and, in the process, both discovered the teacher had misplaced, and thus not graded, work she had turned in.

Ivery Rhodes, one of this year's scholars, graduates Thursday from Cleveland High School. The youngest of five boys raised by a single mother, Rhodes is headed to Eastern Washington University in the fall, having beaten back challenges including low teacher expectations and gang warfare.

"When I first got into high school my teachers were not very encouraging, they just saw me as another black male playing basketball and not really looking to further themselves in education," Rhodes says.

He recounts that two guidance counselors asked him what he planned to do with his life and when he answered that he had no plans, directed him to the Achievers program.

Rhodes is the first in his family to attend a four-year college. He made the tough choices, defying teachers' low expectations — not by complaining but by slowly ramping up the advanced-placement classes until they had to acknowledge his worth.

Rhodes, too, had to separate himself from his gangbanging friends and know that steps like taking calculus would be among the many things he would have to face alone.

The key to his success was help.

"I have mentors, guidance counselors — a whole team of people who have my back," Rhodes said. "My friends don't have that."

College success doesn't change the life of the graduates, but the culture they belong to.

Rance graduated in 2007 but last week she was back at a graduation ceremony. This one for her younger brother, an Achievers Scholar, who graduated last week from Stanford University.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com