New state data released this week found that Oregon students as a whole showed virtually no growth from the previous year’s dispiritingly low scores on standardized reading, math and writing tests.
But there are glimmers of hope and signs of progress to be found at individual schools and districts around the state, proving that academic gains are possible, even for student groups that have been the hardest hit in the years since the pandemic shuttered school buildings.
Schools in Portland, North Clackamas, Grants Pass and the tiny Elkton Charter School in Douglas County were among those whose students demonstrated promising growth. Yet, even most of those districts still have enormous room for improvement, particularly among Black and Latino students, special education students and those whose families qualify for food stamps.
It’s only in the very wealthiest district in Oregon that anywhere close to 90% of students are where they need to be in order to graduate high school fully ready for college or a career. In Riverdale, a tiny district sandwiched between Portland and Lake Oswego, 85% of students tested as proficient in English. Even there, only 69% of students tested as proficient in math. Those numbers, while not 100%, are far above the dismal statewide figures showing that 40% of students hit proficiency targets in English and 30% did so in math.
At Sitton Elementary in North Portland, both 3rd and 5th grade students made huge jumps in math and English in the 2022-2023 school year. In third grade, 40% of students hit proficiency levels in reading last spring, up from about 26% the previous year. Fifth grade math showed a similarly impressive gain, from just about 17% in 2022 to 30% this year.
The school, which sits on the edge of Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood, has both Spanish language immersion classrooms and English-speaking ones. Only 28% of its students are white, according to state data.
The school has benefited from having support specialists to help classroom teachers, said Principal Becky Berry. Instead of pulling students out of the classroom for remedial help, she said, Sitton has experimented with a “push-in” model where a math specialist might come and sit with students who need extra help during a lesson, to be there in case they get stuck and to encourage them to collaborate on finding an answer.
Among the other supports the school offers is a beloved therapy dog and golden retriever named Landon who has quickly become a celebrity around campus. Berry said Landon brings kids joy and can help them calm down so they are ready to learn. “It’s just hard to feel sad when you see that cute face,” said one second grader.
Berry, like other principals around the state, said that having clear data on student performance helps her team drill down on precisely who is struggling with fractions, or phonemic blends, or spelling words. Teams of teachers, including classroom teachers, special educators and English language teachers, at Sitton meet weekly to look at that data and adjust their planning, Berry said.
“We’re always asking, ‘Where are the successes?’” Berry said. “And then, ‘Where are those gaps? And in a very timely manner, what are we going to do about those gaps? What are we going to do tomorrow? What are we going to do next week? How do we keep pace and stay on it?’ And that really is the work of our educators.”
Throughout the state, student behavior and emotional dysregulation have been big obstacles to academic learning, particularly since the return to full-time, in-person school in fall 2021. That was the case in Grants Pass too, said Susan Zottola, the district’s director of elementary education. But Grants Pass was still one of only a few larger districts in the state to see overall growth in both English and math, including big gains in both subjects at third grade and more incremental ones in some of its later grades.
Teachers in Grants Pass say that bulked up mental and emotional learning supports, paid for in part by federal pandemic relief funds, have made a huge difference, Zottola said. Having specially trained providers at school to help a kid calm down not only helps that student, but their classmates, she said.
In addition, to build relationships and trust with families, Grants Pass has experimented with half-days during the entire first week of school for kindergarteners through fifth graders, with afternoons reserved for one-on-one meetings with families and teachers to talk through hopes and fears for the school year.
Parents have raised concerns about the child care challenges that presents, Zottola said, but they and teachers say they are grateful for the chance to connect on a personal level and that it helps the teaching staff better understand what kids will need to succeed.
The district has also offered after school math tutoring to between 40 and 50 middle school students, said Trisha Evans, the director of secondary education, and is trying to expand the program this year, though the budget won’t stretch to cover every student who needs the help. The middle schoolers who are struggling the most with literacy and writing also now take English twice during the school day, Evans said, a strategy that has shown promise in other states.
In the North Clackamas School District, Riverside Elementary in Oak Grove had a banner year, with about one-third of third graders hitting proficiency targets in math, a huge jump up from just 15% the previous year – though about 15% of the grade did not get tested. Teachers at the school, where about one-third of students are Latino, have been doing intensive training to better understand how the brain learns foundational math skills and working together to translate that learning to their classrooms, said Principal Teresa Jaramillo.
It’s key to understand that there’s not just one way to solve a math problem, said Dianna Ngai, the district’s associate director of teaching, learning and professional development. Some students will be quick to grasp that 6 x 3 = 18 but others need to see a visual representation. Others need to be able to draw or use blocks to get to the answer with their hands, while some might do best to puzzle through solutions with their classmates before arriving back at 18, Ngai said.
Teachers at Riverside also use data — quizzes, in-class assignments and verbal check-ins with students — to figure out what concepts students have grasped and what teachers might need to “re-teach” in a different way before moving onto other units, Jaramillo said.
Oregon’s smaller, rural districts often have higher across-the-board poverty levels than their metro area counterparts. But tiny Elkton in Douglas County, where 135 students attend a single K-12 charter school and the poverty rate is 19%, had an astounding 91% of its third graders hitting math proficiency and 83% of the same grade doing so in English, both up about 28% from the previous year.
Superintendent Andy Boe, Elkton’s sole administrator, said his experienced early elementary teachers deserve the credit and that the school, like others in Douglas County, has benefited from a partnership with the Ford Family Foundation, which has helped them analyze data about their student body, above and beyond just test scores.
Their data sets also include attendance, socioeconomic levels and the results of surveys given to teachers and students about how safe and supported they feel at school. Armed with that information, Boe said, teachers can better pinpoint what every student needs.
The Elkton school is also home to one of the state’s free preschool programs for families whose income puts them at 200% or below on the federal poverty scale. For a family of four that’s $60,000.
“That gets kids in school and used to being around us and being part of who we are,” Boe said. “It used to be that we would see kids start in kindergarten and it would take us a year, a year and a half to get them sorted out and on track. Preschool moves them forward socially and emotionally so they are ready to learn in kindergarten. That’s a huge piece.”
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com