On the evening of Aug. 14, 2019, the Portland school board made a pledge: Our schools will drastically boost Black and Latino student achievement by 2022.
Yet more than two years after school board members and Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero promised to make progress for Black and Latino students their “north star,” Portland Public Schools has largely failed to fix the systemic problems that hurt students of color, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.
Low expectations, poor teacher training, outdated curricula and a revolving door of leadership all continue to doom the vast majority of the district’s Black and brown children to a lifetime of diminished opportunities, starting when they are just 6 and 7 years old.
To get a sense of where students were in the fall of 2021, Portland used a well-regarded national test. It uncovered yawning racial gaps.
The results showed the staggering racial divide in Portland’s public school system. The test showed Black and Latino elementary and middle school students were consistently at least a full year, and in some cases three or four years, behind grade-level expectations. Scores on the test revealed that white students were the only racial or ethnic student group in Portland Public Schools whose average test scores hit or exceeded grade-level benchmarks in reading and math across grades three through eight.
Black fourth-graders, on average, were barely reading at a third-grade level, according to nationally benchmarked figures from Portland-based Northwest Evaluation Association, which makes the Measures of Academic Progress tests. The average Latino fourth-grader was also a year behind.
The findings were especially concerning, the district’s new chief of research, assessment and accountability, Renard Adams said, because those disparities would likely compound as students grew older. Black eighth-graders in Portland Public Schools, on average, read at about the level they should be in the fall of sixth grade, he said. Latino students, meanwhile, consistently tested about a year behind in reading, according to the analysis.
Results were even worse in math. Black and Latino fourth-graders were about 2 1/2 years behind, on average. Latino eighth-graders were 3 1/2 years behind. Most shockingly, Black eighth-graders were about where they should be at mid-year of fourth grade.
The data is particularly troubling considering more than 30% of all Black children in Oregon attend Portland Public Schools.
The district’s top brass promised years ago to improve Black and Latino students’ outcomes in large part by standardizing curriculum across the district. But that hasn’t happened.
Only one-fourth of educators entrusted to teach elementary children to read have undergone or begun a highly regarded training to help them do so effectively, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive found.
The district has purchased a new elementary math curriculum, but most educators haven’t yet been trained to use it.
District leaders also missed other opportunities to deliver on their promise: Despite bountiful federal funding to fuel improvements, summer and after-school programs have so far done little to address gaps for Black and Latino students. District leaders also chose not to add instructional time in core subjects and failed to effectively address the revolving door of principals and teachers leaving schools that serve communities of color.
Guerrero told The Oregonian/OregonLive “there’s no doubt” the state’s largest district must do more to bolster academic outcomes for those pupils and retain high-quality educators and administrators. He said two guiding documents he spearheaded lay the foundation for how Portland Public Schools will accomplish those goals.
Much of Guerrero’s tenure thus far has concentrated on developing those documents -- a mission statement and a strategic plan – that he says will ensure consistency regardless of administrative churn. Parents and students were invited to help craft them, which Guerrero said created buy-in among families.
“One way you have that consistency is to have the broader community share ownership over the public school system. This is why my emphasis is on encoding that in a vision and a multi-year strategic plan,” he said.
At the December school board meeting during which the 2021 results were unveiled, district officials acknowledged the bleak implications for Black and Latino students’ futures.
“What we know is that we probably need to adopt some new practices. Simply meeting your growth target in math is not going to cut it — you’re going to have to exceed it to catch up with your peers,” Adams said.
School board members asked Adams whether they should adopt a new lower goal for the student results they expect Guerrero to deliver in 2022.
He advised the board to wait until spring to decide. Gary Hollands and his fellow school board members agreed with the approach.
“We can’t just look at where they are academically. We need to see why they’re there and ask them what they’re dealing with,” Hollands said. “There are so many more variables now.”
The typical Latino elementary student in Portland Public Schools is a year or more behind in math and reading. The district has purchased a new math curriculum and put one-fourth of reading teachers through a proven literacy training program. But most teachers still use the old approaches that have proven not to work well for students of color.Beth Nakamura / The Oregonian|OregonLive
SCATHING AUDIT
For nearly three years, Guerrero and school board members have been painfully aware of how bad Black and Latino students are faring in their schools.
In 2018 and 2019, Portland Public Schools’ rock-bottom proficiency rates for Black students quickly became a focal point in school board campaigns.
The single most mentioned statistic: Only 19% of Black third-graders in the state’s largest district could read proficiently.
That was worse than in any of the three other Portland-area districts with at least 900 Black students, behind 21% in Reynolds, 25% in David Douglas and 32% in Beaverton.
The results were similarly bleak in math. Among Portland sixth-graders, only 8% of Black student and 21% of Latinos had mastered the subject.
Again, Black Portland students lagged their counterparts in Reynolds (10%), David Douglas (13%) and Beaverton (34%).
Yet district officials also had a clear road map to the systemic changes needed to fix the glaring inequities.
Early in 2019, the Oregon Secretary of State’s office released a scathing 98-page audit that detailed the myriad ways Oregon’s largest school district systemically failed its students of color.
Auditors found Portland Public Schools leaders failed to attract and retain strong principals in schools with the highest shares of students of color and children from poverty-impacted homes and further destabilized those schools by saddling them with a flurry of initiatives.
The audit also called out the district’s uneven approach to reading and math instruction.
Eleven of the 14 most comparable Oregon districts clearly outshined Portland at shepherding Latino students to earn diplomas, the audit said.
As part of their vow to do better, leaders of Portland Public Schools spent much of Guerrero’s early tenure developing a guiding document that lays out what they aspire to instill in each of the district’s graduates as well as its educators, including a major focus on racial justice.
The vision, as it’s colloquially known, is a gauzy mission statement that Guerrero said would guide the district’s decisions on everything from which textbooks to buy to whether a teacher or principal candidate is fit for the job.
District leaders and school board members also point with pride to the strategic plan that top administrators unveiled in 2021. But that plan says much more about the importance of boosting academic outcomes for Black, Latino and Native American students than how the district will do so.
Portland Public Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero is negotiating a new contract with the school board. While Guerrero has made no secret of the fact that his eventual goal is to leave PPS for a larger district, board members said they believe he’ll first dedicate himself to closing the achievement gap in Oregon’s largest school district. (2017 photo by Stephanie Yao Long / The Oregonian)Oregonian file photo by Stephanie Yao Long, 2017
‘GUARANTEED’ CONSISTENT HIGH-QUALITY CURRICULUM
As early as 2017, Guerrero and his hand-picked deputies promised to rewrite the district’s entire core curriculum to guarantee equitable learning opportunities for all students. That would mark a big change in a district that has long given significant autonomy to teachers – and tolerated what leaders acknowledged were uneven academic expectations from school to school.
Promising to deliver a “guaranteed and viable curriculum,” a concept promoted by one of the nation’s premier teacher trainers, then-Chief Academic Officer Luis Valentino said the district would employ “rigorous curriculum design by teachers and administrators using evidence-based practices” across all core subjects and all grades.
Valentino has since departed to become a superintendent elsewhere, and the rigorous curriculum rewrite hasn’t happened. Even the more modest curricular changes that Guerrero’s administration promised have yet to happen or are only partially underway.
District officials still maintain that the rollout of a new elementary math curriculum and adoption of a science-based approach to teaching literacy will be part of the solution to vastly unequal educational outcomes.
Those, however, seem to perpetually be on the horizon in Oregon’s largest district, in which teachers union leaders now say educators are too exhausted to teach fulltime during the pandemic, let alone learn to teach two core subjects in a fundamentally new way.
Union negotiator Emy Markewitz, a third-grade teacher at Northeast Portland’s Vernon Elementary, told district officials during a November bargaining session that teachers felt so overburdened as they work to reintroduce students to the classroom after a year of virtual learning that many haven’t been able to dive into the material.
Promising changes to reading instruction, by contrast, are already well underway and making a difference in some Portland classrooms and some entire schools serving a concentration of Black and Latino students.
Some 450 educators — elementary teachers, reading specialists and principals —lapped up a 100-hour professional development program on the science of reading over the course of 18 months.
They represent about 25% of educators on the front lines of literacy in the district’s elementary grades.
So far, however, most Portland Public Schools teachers continue using the old methods that don’t work for too many of its young children.
Karanja Crews, whose Black son and daughter attended Boise-Eliot/Humboldt and are now a seventh- and sixth-grader at Harriet Tubman Middle School, wonders whether the state’s Smarter Balanced tests will reflect the improved instruction for Portland students whose teachers have undergone the training.
He taught fifth grade for 10 years — five in Beaverton, five in Portland Public Schools.
Even though Crews could tell his children were reading proficiently when he helped them with their homework, he was surprised to find they didn’t meet the state’s reading benchmarks when they were in third grade.
His children attended Boise-Eliot Humboldt before the school’s educators trained up in the science of reading.
“I can see she can read text, understand text,” Crews said of his daughter. “Why didn’t that translate to the results I saw?”
As a former teacher, he has been able to help his children and can tell his kids are on track and reading proficiently.
“But what about kids who don’t have parents who are educators?” Crews said. “They’ve been done a disservice.”
HIGH TURNOVER, LESS EXPERIENCE
Meanwhile, the state’s largest district has failed to grapple with what it has acknowledged is high turnover at some of its neediest schools.
Schools predominantly attended by students of color and children from low-income households are subject to a revolving door of both principals and teachers. District leaders have repeatedly pledged to address that problem but have not stemmed the churn.
Parents have long complained about frequent leadership change in high-needs schools, saying the lack of consistent leadership has left families to pick up the slack in establishing a sense of community and culture, as principals move in and out.
Those schools also suffer from a large infusion of new-to-the-profession teachers as those with more experience frequently leave for other schools or districts. In schools with predominantly white student populations, teachers have about 15 years of experience on average, an Oregonian/OregonLive analysis of district data shows. In schools with predominantly Black student populations, by contrast, it is about 11 years. In predominantly Latino schools? Nine.
And the low average teacher experience rates in high-minority schools means an outsized share of teachers in those schools are newbies. That’s a problem because research shows teachers in their first three years in the profession are less effective at helping children learn than those with at least three years under their belts.
The Portland school board will for the first time judge Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero by whether he has lived up to his promise to achieve meaningful gains for its Blackmand Latino students. “As long as this guy delivers for our Black kids, that’s what I care about,” said board member Herman Greene.Mark Graves/The Oregonian
A QUESTION OF LEADERSHIP
In 2022, the Portland school board will for the first time officially judge whether Guerrero has lived up to his promise to achieve meaningful gains for its Black and Latino students.
It’s a decision they put off for two years as board members thought it was unfair to evaluate him in 2020 or 2021 against student performance metrics set before the pandemic.
Board members also moved Guerrero’s next evaluation to September 2022, later than the usual timing of June or July, so that they’ll have concrete results including test scores, student growth measures and graduation rates in hand.
Guerrero has made no secret of the fact that his eventual goal is to leave Portland Public Schools for a larger district, as witnessed by his recent unsuccessful bid to become the superintendent in Los Angeles. But Hollands and Scott said they believe he’ll first dedicate himself to closing the achievement gap in Oregon’s largest school district.
“I may not die in Oregon,” Guerrero told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “But as long as I’m here, that’s where the focus will be.”
He is currently negotiating a new contract with the school board. His current employment agreement sunsets in June.
The next two years are a make-or-break period for Guerrero. “As of today, I am not actively pursuing another administrative tenure,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive in mid-December.
Now the question is: Can he deliver on the one he’s got?
--Eder Campuzano
This story was made possible in part by a grant from the Education Writers Association.
This story was updated on Feb. 4. A earlier version of misattributed portions of the December presentation on Portland Public Schools’ reading and math achievement data to an expert at the nonprofit that developed the test. District research expert Renard Adams presented that information.
To comment on or suggest follow ups to this story, please contact Eder Campuzano’s editor, Betsy Hammond: betsyhammond@oregonian.com; @chalkup