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Learning - The money will help improve high schools, graduation and college preparedness By Scott Learn The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will plow $2.6 million more into Portland Public Schools to help Oregon's largest district improve its high schools and increase graduation and college readiness, district officials said Tuesday. It's the second direct grant in two years to Portland Public Schools from the Gates Foundation, backed by Microsoft's billionaire founder. Superintendent Vicki Phillips said the two-year grant would pay for consultants and a new four-staff high school improvement office to do work in three areas: Evaluate high school options for students. The district has a wide array of magnet, alternative and regular high school programs. Phillips has pushed for a core curriculum, a set of common courses that is proving controversial with teachers. The high school office will help develop that and analyze what's working, what's not and what students need, Phillips said. The district could expand successful programs and offer new ones, such as a "very strong fine- and performing-arts school," she said. "In the past we've been more opportunistic than strategic about what some of those choice are." More deeply analyze student performance. Among other steps, the district wants to identify leading indicators that tip off schools on which students might drop out. Potential indicators: freshmen who get D's or F's, falling attendance, low participation in extracurricular activities and course-taking patterns that aren't preparing students for life after high school. Help students create individual graduation plans. The district has started doing this with seventh- and eighth-graders, but district officials want to make the plans Web based and password protected. Students and their parents could gauge their performance and progress toward graduation, Phillips said, see the classes they need to take and chart which courses would be best for different career paths or college. Phillips has made improving high schools a top priority since arriving in 2004. But the district has had mixed results with its small-school initiative, partially funded by Gates, with some schools showing standardized test score improvement and others showing losses. The district's one-year dropout rates in 2004-05, the latest data available, ranged from 0.2 percent at Benson High to 15.8 percent at the Spanish English International School, a small school within Roosevelt High. A three-year, $9 million Gates grant last year to Portland Public Schools and the Portland Schools Foundation was designed to improve curriculum and professional development for middle and high school teachers. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $60 million since 1998 on Oregon projects, from libraries to schools to cultural organizations. The biggest chunk of money has gone to education, a principal foundation activity. |
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