Graduation rates at Portland-area high schools barely budge, echoing statewide lack of improvement

Across Portland and its suburbs, high school graduation rates for the class of 2014 barely budged from 2013 levels.

There were isolated instances of schools making dramatic improvements, including at Putnam High in North Clackamas, Southridge High in Beaverton and Madison High in Portland.

Overall, however, high school diploma-granting stagnated, both in large Portland-area districts and statewide, according to figures released Thursday by the state.

Across Oregon, 72 percent of students in the class of 2014 earned a diploma in four years. In Portland Public Schools, 70 percent did. In Beaverton, 80 percent did, marking an improvement of just 1 percentage point from the class of 2013.

That was a point of frustration for Oregon schools chief Rob Saxton and others, given that Oregon's on-time graduation rate is one of the lowest in the nation and state leaders aim to raise it above 90 percent by 2025.

"The question has to be, are we improving our graduation rate?" Saxton said. "It does seem stuck."

In Portland, where only 61 percent of low-income students graduated on time,  one of the worst rates in the state, Superintendent Carole Smith called the results "not good enough."

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The metro area did boast some superstars. Seven high schools, including Century and Liberty in Hillsboro, Franklin and Grant in Portland and Clackamas and Putnam in North Clackamas, graduated at least 85 percent of their low-income students in four years.

Madison High, a high-poverty school that fought back after years of poor performance, raised its rate 11 points in a single year to 75 percent.

And Century, Tualatin and Liberty high schools graduated at least 83 percent of their Latino students on time.

But rates in Beaverton, Tigard-Tualatin, Gresham-Barlow, Reynolds, David Douglas and Lake Oswego were remarkably flat. And graduation rates declined in Forest Grove and in West Linn-Wilsonville, particularly at Wilsonville High.

The on-time graduation rate at Roosevelt High, the school that serves the most economically disadvantaged student population in the Portland area, plunged to 53 percent, a disappointment after years of work, backed with millions of federal grants, to turn things around.

Roosevelt's longtime principal Charlene Williams, now a senior director of schools in that section of the district, said part of the decline was due to a surge in students transferring to Roosevelt after the start of their sophomore year already too far behind to finish in four years. But she said it also reflects that the school needs to figure out what went wrong and do better.

"That is not representative of our best outcomes for students," she said. "We owe it to our kids to keep working."

Leaders of schools that saw notable successes cited common approaches that work, starting with paying a lot of attention to freshman and front-loading the school's smallest classes and best teachers to get them off to the right start.

They also track attendance and have a coordinated effort to promptly respond when a student shows signs of skipping school.

In a February 2014 series, Empty Desks, The Oregonian revealed that Oregon has one of the worst absenteeism rates in the nation, starting in kindergarten – and that directly leads to students dropping out of school.

Oregon schools chief Rob Saxton, who ascended to that job just before the class of 2014 started its junior year, wants every high school to prioritize helping every ninth-grader attend school more than 90 percent of the time and end the year with six credits. Failing to hit those benchmarks makes a student several times more likely to drop out, studies have shown.

To spur that change, Saxton is lobbying for unprecedented changes to Oregon's two-decades-old school funding formula.

He wants high schools to give ninth-graders who need it a summer school ramp-up to high school plus extra attention during the school year. He proposes permanently changing the state formula to give schools an extra $400 for every low-income, minority, special education and limited-English-speaking freshman who gets that help and as a result finishes ninth grade on track.

"I am basically saying, 'This is a very high leverage strategy and let's encourage everybody to do it.' "

He also is pushing to change the formula to give more money to schools that offer in-depth career-technical courses.

So far, he has found little legislative support for either proposed change to the formula, he said. Too many schools worry they will lose money when others gain, he said.

"Let's face it: every formula change is a steep one," Saxton said.

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com

503-294-7623; @chalkup

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