What we need from our high schools
Like every Oregonian, I want our students to graduate from high school, earn that diploma, and go on to do great things. But, even more so, I want our students to actually learn things.
Housekeeping
This being the first post of the year, I wanted to thank you all for being a part of this community. Take the time to share your favorite post of 2020 so that we can continue to add Oregonians to this family.
Impending posts: Sue Hildick, Bruce Abernethy, Loran Joseph, Nathan Howard, and Ron Paradis
Tomorrow: Chapter 1 of Rediscovering the Oregon Way
Now to the post!
Kevin Frazier edits The Oregon Way and “attends” the UC Berkeley School of Law. He runs No One Left Offline, a nonprofit focused on closing the Digital Divide.
In dry, bureaucratic language, the Oregon Secretary of State office reported that “[r]egular attendance, ninth grade on-track, dropout, and high school graduation rates are not yet hitting state benchmarks [in Oregon].” The statement came in an audit of career and technical education (CTE) programs in our high schools.
These programs received a financial boost from Measure 98, which allocated funds toward CTE courses such as “medical office procedures, digital arts, culinary arts, accounting, . . . and fisheries technology.” The hope of voters and legislators alike was that these programs would increase Oregon’s graduation rate while also providing students with the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly competitive and skills-based economy.
But, in what seems to be a pattern, Oregon is putting the cart before the horse. In a desire to increase one metric—graduation rates—the State is forgetting to focus on what really matters—basics such as whether or not students are even attending school.
Like every Oregonian, I want our students to graduate from high school, earn that diploma, and go on to do great things. But, even more so, I want our students to actually learn things, which is contingent upon them being in class.
That’s why as important as CTE courses are, our focus on “fisheries technology” and other programs should be secondary to getting kids to show up in the first place.
The audit said that “regular attendance…[was] not yet hitting state benchmarks.” A closer read adds some damning details to this curt assessment: “For the 2018-19 school year, 79% of ninth graders, but only 60.7% of 12th graders, were regular attenders. The state’s long-term goal is for 93% of students across all grade levels to attend regularly.” Importantly, being a “regular attender” doesn’t even mean showing up every day, just 90% of days.
This definition combined with the statistics above suggest that Oregon needs to spend more resources on simply making sure kids are spending time in class. The repetitive absence of 40% of our seniors and 21% of our freshman is even more troubling given that Oregon has one of the shortest school years in the nation.
Furthermore, as supportive as I am of CTE courses, Oregon needs to make sure it can actually measure the impact of these classes before further investing in them. Right now, that’s not happening. It’s great that the State has noted an uptick in graduation rates since Measure 98 was implemented, but there’s no sort of rigorous analysis that definitively points to CTE courses having a causal relationship with that uptick.
According to the audit, the group reasonable for measuring the effectiveness of Measure 98-related efforts “is missing opportunities to perform larger program analyses, such as calculating educator equity gaps or reviewing data on High School Success initiatives that affect alternative schools and programs, which experience some of the lowest graduation rates in the state.”
In other words, we’re failing to monitor the true effects of these important and large investments. Any consultant would flag this as a massive mistake. There’s a reason for the common refrain: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Right now, Oregon’s approach to evaluating our high schools is more akin to tactics employed by a sketchy fitness trainer than a rigorous policy analyst. The fitness trainer has one goal in mind: report that their clients are losing weight. They buy flashy equipment—TRX ropes, underwater treadmills, and state-of-the-art kettle bells—and run you through the fanciest routines. But they often fail to teach you the proper technique and to even make sure you attended your workout sessions. In their minds, they succeeded if your weight is lower at the end of your workout plan. The ends, not the means, are what matter.
Oregon needs to get back to basics before it further invests in new programs: make sure kids attend class and actually record their progress and the extent to which that progress is attributable to new investments like CTE.
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Kevin, I think your piece misses some important points.
First, as one of the architects of Measure 98, I'm proud of the accountability elements we put in that initiative -- regular audits and evaluations, exactly what you are asking for here. We bucked the trend toward pouring more and more money into the K12 funding stream without such accountability measures, and we argued that, once funded, Measure 98's programs should compete with other proposals for high school funding on the basis of results. In my mind, that's as good as it gets in today's policy world when it comes to accountability.
Secondly, the 9th grade on track metric was added to M98 based on data showing that, once kids fall behind in 9th grade, it is much harder for them to get back on track to graduation. 9th grade on track programs are based on monitoring every kid and intervening -- via mentoring and extra class time and home visits to get them to show up for class -- when needed. The fact that this metric is showing improvement is a sign that Measure 98 is working to get more kids to on-time graduation.
Thirdly, CTE courses -- everything from auto mechanics to culinary arts -- can engage kids in learning who would otherwise be turned off to a standardized curriculum. Once kids get to high school, they need more options to keep them engaged. We're used to praising sports programs for that reason. But it works for shop classes too. One of the most telling examples that we cited in the M98 campaign was the experience of one kid at Silverton High School who was coaxed back into an auto mechanics class after dropping out of school and went on to graduate and major in aeronautics in college.
Finally, as we found in campaigning for M98, there is a bias among the better-educated that hands-on vocational learning programs are inferior to the more academic curricula. I used to think so as well. But, where I've seen kids engaged in CTE programs, I've witnessed a sequence of questioning and learning that can take a kid from working on an engine to mastering physics and, with growing confidence in their contributions to society, experiencing what it means to be an engaged citizen. One of my favorite authors, Matthew Crawford, went in the other direction -- from philosophy to motorcycle mechanics, but he makes the same points about the discipline and creativity of craft in his Shopcraft as Soulcraft. It is worth reading.
I'm worried that the gains from updated and expanded CTE programs will be disproportionately affected by the virtual learning regimes in effect now. That's on my list for investigation and a potential post in the future.
As the parent of two young adults who tried and failed with the Traditional HS structure, I'd argue that it makes more sense to examine WHY kids aren't attending school and then alter the current infrastructure to allow for differences in learning styles, the changing nature of work itself (I'd argue that the expectation that you go from HS to college and then to work is outdated, for starters.) and even the way we structure and deliver education.
For example - after years and years of studies that suggest a later school start time for adolescents, we still expect our HS students to be in school by 7:30-8 am in most locations. While that might have worked back in the agrarian age and continues now to accommodate HS sports, it provides a serious handicap right out of the gate for many students.
Both of my kids moved to an alternative program to get their HS diplomas - PCC's Gateway to College program. They provided the rigor and accountability Kid #1 thrived in, while Kid #2 - who has severe ADHD - floundered in a typical HS structure requiring 8 classes per day, while they succeeded when they could take *only* 3 subjects per term, and at hours that better fit their body's circadian rhythm.
So that's my long-winded way of saying - maybe if you blow up and reconstitute the entire structure of HS education as we know it now, you'd have better attendance.