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Hi, I am looking into moving to the Portland area from Texas and wondering why your high school graduation rates are so low- I mean, some of these schools are much better academically than schools in Texas but the graduation rates are low. Lakeridge High in Lake Oswego for example looks like a great school but has only a 94% graduation rate which is very low for a school that is highly ranked. What is going on here?
People have varying opinions about this. You could point to many factors, but the one I am familiar with is there is a strong drug "underculture" present in Oregon. Drugs aren't really looked down on by a significant portion of the population, including high schoolers. This manifests itself in many ways. It's one reason I left.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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I wouldn't consider 94% to be low. Here in our city there are 3 high schools, and their graduation rates are 94%, 96%, and 99% (Catholic). Their school ratings are 9, 9, and 10 out of 10. Medina High School, where Bill Gates lives on Lake Washington it's still only 97%. In Lafayette CA where I grew up and the median home price is now $1.47 million the graduation rate is 96%.
Teacher here. I previously taught for a decade in Texas and now across the river in WA. But I'm pretty in tune with OR, and while WA has somewhat better stats, they aren't that much better. I think there are a number of factors involved. I'll list them in no particular order:
1. Mandatory attendance age. TX has very strict mandatory attendance laws. Used to be that parents could be taken to court and fined if their kids weren't in school up until age 18. I think this law was relaxed recently as it was unevenly applied in discriminatory ways (black parents were much more likely to run afoul of attendance courts than white parents for the same offense). But the culture in TX is still much more geared towards requiring all kids be in school until age 18. Once you reach age 18 you are likely to be nearly through your senior year anyway, so might as well just stick it out. Why drop out 2 months before graduation? By contrast OR allowed HS dropouts at age 16 for generations. I think it was raised to age 18 in 2017 but the culture is still much more permissive of drop-outs.
2. Mandatory attendance requirements. TX has has a maximum number of absences allowed per semester. As I recall it is 13 or maybe 17 days that you are allowed to be absent and still get credit for the semester. Anything more than that and you have to have excused reasons such as illness. So schools are more diligent about tracking down kids who might not be dropped out but are only attending sporadically. I'm not sure what the law is in OR but I think it is much more permissive. In WA I see kids miss many days of school, show up towards the end of the semester with some makeup work, and basically skate by. If you allow kids to miss too much school then they are more likely to form that habit, and eventually just drop out. A lot of this is actually problematic parents. I have had parents with various issues who basically just keep their kids home because they want or need someone around the house. Oregon also has I think one of the shortest school years of any state. And I think the school days is also shorter. The number of hours that kids are in school in OR per year is probably hundreds less than TX.
3. School ratings. In TX the state ranks and rates schools based both on test scores and graduation rates. So school districts have a very powerful incentive to keep their graduation rates as high as possible. In TX there is often less to distinguish "good" and "bad" districts other than lines on a map because TX is mostly flat. So school ratings are very important for things like real estate values, where you are going to locate businesses and so forth. School boards in suburban areas are under intense pressure to keep their ratings up in the "exemplary" category and keeping the graduation rate up is necessary to accomplish this. In OR, districts are more consolidated and physical geography is more important in determining real estate values. For example, Salem basically has one giant school district that covers the entire metro area. By contrast, where I taught in Waco TX (similar size city) there were at least 10 different districts covering the city and suburbs and people made specific real estate decisions of which suburb to buy into (or build in) based on the school ratings.
4. Culture. Unlike what DKM says, I don't think it is really the drugs. They are everywhere. But there is much more of a casual attitude about school in the Pacific Northwest. Both among the kids, and among the parents. And honestly, especially among rural white families that for generations have not really needed school in order to farm, log, work in mills, or fish. For example, last year I had two girls in my class, both with single mothers who worked at the same strip mall. One mother who worked at a hair salon basically just wanted to get her daughter through school without getting pregnant or on drugs because she had a chair waiting for her in the salon. That was the white girl. The other single mom who worked in the nail salon wanted to see her daughter go to Stanford and become a surgeon and was putting her extra money towards SAT prep. She was, of course, Asian-American. Equally bright kids from equal economic settings and attending the same school. But utterly different expectations. Texas also has plenty of that. But I think the culture is more achievement-oriented.
5. Funding. Oregon schools have been bleeding money for generations due to the super-majority required to pass bonds and a variety of other reasons. In Texas there is no initiative and referendum process by which voters can implement property tax restrictions like in OR. And schools only need a 50% passing rate in order to be approved. So it is MUCH easier for local districts to pass bonds. Pretty much every school bond failure in OR or WA in the past 20 years would have been approved in TX due to the lower threshold. Property taxes in TX are much higher as a result. But many of the schools are also better. In the past decade that has started to change as the Texas legislature has cut state funding. But that is a relatively recent development. In OR it goes back generations.
My opinion? The State of Oregon (governor and legislature) needs to develop a serious sense of urgency about the poor quality of public education in the state. That has been utterly lacking. It isn't just about money. They need to seriously hold districts accountable for their graduation rates and attendance rates. And empower them to actually make sure kids are in school. And also take a hard look at curriculum and what is being taught, and what standards are being expected of students and teachers. But you can't just raise standards without supporting them with new curriculum and resources. That takes a lot of money.
I agree with Texasdriver but would like to add another factor... the schools are geared toward college attendance and not all kids want to attend college or can afford to attend college. There are few classes for those interested in the crafts. For those who don't know: to become an electrician takes real math skills and the ability to read construction drawings. I don't see high schools, except for Benson High School in Portland, offering programs for those students. For what it is worth, Benson is very selective and most of their students go on to college because, in my opinion, the school teaches what they are interested in.
Story of a high school dropout: I have a nephew who attended a high school renowned for its academics but this kid was no academic. On the advice of his counselor, he enrolled in Portland Community College's auto maintenance program after his sophomore year. He got his high school equivalency diploma and was hired by Costco. He worked there for many years, becoming a supervisor. He enrolled in an accredited online college and earned a Batchelor's Degree. He now works in human resources for the State of California.
I think many high school counselors steer kids who aren't a good fit to community colleges and that is good. I hate to call them dropouts because many aren't. The problem with our high school education system is that it is built by academics for academics.
People have varying opinions about this. You could point to many factors, but the one I am familiar with is there is a strong drug "underculture" present in Oregon. Drugs aren't really looked down on by a significant portion of the population, including high schoolers. This manifests itself in many ways. It's one reason I left.
Lake Oswego is off the chain with all the party drug use by the prep school set. 94% graduation rate ... appalling.
I think many high school counselors steer kids who aren't a good fit to community colleges and that is good. I hate to call them dropouts because many aren't. The problem with our high school education system is that it is built by academics for academics.
I could not agree more. I taught for a decade at a large suburban public school in TX that would be roughly equivalent to Tigard or Clackamas here in OR. Every year during graduation the principal would announce: "Everyone who has been accepted into college please stand up" and most of the students would stand to applause. Then he would say: "Everyone who has been accepted into the military please stand up: "and most of the rest of the students would stand to more applause. And people would look around at who the losers were who weren't standing and it would be no one. The pressure to follow one of those two paths is intense. The school newspaper did the same thing. Every spring their last issue would be to list every single senior and where they were going after graduation. Most put a college or the military. It was very much the "loser" move to put "undecided" or "work".
Community college can also be a trap. Waco had three large colleges. There was Baylor University which is an expensive private university. There was McLennan Community College which was a large typical community college. And there was Texas State Technical College (TSTC) which was a tech school with lots of programs like pipeline welding, electrical lineman training, aircraft mechanics, and that sort of thing. They had a huge number of programs that were pipelines into good guaranteed jobs in fields with shortages of workers: https://tstc.edu/programslist/browse
Every year a large number of students would essentially be pushed into community college, or just drifted their out of inertia, rather than exploring more technical training options that would have been offered at TSTC. The universal idea was to go to community college to "get your basics" and then transfer to one of the nearby 4-year schools to finish up.
What I saw happen with large numbers of these students is that they would get out student loans, go to the local community college to study college "basics" like math, science, english lit, history, etc. Quickly discover that they didn't like math, science, and English when they took them the first time in HS and still don't like them the second time in community college, and then just sort of drift away and wind up working at the mall or some place like that, except that they wasted a year or two and now have college loans for a degree they never received. Nationwide the graduation rate for community colleges is abysmal because so many students fall into this path without really thinking it out, instead of discovering better paths into non-college careers that they might find more rewarding.
The state of Oregon is right smack dab in the middle of the pack for funding per student. Half the states spend more, half spend less. Amount of money is not the problem with education in Oregon. What is spent is badly allocated, so giving the school system even more money will not fix that problem. They would simply have more money to spend badly and it would not be used to increase the graduation rate.
The state of Oregon is right smack dab in the middle of the pack for funding per student. Half the states spend more, half spend less. Amount of money is not the problem with education in Oregon. What is spent is badly allocated, so giving the school system even more money will not fix that problem. They would simply have more money to spend badly and it would not be used to increase the graduation rate.
Call it whatever you want. Blame it on PERS or bureaucracy or salaries. But individual schools are not getting the resources they need. You can travel the state and find rural schools all over the place that completely lack resources from science labs to textbooks to computers to programs student's might find more relevant to today's economy. In addition to the shortest school years, Oregon also has among the highest class sizes in the country.
Frankly the reason why Oregon is somewhere in the middle of the pack in school spending is because so many other states, especially in the south, basically pay poverty wages to their teachers. It is most certainly NOT in the middle of the pack when it comes to actual dollars spent on students in terms of resources. Especially if Oregon is compared to states that Oregonians would view as "peer" states such as MN, IA, and MA rather than states like MS, and AL.
This data is a little old, but it is the best I can find. It shows graduation rates for every school district in the country. The contrast to TX is pretty stark. Which part of the country does OR want to be compared with? And honestly, WA doesn't look much better.
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