Oregon’s Small-School Experiment Slow to See Results

By Betsy Hammond and Lisa Grace Led, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

Jun. 8–Oregon’s highly touted small high schools are graduating their first class of students who spent all four years in intimate academies intended to revolutionize the big American high school.

Armed with $25 million from billionaire Bill Gates and other education reformers, backers of small schools heralded the academies as the best way to curb high dropout rates, forge connections to keep teenagers on track and prepare every graduate for college.

Four years into that effort, however, Oregon’s small schools have yet to deliver on those promises.

Instead, their statistics look a lot like results from the lumbering, impersonal high schools they are supposed to replace. Lots of students quit, and most of the graduates aren’t ready for the rigors of college.

At Marshall and Roosevelt high schools in Portland, which each house three academies, about half of their students didn’t make it to graduation. That’s the same low graduation rate as when they were two big schools instead of six small academies.

“At first, I loved going to school,” says Victoria Sargent, 17, who attended Pauling Academy, a science- and math-focused school on the Marshall campus. “After a while, it was boring to me. Nothing was a challenge. I never had a connection with teachers.”

Sargent said she was frustrated hat she couldn’t get classroom help with math and that teachers weren’t clear about their expectations. Her grades slipped. This spring, she switched to nightschool at Marshall.

In Hillsboro, Liberty High broke into small schools four years ago, but its dropout rate remains the highest in a district with three other traditional high schools. Despite progress in getting more students to take college-prep courses, three in five Liberty graduates fall short of entry standards for the University of Oregon — the district’s definition of college-ready.

Twyla Baggarley, who graduated from Liberty on Saturday, passed Advanced Placement calculus as a junior but worries that she might not be primed for college after a lackluster senior year. Tired of teachers who taught straight from the textbook, she chose to take just one full-year core course, AP English, and padded her schedule with photography and two periods of PE.

She and other students say administrators seemed so caught up in tinkering with the small schools’ structure that they didn’t pay enough attention to the quality of teaching.

“I saw no point in taking another class where I have to just teach myself,” she says.

The lessons for other high schools are sobering. Even with millions of dollars for teacher training, an army of experts to coach schools and the backing of the Northwest’s top philanthropies, fixing high schools so they work for all students remains a formidable and elusive task.

Oregon’s small-schools initiative was launched in 2004 with grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Meyer Memorial Trust. Nationally, the Gates Foundation has donated more than $1 billion to create and support small academies.

Eleven big high schools from Portland to Medford got grants of about $1 million each to break into academies of fewer than 400 students each. Two schools — Lebanon and North Medford — have since backed out.

Marshall, Roosevelt and Liberty jumped in first and are graduating the first class of seniors who spent all four years in academies.

Educators at the Portland schools made the switch four years ago after mounting pressure to improve. At Marshall, former Principal John Wilhelmi had to cut band, auto shop and other popular programs because so many students left to attend other schools.

“We felt our graduation rates could be better, our school climate could be better,” he recalls. “We felt we could stop the loss of kids with this vehicle of personalization.”

At Renaissance Arts, a 294-student arts-focused academy at Marshall, students collaborate on projects, even in such dry subjects as Susan Pfohman’s advanced algebra class. One day last month, her 16 high schoolers broke into groups of four to do a statistical comparison of two advanced algebra classes. The object: use anonymous test score data to determine which class was higher achieving.

“There’s no right answer,” Pfohman called out, as students discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each class. “But you’re going to have to justify your reasoning.”

Despite the smaller classes, key indicators of student success at Marshall and Roosevelt — test scores and attendance, for instance — haven’t changed much since the campuses split into small schools.

At Marshall, the average student missed more than five weeks of school last year. At Roosevelt, the average student missed six weeks.

Students in two academies at Roosevelt and two at Marshall have shown improvement in reading since the change, but math performance declined. At Roosevelt, math performance remained flat.

Administrators say students at both schools pose special challenges to educate. For instance, at BizTech on the Marshall campus, 76 percent of students come from low-income families. At the Spanish-English International School at Roosevelt, 82 percent of students are low-income. Officials say many of these students enter high school less prepared than their counterparts at other high schools, and many work part time to help support their families.

Nevertheless, some students and parents say the small-school transformation overpromised and underdelivered for the class of ’08.

“The idea and the potential are great, but the actual execution has been less than great,” said Cindy Adams, whose youngest son, Brandon, graduated Friday from BizTech. “We knew it would take time, but what we were told was by the fourth or fifth year, Marshall should be rockin’.”

Gates Foundation leaders also have grown impatient at the uneven results when big schools break into small ones. This fall, Gates probably will switch the focus of its grants for fixing high schools to target teaching and raise teacher quality, says Vicki Phillips, former Portland superintendent who now directs Gates’ education initiatives.

“We have learned that small by itself is not enough,” Phillips says. “Good curriculum and instruction don’t just show up. . . We need to get more dramatic results.”

Meyer Memorial Trust, the other benefactor of Oregon’s small schools, will donate another $3 million to continue support and teacher training at schools that have made progress and are willing to keep working.

The group leading Oregon’s small-school charge is a business-backed nonprofit known as E3, or Employers for Education Excellence. Organizers remain bullish on the approach but concede it may take years to see results worth bragging about.

“The results are slower than anyone wanted,” says Karen Phillips, a former school administrator who heads E3′s small-schools initiative.

She pledges that by 2010, graduation rates will rise and schools will deliver double-digit increases in the passing rates on 10th-grade reading, writing and math exams.

She sees promising signs, such as vastly improved attendance at a small school in Woodburn, most freshmen passing all their classes in Medford and rising test scores in several academies in Portland.

But it’s clear that some of the central tenets of E3′s strategy have hampered better outcomes for all students.

Organizers put so much emphasis on school structure and small details of the reorganization that the caliber of teaching became secondary.

At Liberty, for example, Principal Gregg O’Mara says E3 kept pressing him to make the small schools more independent from one another. Partly for that reason, the school reorganized twice in the past four years. Starting this fall, he says, Liberty will focus on getting every teacher to collaborate with colleagues on better teaching and student outcomes.

Leadership also has been a problem. Top-notch schools typically require top-notch principals. But school districts cannot afford to pay multiple principals at one high school the same high salary as they pay the principal of a big high school.

As a result, many small high schools are run by lower-paid, less-experienced administrators. That has led to high turnover, and at some schools, confusion among teachers and students about who is in charge.

In addition, E3 has not been clear about the results it wants from small schools. There are no performance targets or timelines for schools, and the group has not defined what makes a student “college ready.”

E3 leaders admit they were naive about how easy change would be. They learned the hard way that they can’t overhaul schools without more backing from superintendents and district administrators. They also are providing more teacher training, particularly in reading and math.

Despite disappointing results, small-school champions maintain that the strategy will pay off.

Portland Superintendent Carole Smith points to test score improvements at some of the academies as evidence that many students are thriving in a more intimate setting.

“We definitely need different environments to meet the needs of different kids,” she says.

Tamara Snook, this year’s valedictorian at Marshall’s Renaissance Arts Academy, has attended big high schools here and elsewhere. She transferred to Renaissance as a freshman and recalls how teachers told her mother about her hard work. An art teacher introduced her to other smart kids. Senior year, Snook took college math at Portland Community College.

“I felt that all these people care. They actually want to get to know you,” she says.

At Liberty, results are on an upward trajectory. After the school created a freshman academy last fall, the percentage of freshmen passing all core classes increased to 76 percent this year, from 63 percent last year. More seniors graduated with good grades and college-prep courses this year than ever before.

Gloria Miranda graduated Saturday from Liberty’s human-services academy. Its focus enabled her to spend two periods a day working at the school’s day-care center and researching child development, which she says kept her on track for college and a teaching career. But senior year, she ended her school day about noon to work at Baskin-Robbins. She’s unsure how well she’ll compete at Portland State this fall.

Some small schools are changing their approach based on what’s worked and what hasn’t.

When Ed Bear took over as principal of Marshall’s BizTech last fall, he required freshmen to take 90 minutes of math and language arts every day. He’ll up the ante to require 90 minutes of language arts for sophomores starting in the fall.

“We’re in a place to be successful, but a lot of work needs to get done,” he says.

Change can’t come soon enough for Russell Lewis, 18, who dropped out of BizTech in his junior year and works at McDonald’s. He’s studying to get his GED.

He admits that he didn’t do his homework at Marshall but wishes that teachers had pressured him more before he started failing classes.

“My little brother’s in seventh grade, and I don’t want him to have to go through what I did,” Lewis says. “I hope that it’ll get better.”

By Betsy Hammond and Lisa Grace Lednicer

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