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It's actually not possible for Medford or Eugene to be like Palo Alto CA or Newton MA etc. The parental involvement, education level of parents and household wealth are magnitudes different and cannot be wishfully hoped upon. Places like Palo Alto are full of Stanford degree holders. That's not a policy or strategy to improve Oregon education.
I'm not saying it is possible to turn Eugene or Medford into Palo Alto. I'm saying if you want to improve education in Oregon you need to look at what is being done in the most successful communities in the country. Because in a global world, that is who students in Eugene and Medford are competing with. We are no longer educating kids to go work in the local mills, mines, and farms where their fathers and grandfathers worked.
And if you look at the most successful and high-performing schools in the country they all share similar characteristics. High expectations within the local community, high standards and expectations within the schools themselves, and high levels of resources. If you want to start improving Oregon schools, those are the areas that you need to tackle. There isn't some magical alternative way to improving education that doesn't involve those three elements. Instead of doing the hard things, we fuss around with latest curriculum fads instead, thinking that they will make a difference. Like teaching a "growth mindset" and "student-centered learning" to name two recent fads. But those sorts of things just chip around the edges in insignificant ways and never have much effect unless you make the really hard investments to make the schools better. Oregon schools will never be improved by designing new curriculum unless the structural improvements are made as well.
Bear in mind that when you see only one graduation rate listed, it's a 4 year graduation rate. There may be kids who didn't have enough credits as of May of their senior year, but then did credit recovery or came back or another year as a "supersenior" (not uncommon for SpEd students and recent immigrants) and thus still received the high school diploma, but weren't counted as graduates in the official figures.
Graduation rates are a fairly easy statistic to massage so I always take them with a grain of salt, anyway. (Drop-outs or late graduations basically don't count against a school's graduation rate if the student is transferred to another campus or program before the end of the school year. I'm sure you can imagine some of the shenanigans an even mildly unethical bureaucrat could pull with this fact.)
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.
I think Nell Plotts' example of a high school dropout really gets more to the heart of the question and thinking behind the question. Or rather the perception that something is really wrong with an otherwise exceptional school - Lakeridge High School (#332 in National Rankings). The fact it has a 94% graduation rate does not make it a bad or lessor school. So what happened to that 6% and does it mean that they wound up as losers? What does that really signify, if anything, at all in the real world? I mean, seriously?
When we attempt to objectively judge a school as a good fit for our children, what criteria is really meaningful? Are those average SAT scores, perhaps? Or the # of National Merit Scholars? What about number of APs taken? How about how many went on to college? Or more importantly where they went to college? How many got into prestigious schools? Which 'metrics' actually translate into meaningful differences if we attempt to base parenting decisions upon them? And to what degree do these numbers really reflect what life is actually like as a student growing up in such a community? To that end, could there be a community with lower common 'stats' that actually nurtures true learning and intellectual curiosity more?
IMO, American high schools have become so obsessed with achieving these higher stats, that they've lost a lot of what it means to truly educate a child. With so much focus on getting those numbers up, teaching to the test has become all too common vs. actually delving more into conceptual learning and real world problem solving. Teaching kids to be good test takers is not really teaching at all or least a very limited form of wrote memory learning. I think the criteria is part of what is broken within our education system today. That's why, at least in part, some well known universities are no longer considering SAT results. And they are placing less emphasis on APs or GPAs above 4.0. It's also why some leading Fortune 500 companies are not asking about GPAs while in college.
I think Nell Plotts' example of a high school dropout really gets more to the heart of the question and thinking behind the question. Or rather the perception that something is really wrong with an otherwise exceptional school - Lakeridge High School (#332 in National Rankings). The fact it has a 94% graduation rate does not make it a bad or lessor school. So what happened to that 6% and does it mean that they wound up as losers? What does that really signify, if anything, at all in the real world? I mean, seriously?
When we attempt to objectively judge a school as a good fit for our children, what criteria is really meaningful? Are those average SAT scores, perhaps? Or the # of National Merit Scholars? What about number of APs taken? How about how many went on to college? Or more importantly where they went to college? How many got into prestigious schools? Which 'metrics' actually translate into meaningful differences if we attempt to base parenting decisions upon them? And to what degree do these numbers really reflect what life is actually like as a student growing up in such a community? To that end, could there be a community with lower common 'stats' that actually nurtures true learning and intellectual curiosity more?
IMO, American high schools have become so obsessed with achieving these higher stats, that they've lost a lot of what it means to truly educate a child. With so much focus on getting those numbers up, teaching to the test has become all too common vs. actually delving more into conceptual learning and real world problem solving. Teaching kids to be good test takers is not really teaching at all or least a very limited form of wrote memory learning. I think the criteria is part of what is broken within our education system today. That's why, at least in part, some well known universities are no longer considering SAT results. And they are placing less emphasis on APs or GPAs above 4.0. It's also why some leading Fortune 500 companies are not asking about GPAs while in college.
Sure. I agree with everything you said. In fact California is moving completely away from the SAT and ACT for admissions into state colleges and universities. And I expect the pandemic to be the death knell for standardized college testing.
That said, selective institutions are always going to come up with sorting mechanisms for admission. Whether it is med school or Wall Street internships or even jobs at Costco. There will never be some random lottery for admission into med school, nor will there be unlimited numbers of seats for anyone who wants admission. OHSU, UW, and other med schools are going to use whatever measurable criteria they can to sort through the thousands of applicants to decide which 5% or which 10% they are doing to admit. If it isn't going to be test scores or grades then it will be some sort of personal portfolio which will result in just as big of a rat race and the privileged will have just as much of a leg up. Perhaps even more so since they can afford to do HS summer medical internships to Botswana or Bolivia and things like that while their poorer peers are working all summer at Wal-Mart to help mom with the rent. Standardized testing might actually be the most equitable and democratic way to do it.
And I think it is a mistake for highly motivated middle class parents to look at their own experiences of leading their own children through alternative pathways like homeschooling, internships, and other alternate routes to education and think that those experiences can be replicated on large scale for students from other backgrounds who don't have that kind of support or guidance. It mostly doesn't work like that. Kids drop out and hit dead ends of poverty and despair much more often than they strike it rich in creative eclectic ways. Yes you can always find examples of HS dropouts who go onto be tech billionaires or whatever. But you find a whole lot more of them who wind up in dead end poverty level jobs, ill equipped for the future.
Yes there is benefit to flexibility in education. But a loosey-goosey "follow your own path, it's all OK" attitude in education sets up huge numbers of kids for failure.
As a HS teacher I have seen a lot of kids drop out and then wind up trying to put the pieces back together in community college and such. More often than not they get started in community college, soon find out that they didn't really like English and Algebra and Biology the first time around when they took it and failed in HS and they still don't like it now 3 years later. And the are often stuck in remedial classes that cost them money but don't give them credits. Except when they drift away and wind up back at that job at the mall they now have thousands of dollars of student loans hanging over their heads and nothing to show for it. And it is far, far worse if they get sucked into expensive for-profit institutions that prey on those sorts of kids. If you think the HS dropout rate is bad, the community college and for-profit university dropout rate is far far worse.
Yes there is too much standardized testing. And too much of it is duplicative. If Oregon, for example, tests all students for proficiency in math and English with "Smarter Balance" (common core) standardized tests, then THOSE tests ought to be all that is required for admission into Oregon colleges and universities. What is the point of forcing them to sit for separate math and science tests in the form of SAT or ACT?
But none of that really gets to the point of this discussion which is how do we improve Oregon schools. The most highly successful schools like those from the wealthy areas we are talking about don't do it through repetitive testing, drill, and teaching to the test. They have vibrant, engaging, diverse, and challenging curriculums . Kids in those schools are doing all kinds of creative and engaging things. They have world-class robotics and computer labs. They have music and recording studios. They have top quality theater and arts programs. It is the so-called "failing" schools in mostly poorer areas that turn themselves into test prep factories and eliminate all the enrichment stuff that the rich schools have in spades. You can have high standards and high expectations without turning your school into a test prep factory. In fact, you can do it without any standardized testing at all.
Sure. I agree with everything you said. In fact California is moving completely away from the SAT and ACT for admissions into state colleges and universities. And I expect the pandemic to be the death knell for standardized college testing.
That said, selective institutions are always going to come up with sorting mechanisms for admission. ...
Of course there will always be mechanisms in place to determine admissions. Highly selective schools will just be using a more holistic approach to evaluate students for admissions looking at the whole person vs. merely these standardized tests as initial 'gates' or 'pre-filters' to further consideration. As you mentioned, CA is no longer weighing that. Even schools like Stanford are using different criteria. That doesn't mean they aren't still highly selective, though. They just don't want to be gamed with these fake and/or inflated metrics of true academic ability, intelligence or potential success within their demanding programs.
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Yes there is benefit to flexibility in education. But a loosey-goosey "follow your own path, it's all OK" attitude in education sets up huge numbers of kids for failure.
I've never been a fan of 'unschooling' movement since I think kids need intentional guidance and structure vs. doing their own thing (i.e. goofing off). That said, many high school aged kids are proving that they can function more like a college student through programs such as Running Start in WA. They basically need to learn earlier on how to mange their time between classes vs. being micromanaged every day by a babysitter/teacher. And many are graduating with their AA/AS's while in high school. This follows more of a European model where teens enter college at a younger age and can therefore obtain graduate degrees earlier on as well. Or they go into an intensive, hands-on internship program working with companies while being trained in high demand fields. We're not talking about going to work at the mall here.
We have something like that, at least in part, in Clark County through the public schools. It's called Cascadia Tech Academy. I've met some of the graduates and they seem to be doing well. My dental hygienist actually graduated from the program.
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But none of that really gets to the point of this discussion which is how do we improve Oregon schools. The most highly successful schools like those from the wealthy areas we are talking about don't do it through repetitive testing, drill, and teaching to the test. They have vibrant, engaging, diverse, and challenging curriculums . Kids in those schools are doing all kinds of creative and engaging things. They have world-class robotics and computer labs. They have music and recording studios. They have top quality theater and arts programs. It is the so-called "failing" schools in mostly poorer areas that turn themselves into test prep factories and eliminate all the enrichment stuff that the rich schools have in spades. You can have high standards and high expectations without turning your school into a test prep factory. In fact, you can do it without any standardized testing at all.
Well, this is the hardest one. It's a very complex problem. While I agree students need more engaging programs where they are actually encouraged to *think* and problem solve vs. memorize or prepare for tests, how can that be institutionalized? In the top schools, to Guineas' point, they do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, its an entire culture and community that promotes those types of learning experiences. So, how does a school in a more middle of the road or lower income area provide such a structure? It cannot simply be a boxed curriculum that's air dropped in. There is more to it than that. But at the same time, I agree with you that other districts can still model their learning objectives and teaching methods after such schools. It's not like there is nothing which can learned or applied for a wider audience of teachers and students to benefit from.
IMO, school administrators and teachers need to be re-trained just as much the students using more effective models. How can that be achieved? One way would be to follow the lead of these more innovative and effective schools. While Covid has been a terrible thing overall, I do believe it is forcing educators at all levels from K through college to rethink educational models and methods. Even before Covid, remote learning was growing at greater clips. Now, it is exponential growth out of necessity. A benefit of remote classrooms is that kids can participate in Stanford or MIT courses from their own living rooms! I think we are just barely scratching the surface of a new hybrid model where local teachers can team with the best of the best educators remotely to provide a much better overall local learning experience. And this hybrid model could be a mentoring program for the local staff as well.
Derek
Last edited by MtnSurfer; 09-14-2020 at 05:41 PM..
texasdiver - I have to say, it's been interesting reading your take on both states. My husband went to elementary school through part of junior high in Texas and the rest of junior high and high school in OR and what you've written about is what he says to all the time: goals in OR is to get on welfare, not work, and do drugs (most of the people he went to HS with in OR fall into that category). In TX, he learned things in early elementary school which he was then taught in HS in OR. He said his entire HS life felt like a repeat of elementary school. TX was way more structured and on top of kids/parents, OR didn't care. I think I'll go tell hubby that nothing has changed (that's so sad). I'm grateful I don't have kids because I really like living here.
As a general response, and maybe those that live(d) in TX can respond, but how expensive is college (community or university)? I'm from CA. I took a 3-credit course at a PCC for work and I was SHOCKED at how much it cost. For that 1 class, just school fees and no books, I think it came to about $450. In CA, that same class would have been about $200. You can't expect people to go to college if they can't afford it. And if parents know they can't afford even community college for their kids, they may not push them.
texasdiver - I have to say, it's been interesting reading your take on both states. My husband went to elementary school through part of junior high in Texas and the rest of junior high and high school in OR and what you've written about is what he says to all the time: goals in OR is to get on welfare, not work, and do drugs (most of the people he went to HS with in OR fall into that category). In TX, he learned things in early elementary school which he was then taught in HS in OR. He said his entire HS life felt like a repeat of elementary school. TX was way more structured and on top of kids/parents, OR didn't care. I think I'll go tell hubby that nothing has changed (that's so sad). I'm grateful I don't have kids because I really like living here.
As a general response, and maybe those that live(d) in TX can respond, but how expensive is college (community or university)? I'm from CA. I took a 3-credit course at a PCC for work and I was SHOCKED at how much it cost. For that 1 class, just school fees and no books, I think it came to about $450. In CA, that same class would have been about $200. You can't expect people to go to college if they can't afford it. And if parents know they can't afford even community college for their kids, they may not push them.
There are really two Oregons. There are the upscale suburban areas around Portland and in a few pockets elsewhere like Corvallis, South Eugene, maybe Bend and West Salem where there is the same upper-middle class drive to achieve like anyplace else. And then there is a whole giant swath of the rest of the state where there is just not a lot of drive, especially with respect to education. I saw it growing up in North Eugene. Most of my classmates who were really successful left the state and never looked back.
A perfect story that sums up the state of much of rural Oregon is this New York Times series by Nick Kristof "Who Killed the Knapp Family from earlier this year:
Kristof goes back to his home town of Yamhill OR and looks up all the kids on the school bus he used to ride to school and discovers that over 25% of them are dead or in prison. The whole article is about rural despair and vanishing opportunities. What makes the article especially jarring is the knowledge that Yamhill is not deepest darkest Appalachia. It isn't even a remote town like Roseburg. Yamhill is within easy commuting distance of the Beaverton-Hillsboro corridor which for the past several decades has been the largest single job engine in the Pacific Northwest outside of the Seattle area. The place has been dripping with jobs for the past several decades. In tech, health care, and for that matter, construction. Here in Camas I have neighbors who commute to tech jobs out in Beaverton and Hillsboro. That is a LOT longer and more difficult commute than it would be from Yamhill.
Apparently the folks in Kristof's story would rather sit around and do nothing but cook meth if they can't get the timber jobs that their fathers and grandfathers used to have. God forbid they have to drive 1/2 hour to find a good paying job. That is the mentality in large swaths of Oregon. Dissing of education is just a part of it.
I love Oregon. I grew up in Oregon and my family goes back 5 generations. I have extended family scattered all over the state. But I fear for the future because it is falling behind in so many ways. Take away the Portland metro and most of the rest of the state looks about like Arkansas. It used to not be that way.
There are really two Oregons. There are the upscale suburban areas around Portland and in a few pockets elsewhere like Corvallis, South Eugene, maybe Bend and West Salem where there is the same upper-middle class drive to achieve like anyplace else. And then there is a whole giant swath of the rest of the state where there is just not a lot of drive, especially with respect to education. I saw it growing up in North Eugene. Most of my classmates who were really successful left the state and never looked back.
A perfect story that sums up the state of much of rural Oregon is this New York Times series by Nick Kristof "Who Killed the Knapp Family from earlier this year:
Kristof goes back to his home town of Yamhill OR and looks up all the kids on the school bus he used to ride to school and discovers that over 25% of them are dead or in prison. The whole article is about rural despair and vanishing opportunities. What makes the article especially jarring is the knowledge that Yamhill is not deepest darkest Appalachia. It isn't even a remote town like Roseburg. Yamhill is within easy commuting distance of the Beaverton-Hillsboro corridor which for the past several decades has been the largest single job engine in the Pacific Northwest outside of the Seattle area. The place has been dripping with jobs for the past several decades. In tech, health care, and for that matter, construction. Here in Camas I have neighbors who commute to tech jobs out in Beaverton and Hillsboro. That is a LOT longer and more difficult commute than it would be from Yamhill.
Apparently the folks in Kristof's story would rather sit around and do nothing but cook meth if they can't get the timber jobs that their fathers and grandfathers used to have. God forbid they have to drive 1/2 hour to find a good paying job. That is the mentality in large swaths of Oregon. Dissing of education is just a part of it.
I love Oregon. I grew up in Oregon and my family goes back 5 generations. I have extended family scattered all over the state. But I fear for the future because it is falling behind in so many ways. Take away the Portland metro and most of the rest of the state looks about like Arkansas. It used to not be that way.
EXACTLY THIS! Oregon is the West Virginia of the west in more ways than one. I notice the same thing too. Just a very anti-education attitude, don't want to be there.
Thanks for posting the story. I subscribe to the NYT but somehow missed this, probably because it came out in the covid era.
texasdiver - I have to say, it's been interesting reading your take on both states. My husband went to elementary school through part of junior high in Texas and the rest of junior high and high school in OR and what you've written about is what he says to all the time: goals in OR is to get on welfare, not work, and do drugs (most of the people he went to HS with in OR fall into that category). In TX, he learned things in early elementary school which he was then taught in HS in OR. He said his entire HS life felt like a repeat of elementary school. TX was way more structured and on top of kids/parents, OR didn't care. I think I'll go tell hubby that nothing has changed (that's so sad). I'm grateful I don't have kids because I really like living here.
As a general response, and maybe those that live(d) in TX can respond, but how expensive is college (community or university)? I'm from CA. I took a 3-credit course at a PCC for work and I was SHOCKED at how much it cost. For that 1 class, just school fees and no books, I think it came to about $450. In CA, that same class would have been about $200. You can't expect people to go to college if they can't afford it. And if parents know they can't afford even community college for their kids, they may not push them.
You'll find the community colleges in Texas are similar to that ~$400-500 per class cost. California has more state-level subsidies for its students.
I'm not saying it is possible to turn Eugene or Medford into Palo Alto. I'm saying if you want to improve education in Oregon you need to look at what is being done in the most successful communities in the country. Because in a global world, that is who students in Eugene and Medford are competing with. We are no longer educating kids to go work in the local mills, mines, and farms where their fathers and grandfathers worked.
And if you look at the most successful and high-performing schools in the country they all share similar characteristics. High expectations within the local community, high standards and expectations within the schools themselves, and high levels of resources. If you want to start improving Oregon schools, those are the areas that you need to tackle. There isn't some magical alternative way to improving education that doesn't involve those three elements. Instead of doing the hard things, we fuss around with latest curriculum fads instead, thinking that they will make a difference. Like teaching a "growth mindset" and "student-centered learning" to name two recent fads. But those sorts of things just chip around the edges in insignificant ways and never have much effect unless you make the really hard investments to make the schools better. Oregon schools will never be improved by designing new curriculum unless the structural improvements are made as well.
Those aren't even new things. They're "fads" in the sense that they're new terminology with new ways of measuring what students should be doing anyway as a matter of course. "Growth mindset" = persistence, morale, not giving up, celebrating small successes which leads to big ones. "Student-centered learning" = engagement with the class, individualized attention from the teacher, encouraging active learning after initial instruction.
Good teachers fostered those things axiomatically. Now they have to spend a lot of time documenting it.
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TX was way more structured and on top of kids/parents, OR didn't care. I think I'll go tell hubby that nothing has changed (that's so sad). I'm grateful I don't have kids because I really like living here.
