I love Oregon. Oregon is in my bones. I was born in Oregon City and have lived in three corners of the state. Every attempt to leave Oregon (even for years at a time) has somehow become a round-trip. But some things about Oregon make me crazy.
Oregon's approach to education is frequently annoying. Particularly in the last decade, we have seen a state with a long tradition of local control become (due largely to its dependence on federal grant dollars) focused on state-wide compliance to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration. And it's not just a matter of material compliance. The education community in Oregon seems to feel the need to adopt and BELIEVE the rhetoric of its federal sponsors. (It would be fun to do research on the coming and going of certain federal 'stock phrases' in Oregon publications...RTI, PBS, PLC's, Data-Driven-Decision-Making. My favorite has to be the rapidly evolving 'scientific'-'scientifically based'-'research based'-'evidence-based", all casting about for some magical guidance that will replace the judgments of practitioners with something more mechanically sound. The fact that the phrase has evolved so rapidly and so thoroughly should be a hint that there is something about the notion that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.)
One of the federal fashions that Oregon has adopted without reservation is high school bashing. I don't know that they mean to (as I observed, the Oregon institutions seem to need to believe the federal rhetoric, making much of their practice unreflective), but that's the habit.
Oregon's blind spot regarding high schools played out in an interesting way with its Race to the Top (RTTT!) application. The authors claim that Oregon has no Districts that are performing poorly, only individual schools. Nobody who is familiar with the results of state assessments and report cards will be surprised to know that the vast majority of 'failing' schools are high schools. But here is the blind spot: if a high school performs abysmally, is it reasonable to assume the every elementary and middle school feeding into it is somehow healthy? Is it likely that the high school is taking incoming freshmen who are fully prepared for the rigors of 9th grade and crushing them into failure in the 15 short months between entering high school and the administration the 10th grade assessments? Are those 15 months (three of which are vacation time) really undoing 9 years of successful schooling?
This is an unsustainable proposition. And yet ODE's official position seems to be that a district that has not one successful high school is somehow not a failing district. Is it really feasible that a high school is failing while all of its feeder schools are successful? My experience is other than that. 10th graders who fail to meet state benchmarks nearly always entered high school at a significant deficit. Adept 9th graders become, with rare exceptions, adept 10th graders and competent graduates. Exceptions are rare and typically have to do with personal trauma or other significant life events. To claim otherwise can only indicate a lack of experience with high school students.
Oregon's dilemma? The cold hard truth about schools is politically undesirable and won't win any competitive grant money from the feds.
The naked truth is that doing is good job at schooling is a difficult and tenuous undertaking. It is fraught with political temptations and pitfalls. There are no guarantees. And every attempt to make the enterprise more predictable, more efficient, more uniform, has failed. Utterly. And yet those who control the purse-strings feel the need to create the illusion of predictability, uniformity, standardization, and simple cause-effect relationships in order to justify even a bare subsistence level of funding.
So what do we do? Do we lie? Never! Unthinkable! What we tend to do instead is to adjust our beliefs in order to survive. We begin to BELIEVE those stock phrases and unexamined assumptions that will align our rhetoric to the language of the funding agencies. Does the use of technology in the classroom improve student achievement? Yes, Sir! Is PBS effective? You bet! Can RTI change the world? Give us 10 minutes! (and a grant!)
Here's another cold, hard truth. Every effort at school reform, teacher reform, principal reform, every implementation of new math, new science, computerized English, curriculum mapping, improved textbooks...every educational cure deployed over the past 50 years, has gotten us to where we are today. And today, according to the establishment, we are in crisis.
And if we are in trouble today, what could be less rational than to turn to the same people who have, for 50 years now, promised that the next reform, the next innovation is the real, real, real, real cure? And yet, what are we doing?
And what are the alternatives? Are there any? And if there are, is there any way to access them from inside the current system? The system? The System? Someone at ODE used be fond of saying that we don't want a K-12 school system, we want a system of K-12 schools. What they meant, I think, was that local communities should still get to decide on the decor in the staff room.
Oregon desperately needs more schools that are outside the System. There are a few, including some very good public schools in Eastern Oregon where teachers and students produce wonderful results and take solace in the fact that Salem is further away than is Boise! And for children whose parents have the means, the connections and the drive to access them, there are private schools. Some of these are quite good, others are decidedly not, but they do have the virtue of greater independence from a centralized (and largely paralyzed) bureaucracy. And there are charter schools. Again, some quite good, some not, but all operating with some insulation from the Powers That Be and therefor capable of course correction and innovation.
The Oregon system largely hates charters. Charters are unruly. They are non-standardized. Some are extremely successful (which is in violation of Oregon's egalitarian mandate). And while no charter school can ever remotely be said to cause a financial hardship for a district, the accusations of 'stealing', 'pirating', 'cannibalizing', and 'union busting' ring through the halls (including union halls) of power at the mention of Charters. In fact, all of the pretend-conflicts within the current near-monopoly give way to rousing choruses of 'We Shall Overcome' at the very mention of Charter Schools. Why is that? Change is scary. Charters are scary. Charters can fail. (When other public schools fail, we just continue propping them up across the decades, so that doesn't really count as failing in the minds of TPTB). Worse yet, Charter Schools might succeed? And what if a school succeeded where others had failed? Would that make it (gulp!) better? Unthinkable! And what if it succeeded without conforming to the guidance of this week's hot education guru? That would be a double indictment of the education industry.
There are many reasons to fear-hate charters. Money is not among them. I believe that money is a smokescreen for those much deeper fears that will never be named in a public meeting.
Oregon's schools have room to improve. Dramatically. And Oregon's High Schools can improve, but there are limits to what they can get done until the rest of the K-8 experience is much more fruitful. So long as Oregon continues passing out lollipops to elementary feeder schools while kicking the high schools for dropping the ball, not much is going to change except the name of the vendor who will profit from the next wave of reform.
I support the goal of holding high schools accountable. But high schools cannot be held fully accountable until K-8 education provides the conditions that make high school success thinkable. High Schools would never ask for a free pass or special favors, but a level playing field would be nice. And while Oregon's K-12 system is mired in old habits and clinging to old wine-skins, Charter Schools in the K-8 range are probably the best hope for Oregon's struggling high schools.
Wonk bonus: in a fit of uncontrollable inconsistency, Oregon has declared its intention to name a proportionate number of elementary, middle and high schools to be on the turnaround list. This is because they recognize that if they stick to the Oregon rating system, the vast majority of schools that would qualify would be high schools and virtually all elementary schools would be excluded! So some elementary schools will be targeted for extra support in spite of having higher ratings than some high schools that will, consequently, receive nothing! It's impossible to know (although I suppose it's researchable) whether this has the end result of steering more of the grant money to certain districts at the expense of others.
