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Tualatin Elementary teacher Janell Cooke leads a reading lesson for a small group of her third-graders. The school, which got a top rating from the state today, has highly trained teachers who know how to use research-backed teaching strategies to maintain students' interest and boost learning, says Principal Jamie Kingery. The school consistently helps students make extra-large year-to-year gains in reading and math.
(Thomas Boyd / The Oregonian )
A diverse top tier of Oregon schools, from high schools in well-off suburbs to elementary schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, propel students far ahead in reading and math and help them graduate on time, the state reported Thursday.
Those 114 schools, which enroll nearly 50,000 Oregon students, earned the top rating on state school report cards issued today. They got their students to make outsized year-to-year gains, and they excelled with low-income, minority, second-language and special ed students.
,
,
in David Douglas and
are among those with top results, measured primarily by how far they helped students progress from year to year on state math and reading tests and, for high schools, how many they got to graduate.
in four years, 23 percentage points better than the state average.
At the other end of the spectrum, 60 schools enrolling nearly 15,000 students got rock-bottom ratings for abysmal student growth on state tests or graduation rates. More than half were alternative high schools serving students who come to them already off-track for graduation or schools that serve teens and young adults in youth prisons.
Oregon school performance ratings
The state created a
designed to give slightly more than half of schools one of the top two ratings.
Level 5 schools
These 114 schools performed in the top 10 percent statewide.
Level 4 schools
This is the broadest performance category, covering 557 schools that ranked from the 90th percentile down to the 44th percentile.
Some of the highest performers in this category: Portland’s Lincoln High, Corbett Charter School, Oregon City High, Beaverton’s Southridge High, Centennial Middle School, Beaverton’s Conestoga Middle School, Portland’s Alameda Elementary
Level 3 schools
These 356 schools performed below average to well below average.
Some of the biggest schools in this category include David Douglas, Reynolds and Aloha high schools, Beaverton’s Five Oaks, Cedar Park and Mountain View middle schools and Tigard’s Twality Middle School.
Some schools were placed in this category because they failed to test enough students. Schools that left more than 5 percent of students untested are automatically downgraded one level. This year, that included Clackamas High, Tigard High, Hillsboro’s Glencoe High and Portland’s Grant High and Sunnyside Environmental School.
Level 2 schools
These 113 schools performed in the bottom 15 percent statewide. The federal government considers these schools in serious need of improvement.
Oregon Connections Academy, an online statewide charter school with the largest enrollment of any Oregon school, rated Level 2 despite acceptable levels of student gains on state tests because it has such a terrible on-time graduation rate, just 45 percent for the class of 2012.
Other schools in this low performance category include Beaverton’s McKinley Elementary, North Gresham Elementary, and Portland’s Boise-Eliot and Cesar Chavez schools.
Level 1 schools
These 54 schools rank in the worst 5 percent, and the feds consider them in dire need of improvement. They have low test scores, low student growth, poor achievement by low-income students or, for high schools, atrocious graduation rates.
They include four elementaries in the Reynolds school district, Alder, Woodland, Davis and Glenfair; Hillsboro’s Lincoln Street and W.L. Henry elementaries; and Portland’s Woodlawn and Rosa Parks elementaries.
Model Schools
Twenty-seven high-performing, high-poverty schools were deemed models for the rest of the state to learn from. Seven are metro-area schools: Beaverton’s Raleigh Hills and Greenway elementaries; Centennial’s Butler Creek Elementary; Alice Ott Middle School in the David Douglas district; SEI Academy, a Portland charter school run by Self Enhancement Inc.; and Tigard-Tualatin’s Durham and Tualatin elementaries.
But they included nine metro elementary schools,
and a large statewide online school,
Four elementaries were in the Reynolds school district, two each in Portland and Hillsboro, and
.
At
in the Reynolds district, the largest of the nine, nearly all the students are poor and two-thirds speak English as a second language. Only 30 percent passed state reading and math tests, and the typical Alder student's year-to-year academic growth was smaller than at 95 percent of Oregon elementary schools.
The district, which already considered Alder’s performance unacceptable, has made wholesale changes over the past year. Those include dismissing the principal and hiring a bilingual superstar from Colorado to replace him, shrinking school boundaries to end overcrowding, and making improved literacy instruction at Alder an “obsession” this year, said Chris Russo, Reynolds’ chief academic officer. The school is “unrecognizable” compared to its old self, he said.
“With all we’re doing, (Alder performance) has no choice but to go up,” he said. “I can say with confidence it’s going to pay off this year.”
State officials said they worked hard to design a rating system that would reward schools that help all their students make big strides, not simply give high marks to schools with high passing rates on state tests, which tend to be schools with few poor students, English language learners and students of color.
Rewarding progress, not passing rates, also gives schools an incentive to teach every student as much as possible rather than focus on getting students who are just below the benchmark to pass state tests, said
“We’re saying to schools, ‘We want you to move individual students as far as you can on a yearly basis.’ That certainly is the expectation of a parent,” Saxton said. “We want to recognize schools that have taken students from wherever they are and improved student learning farther than at other schools.”
Elementary and middle school ratings are based 75 percent on student gains on state tests and 25 percent on passing rates. High school ratings are based 50 percent on graduation rates, 30 percent on student gains and just 20 percent on how many students pass state tests.
State officials also designed the rating system to give most schools one of the top two ratings. Only about 45 percent of schools can, and did, earn any of the bottom three ratings.
That is partly due to a federal requirement that the worst 5 percent of schools get the lowest performance rating and the next 10 percent of schools with the worst performance get the second-lowest rating, said Jon Wiens, Oregon’s school accountability specialist. The Oregon Department of Education also chose not to give the middle ranking of 3 on a scale of 1 to 5 to any school whose performance was not clearly below average, said communications director Crystal Greene.
(
VIDEO: Tualatin Elementary math class takes brain break to dance to "Moves Like Jagger"
)
Many high-poverty schools earned the top mark of 5, which was reserved for the top 10 percent of schools statewide. Those include
, a Portland charter school where 88 percent of students are low income; Beaverton's
(74 percent low income);
(71 percent); and four of
eight elementary and middle schools (45 to 88 percent low income).
“Good for all those schools,” Saxton said.
The state also added a new comparison tool this year. Each school’s performance is compared to that of the 20 schools with the most similar demographics, as measured by the share of students who are low-income, Latino, African American, Native American, Pacific Islander or learned English as a second language.
The school is designated as average, above average or below average in its comparison group, a measure of where it stands on a level playing field, state officials said.
and
high schools, for example, earned the top “Level 5” rating for their 90 percent on-time graduation rate and other accomplishments. But compared with similarly homogenous schools such as West Linn, Riverdale and Sherwood high schools, the two Lake Oswego schools’ performance is “about average,” the state reported.
On the flip side,
,
and
schools all received a below-average “Level 3” rating, primarily because of very low graduation rates for their low-income, minority and special education students. But when compared to similar schools, however, all three had “above average” performance, the state said.
-- Betsy Hammond
betsyhammond@oregonian.com