Oregon's education challenge

Oregon has never lacked ambition for its students. The harder question, in the years around the turn of the century, was whether its high schools were organised in a way that could deliver on that ambition for every young person rather than for some.

Where the state stood

Statewide figures from the period told a sobering story. Roughly one in three students who entered high school as a freshman did not walk away with a diploma four years later. Among those who did graduate, about two thirds had the English skills expected for entry level college coursework, and fewer than half were ready for college algebra. The averages concealed a sharper truth: the students most likely to be left behind were consistently those from low income households, students of colour, and students still building English proficiency.

That pattern mattered well beyond the school gates. Employers were asking for higher levels of reading, writing, mathematics and problem solving than they had a generation earlier, and the fastest growing sectors of the economy rewarded people who could keep learning.

Signs of momentum

The picture was not one of decline. Oregon was actively raising expectations. The state had tightened its diploma requirements, asking more of students in mathematics, science and English, and the class of 2012 would need to demonstrate a set of essential skills before they could graduate. Oregon was also among the first states to get assessment results back to teachers quickly, so that instruction could respond to what students actually needed. In 2008 federal grants for expanding public charter schools went to just five states, and Oregon was one of them.

A shared statewide goal

Oregon leaders gathered these threads into a single attainment target, commonly expressed as forty, forty, twenty. Under that goal, four in ten Oregonians would earn a bachelor's degree or higher, another four in ten would earn an associate degree or a technical credential, and the remaining two in ten would finish high school with the skills needed for work and for civic life.

Reaching that target required more than new standards. It required high schools in which every student was known well enough to be supported, and in which the adults had the time and the structures to work together on instruction.

Why small schools entered the conversation

Decades of national research had pointed in the same direction: when a school is small enough that students are known as individuals, and when teachers share responsibility for a defined group of learners, academic performance tends to rise and achievement gaps tend to narrow. The mechanism is not size alone. It is the personalisation that size makes possible, combined with the professional collaboration it allows.

Oregon did not simply import a model. Beginning in 2003 and concluding when the class of 2010 received diplomas, the Initiative drew on the strongest practice from small schools nationally and then adapted it to the particular opportunities and constraints of Oregon communities. The result was a home grown programme, described in the pages that follow.