Last fall, educators at Oliver Elementary in outer Southeast Portland got the news: Due to your students’ low reading and math scores and rampant chronic absenteeism, your school is officially one of lowest performers in Oregon.
As a result, the school and its parent district, Centennial, were subject to state oversight, offered technical assistance and awarded a modest federal grant. The message? You must do better.
This year, Lincoln Elementary in Woodburn turned in the same performance as Oliver did the year before: bottom-tier reading and math scores and sky-high chronic absenteeism.
But due to the vagaries of Oregon’s school accountability system, here’s what Lincoln experienced when school performance ratings came out late last week: No listing. No demands for improvement. No offer of expertise. No federal grant.
Under state rules put into effect last year, Oregon only applies its statistical dragnet to find schools that performed in the bottom 5% every third year. So, while the state ran an analysis last year specifically to see which schools did worst overall, this year it didn’t even check and won’t again until 2022.
Thus, Oliver Elementary and 93 schools like it, with ultra-low outcomes in 2017-18, face consequences. But Lincoln Elementary and six other Oregon schools that performed just as badly in 2018-19 do not.
Educators who help run the accountability system -- or have been caught in it -- say it’s actually not as irrational or ineffective as that might suggest, however.
Most of the 90 or so schools that generated the worst-ranked results this year are on the state’s need-to-improve radar. In most cases, that’s because they performed in the bottom 5% last year too, so they face the same consequences that Oliver Elementary does. In other instances, the school’s extremely poor 2019 results for one or more groups of children, such as Latinos or students with disabilities, got the state’s attention. Those schools, too, got added to the state’s official consequences list.
Perhaps more importantly, the state has changed its approach to fixing problem schools – and educators who’ve experienced both accountability systems are hailing the change.
Under the old No Child Left Behind law, Oregon and other states treated schools as the nexus of any performance problem, prompting attempts at one-off fixes for each school with poor results. Oregon used an off-the-shelf software program to generate a list of what many of those fixes should be. Often, they did not work.
So, under the successor federal law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act, the school improvement team at the Oregon Department of Education was renamed to include the word “district.” Its leader, Tim Boyd, led the philosophical and structural change to instead work with district-level leaders to help them examine districtwide structural problems and find districtwide levers for change. The department doesn’t dictate what those should be but asks hard questions to guide districts to make smart choices, Boyd and other say. The idea is the district-level buy-in will likely fix problem schools in a way that outlasts one principal – and will lift results at the district’s other schools as well.
So even though schools like Lincoln aren’t on any list and don’t qualify for the federal grants, other schools in their district likely are – and district levers may already be being pulled in their favor. That’s true in Lincoln’s case, because five other Woodburn schools, including three other elementary schools, were put on Oregon’s must-improve list last year.
Educators including Oregon City Assistant Superintendent Kyle Laier say the new approach, with its wider lens and less prescriptive tone, is working well. His district, for instance, had its two small district-chartered high schools placed on the must-improve list last year due to poor graduation rates.
Under No Child Left Behind, he said, the focus would likely have been to chase after a few students at each charter to rapidly drive up their graduation rates with solutions specific to those particular school populations.
But what happened instead, he said, was that a team of state experts helped him and other district leaders seek input from educators and advocates for students at all the district’s middle and high schools. That made more sense, Laier said, because students who ended up in the alternative high schools were largely shaped by their experiences coming up in Oregon City’s traditional schools.
Those discussions led the district to focus on improving the trajectory of all Oregon City freshmen, with a particular emphasis on helping them pass enough classes during ninth grade to remain on track for graduation. That meant taking an up-to-the-minute approach to watching data about freshman grades, attendance and test performance and following up with rapid intervention for students who appeared to falter.
Laier said Oregon City hopes to use the federal grant tied to its performance woes to pay two newly hired data experts at district headquarters. They help put up-to-date data about individual students in the hands of teachers and principals at all grade levels, including those who work with freshmen, every week.
Those effects from having two charter schools placed on the troubled schools list have left Laier optimistic that his district will experience lasting improvements for all high school students.
The state accountability team is “addressing the whole district … which allows you to better deal with the root causes” of the particular metric, such as low graduation rates in one school, that got a district school or schools on the troubled list, he said.
His perspective is not unique. Most people interviewed for this story said they are wildly optimistic that widespread school improvement is on its way. They cite the strengths of Oregon’s new, more nuanced approach to school accountability. And they point to the massive infusion of money that schools will receive next school year from the new $1 billion-a-year business tax – and the accountability for specific results it will entail.
The additional money already flowing to high schools from the voter-approved measure that upped funding for career-technical education and dropout prevention has also fueled a can-do and will-deliver stance among school leaders.
“This is a very, very exciting time in education. I believe we are really going to have resources to meet the challenges,” said Mark Mulvihill, superintendent of InterMountain Education Service District in Pendleton. That agency helps the state Education Department lead school and district improvement efforts in 18 Eastern Oregon counties far from the department’s Salem headquarters. “It’s a dream come true in all my career.”
How exactly state accountability and oversight will play out once the big money starts flowing is still somewhat in question, however, he said. “It’s new to us. It’s foreign to us, as in what is the structure of (the Oregon Department of Education) going to look like now. What is going to be its reach? It’s going to morph with all this.”
Joel Stuart, the assistant superintendent in charge of North Clackamas School District’s school improvement efforts, likes the direction that he’s seen the state department move and is confident it will pay off for students.
“I have been in this for 30 years,” he said. “It’s a new environment that I have not seen. It’s encouraging.”
Oregon’s version of school improvement in the No Child Left Behind era, driven in large part by federal mandates, was too often a nightmare, he said. Struggling schools were awash in competing initiatives – from their own district, from specialized departments such as special education and from the state’s sometimes ham-fisted dictates spit out by the software program, Stuart said.
The state “would say you must do the following: a, b, c, d and e, and we will chart each of them,” he recalled. “It became on overload for that school.”
The state has made a 180-degree turn and now listens, asks probing questions, offers suggestions and lets districts take the lead, he said.
Like Oregon City, North Clackamas was prompted to examine a niche problem at two alternative schools but ended up focusing on boosting attendance districtwide and keeping all ninth-graders on track to graduation. When a school gets called on the carpet for poor performance among a single ethnic group, as happened at the district’s Oak Grove Elementary this year, it no longer elicits resentment but an all-out-effort to do better, because the fixes can be thoughtful and locally driven not formulaic or too numerous, Stuart said.
Stuart said Boyd and his team at the state “are really working hard to remove some of those barriers that were there for unknown reasons. It’s not ‘We are going to make you do these 10 forms.’ It’s coming and meeting and talking with you. There is a whole lot less resentment because they’re listening.
“I have now been through both” school accountability systems, Stuart said. “This is making much more of an impact.”
Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@oregonian.com; @chalkup