Gates “Small Schools” Have Worst Dropout Rates in PPS
April 13, 2008 10:50 pm
Still touted as a way to close the achievement gap, the “small schools” model that has gutted the high schools in Portland’s poorest neighborhoods is proving to be not just unpopular, but also impotent in retaining students.
Seven of ten of the schools with the worst graduation rates in the metro area are in PPS, and all seven were split into small schools under the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored Office of High Schools, headed by outgoing chief Leslie Rennie-Hill.
Rennie-Hill wants to pretend that there hasn’t been massive community resistance to the the small schools model, which constrains students to narrow choices of curriculum and strips much of the richness of curriculum common in traditional comprehensive high schools like Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln and Wilson.
This model was so roundly rejected at Jefferson, the community seems to have prevailed in convincing the district to reunite the two main academies there for the 2008-09 school year.
Instead of acknowledging their popular rejection, Rennie-Hill blames No Child Left Behind for having drained the small schools of their higher-achieving students. This from the Thursday, April 10 Oregonian:
Several factors may have influenced the low numbers, said Leslie Rennie-Hill, the district’s chief of high schools. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, students at schools that don’t meet federal benchmarks in math and reading have the option to transfer to a higher-achieving school.
The exodus left Marshall and Roosevelt with “a harder population to teach, a population with more academic challenges,” she said.
The administrator of the grants, also funded by the Meyer Memorial Trust, is quick to the defense, claiming the small school transition simply needs more time to work.
But the truth is that graduation rates are indicators of poverty. Portland Public Schools are increasingly segregated by poverty, and moves like splitting up comprehensive high schools into narrowly focussed academies simply encourages more socio-economic segregation. The answer to schools with problems of poverty is integration; that is, bring back the middle class that has fled these disastrous experiments with our childrens’ lives.
And the way to bring back the middle class is simple: bring back comprehensive high schools, so students don’t have to transfer to get what students take for granted in the other half our city.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
filed under: Data Crunch, Equity, High Schools, No Child Left Behind, Transfer Policy
April 14th, 2008 at 10:58 am
A glaring fallacy of logic takes away from your comments; you write ‘And the way to bring back the middle class is simple: bring back comprehensive high schools, so students don’t have to transfer to get what students take for granted in the other half our city.’… now I’m not saying small schools are, without, question the answer, but how do you figure that simply making small schools large again will convince any parent that this will improve the school. In my experience, the small school model (and I teach in a small school) is not swaying the decision to transfer schools nearly as much as the overall success of the school according to NCLB. You basically breeze over this crucial issue, which is addressed by the comment below;
‘Several factors may have influenced the low numbers, said Leslie Rennie-Hill, the district’s chief of high schools. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, students at schools that don’t meet federal benchmarks in math and reading have the option to transfer to a higher-achieving school.
The exodus left Marshall and Roosevelt with “a harder population to teach, a population with more academic challenges,” she said.’
Particularly important is the final sentence. NCLB is the true problem, as it makes more . Rather than allow for true equity, it creates a greater devide. Anyone who can afford to bolt, will bolt. Socio-economically who do you reckon is left? What sort of teachers wish to teach in such a school? NCLB makes bad schools worse, by allowing the majority of the best students/ and any others who can afford to leave to go. Now, certainly the equity comes in to questions when you look at who can afford (time/money/access) the luxury of traveling across town to go to school, when there is one in the neighborhood.
Small schools are something I am certainly not convinced are the answer. They do limit some options, although in most cases a student can be accomodated by changing small schools, or just having access to other schools class schedule. At my particular school, students frequently go outside of their school, and I even teach an entire class of students outside my school.
Comments regarding it taking time to take effect, etc… are also valid. One major problem is all the protest. How can such a system make gains when nobody will give it a chance.
Use some rational thought when considering the impact of NCLB on this; it may not be the sole problem, but whether small schools or not, it is a huge problem.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I sure didn’t mean to “breeze over” the problems of NCLB; I just wanted to point out that PPS changes have exacerbated these problems.
Removing educational opportunities by forcing students into narrow academic silos has only further alienated families from these schools. Allowing students to transfer willy-nilly around the district has also exacerbated the concentration of poverty, and all the problems that come with it.
If PPS were serious about addressing these problems, they’d acknowledge the challenges of NCLB, but also put their own policy under the microscope.
An honest assessment of the Gates small schools will show that they are hugely unpopular, and will not succeed in luring middle class families back.
What do families transfer for? Comprehensive high schools, as evidenced by the transfer statistics at schools like Grant, Lincoln and Cleveland.
Now dang it, you’ve got the theme from “Welcome Back Kotter” stuck in my head!
April 14th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
‘Welcome back, your dreams have all changed since you’ve been around… welcome back…’
Ok, so I agree that in the case of Small School in Portland they have been fairly unpopular. Whether they are hugely unpopular would be hard to quantify… there must be some support… in my school I will admit most are unhappy, but some are also willing to give it a go. The disadvantages have been stated here pretty clearly. In terms of advantages, they differ. In many schools, students are given an opportunity to specialize in what they hope to pursue as a career. This could be hugely beneficial if we can get past the notion that every kid, regardless of their future plans, should be channeled into college. In addition, in many schools, students will have the same group of teachers for multiple subjects. This, in theory, allows for a much more personal experience.
Again, I do not fully support small schools, and believe they are a bad choice for some schools. What I am not clear about is whether small schools are actually the problem with all of the PPS ‘experimnets,’or if the schools are being set up to fail by NCLB, and or poor administrations (Jefferson comes to mind.) I would like to see the outcome in districts that actually give this program a true opportunity to work. I believe there are some examples of small schools working in certain places, although I am unsure where specifically… for some reason Tacoma rings bell.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I agree with Kotter that small schools aren’t necessarily the problem. They neither cause kids to drop out nor do they encourage kids to transfer to other schools.
As Steve said, however, “siloed” schools are a problem. They severely limit options for all the students they enroll. That’s not a recipe for success.
Small schools should, if structured properly, concentrate on creating closer relationships with at-risk students. The emphasis in Portland, especially via the Gates’ grants, has been on academics and “achievement”. That’s no way to create meaningful teacher-student relationships.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
To be clear, I have no problem with small learning communities, or even small schools. What I take issue with is tracking kids into a career path — to the exclusion of other course offerings — at the ripe old age of 14.
Heck, I didn’t know what I wanted to do career-wise until I was in my thirties, and I’m sure glad I got a broad-based high school education, including physics, calculus, theatre arts, instrumental music, journalism, photography, English Lit, etc.
Yes, some kids will never go to college — that’s why we have technical focus options like Vocational Village. But the removal of comprehensive high schools in poor neighborhoods, in favor of the Gates silo model, has been clearly discriminatory to our poorest students, and has clearly contributed to their continuing declines in enrollment.
So far, only the Jefferson community has complained loudly enough to get some small, tentative steps toward restoring comprehensive education in their cluster.
Luckily for our middle and upper-middle class citizens in the Wilson, Lincoln, Grant, and Cleveland clusters, they don’t have to fight for this. They get it by default, but have to deal with overcrowding from all the in-transfers of students who just want a basic, comprehensive high school education.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Steve,
Has the district actually taken any concrete steps toward restoring comprehensive education at Jefferson, or is it just talk so far???
April 14th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
So far, just talk.
Not talk of adding much in the way of curriculum, mind you, just talk of removing the wall that keeps kids constrained in silos.
I’m having a hard time seeing how they’re going to deliver on any of the “proof points” we’ve talked about without a massive adjustment to the way FTE budgets are allocated. You can’t cut 5 positions from Jefferson and add much curriculum, as far as I can figure.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
The middle grades are the basis of a successful high school. As long as we have such rotten education in the lower economic school’s middle grades then the high schools in those neighborhoods won’t work well either. We can get by with it in the upper middle class and middle class neighborhoods because the parents and community supplement and bolster middle schools and their students, but in poor areas this doesn’t take place. Until it does we will have the mess we have.
My point: Trying to fix high schools in a vacuum doesn’t work. Yet, we try to do it over and over and over.