To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser

Back to Graphic Version

anatomy of change

A Portland high school, once full of promise, tries to reverse a long downward spiral.

Story by Ian McClusky. Photos by Patricia Cordell

Portland, Oregon—"Will John Marshall High School become known as one of the great high schools of Portland? Of the West? Of the Nation?" pondered Principal Gaynor Petrequin in the school's first newspaper, volume one, issue one. It was September 1960. That summer, the last old residential house had been moved and land cleared on a gentle hill, looking west across wooded neighborhoods some eight miles toward Portland's downtown skyline. Cement had been poured, bricks laid. Two stories tall on the uphill entrance, three stories on the downhill side. A giant brick square, with an open courtyard, and long hallways of freshly waxed floors, lined by rows of lockers stretching as far as the eye could see. Librarians had stamped and numbered books, art teachers inventoried new supplies, and eager students worked on the layout of the very first newspaper, where Petrequin issued his front-page "Call to Greatness!"

Now, 44 years later, on the last day of school in 2004, the final bell rings at Marshall. The dismantling begins. Principal John Wilhelmi wheels his desk out of the same office where Petrequin once worked. And as he dollies his desk down the halls, past the rows of endless lockers, he wonders the exact same thing as his predecessor: Will John Marshall High School become known as one of the great high schools of Portland, of the West, of the Nation?

Marshall—driven by dropping enrollments, poor test scores, and almost certain strictures under the No Child Left Behind Act—is reopening its doors in September 2004, not as one large public high school that Principal Petrequin would have recognized, but as four smaller academies. Each school will occupy two wings of the old brick building and has about 15 teachers and 240 students to start, with a cap of 300.

The four schools each emphasize their own area of focus: the Linus Pauling Academy explores health, science, and leadership; the Renaissance Arts Academy concentrates on visual and performing arts; PAIS, the international small school, turns to languages and global studies; and BizTech, modeled after the successful New Tech High School in Napa, California, trains students for the digital marketplace.

The transformation is backed by a $690,000 four-year grant from the Oregon Small Schools Initiative or OSSI (see article, Page 30), which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Meyer Memorial Trust. OSSI partners with struggling comprehensive high schools across Oregon to create "high achieving and equitable small schools." It's a project of the Employers for Education Excellence or "E3" for short. And at Marshall High during the 2003-2004 school year, "E3" became synonymous with survival.

With a lifeline from E3, Wilhelmi and his team of teachers and administrators are trying to reverse a long downward spiral in just one year. This is the story of how they got there.

Diminishing Returns

If you went to any American high school, you could have gone to Marshall High. They had a drama club and band, a glee club and football. In 1969, they sent one of their girls to be crowned queen of Portland's annual Rose Festival. That year, they lost another four boys in Vietnam. American flags, now faded, hung over each door. There was the football field in the back and a yellow school bus out front. Each day at three o'clock the bell clamored like a firehouse. Stepping into the double glass doors was like opening an old yearbook.

Marshall was as average as they come. And that was the problem. "Back then you had a much more homogeneous student body and teaching staff," Wilhelmi explains. In 1969, he graduated from a similar public high school on the west side of Portland. "The 'one-size-fits-all' approach to education worked better then, but now we have a dramatic shift in ethnic diversity, an increased range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and far more challenges with learning disabilities and English language learners."

Marshall's student body had diversified to include Asians, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, and a large group of Eastern European immigrants. Almost six of every 10 students qualified for federally subsidized lunches. Slowly, the data began to reveal an increasing gap between Marshall's efforts to educate and the students' academic success. Despite earnest efforts, at least 20 percent of Marshall's students still fell below state benchmark standards in math and reading. At least 20 percent dropped out.

The student body had shifted, while Marshall had not.

"All schools have dropouts," explains Wilhelmi. "It's common for the freshman class to be the largest, and then slightly smaller and smaller until the graduating seniors—but at Marshall, our largest class was the seniors." Marshall, he explains, had picked up a bad reputation it just couldn't shake. Of the total number of potential freshmen from the two nearby feeder middle schools, Marshall lost at least half to other public schools.

"The siphoning off of our best students has been excruciating," says Tim Taylor, a math teacher. "It used to be that there were always one or two trouble kids in each class—now it's just the norm."

"When you're beat down over time, it's real tough to ever get up," adds Nannette West, the school change coordinator. She recalls one morning last spring, her students noticed through the window that Taylor and his class were launching tennis balls into the air, measuring the distance the balls traveled and the time spent in the air to calculate for velocity. One of her students muttered in disbelief, "We don't have students that smart here."

The large brick building had been built to hold 2,300 students. By the end of Marshall's 44-year run as a comprehensive school, it claimed only 949 students. "We were becoming a small school alright," says West. "Not by choice, but by default."

Despite Best Efforts

As early as 2001, Marshall hoped to curb the exodus of students. Their first attempt came in the form of "Freshman Academies," where incoming students were allowed a two-block schedule, teaming up teachers with smaller groups of students. In 2003, they expanded it to include sophomores, and built into the schedule some common time for teachers to plan.

"It began breaking the walls down between teachers of different disciplines," recalls Keri Troehler, an English teacher. "We started having math teachers talking to English teachers." But it wasn't enough. "We were doing all we could, but the only thing we could do to make students' test scores go up would be to take the test for them."

It was Troehler's second year as a teacher. She had graduated with her master of education degree from Portland State University and high hopes. She'd been warned about the "burnout" that new teachers face. But she had no idea it would be as bad.

Another budget cut, another teacher shifted, and Troehler found herself the lone warden of one of the long anonymous hallways of Marshall. She recalls a dour mood in staff meetings. The ramifications of No Child Left Behind overshadowed all talk.

When President Bush signed the 2001 law, Principal Wilhelmi saw the writing on the wall. They had to change. Not just a little, but a complete overhaul.

"We were walking down the NCLB gangplank," says Gail Whitted, Marshall's network administrator. "We had two more years to comply with regulations and we saw them coming right at us."

With the new policy in place, students could get a free bus pass, a free transfer—essentially, a free ticket to leave Marshall. "It was a 'top siphon,'" says Taylor. "Those with promise left."

Principal Wilhelmi, desperate to save his school, even wrote to President Bush, stating his case: "For every 30 students we lose, we lose a teacher. You lose teachers, and you cut programs. You cut programs, and you attract fewer students. It's a vicious cycle downward."

With no reply from Washington, D.C., he turned to his teachers and staff. "We can make this change for ourselves, or have it made for us. But either way—Marshall must change."

However, Wilhelmi had come to Marshall as an interim principal, and wasn't really in a position to make radical changes. The staff waited for direction. Wilhelmi began to research successful national models. He saw the anxiety in his teachers. Troehler remembers Wilhelmi taking her aside and saying, "Just hang in there. One more year...."

School let out for the summer. By the end of the 2002-2003 year, more than one-third of the incoming ninth-grade class switched to other schools.

Keri Troehler went home and began searching for smaller schools. She prepared her résumé. She drafted a letter of resignation.

Sending Out The Softies

While in grad school in 1996 and 1997, Troehler had read about small schools in textbooks. "But it was on a talking level," she describes. "It's one thing to say, 'Yeah, this is a good idea'—another to actually see it in action."

On October 27, 2003, Wilhelmi, now appointed principal of Marshall, set things in motion. Based on reading such books as High Schools on a Human Scale by Thomas Toch, he drafted an initial proposal to convert Marshall into smaller schools. In City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, he had read: "Big buildings need not be our enemy. They can contain small schools." Wilhelmi took those words to heart.

Three days later, he received an e-mail from the director of the Oregon Small Schools Initiative about the E3 grant, requesting Marshall's participation.

In early November, he assembled his Stage One Fact-Finding Team, which he abbreviated to SOFFT, and affectionately referred to as his "Softies." Within the first weeks, his Softies began disseminating basic information about the small school concept. They mailed a letter to parents in various languages and then showed presentations to sophomore and junior social studies classes and to their Freshman Academy. They presented at middle schools to eighth-graders. Then, in mid-November, using a Smaller Learning Communities federal grant to cover travel and planning, some of the Softies set off to Boston to see small schools in action.

The four-person team visited the Boston Arts Academy, Fenway High School, Mission High School, and the Frances Parker Charter School. When the team came back, everyone gathered. The plane had been delayed and they arrived at 3 a.m. By 9 a.m. they rallied everyone to share the news. "After seeing those schools, I couldn't go back to a big school," said Troehler. "I just couldn't do it."

Less than one month after Wilhelmi drafted his small school proposal, the Marshall team began brainstorming possible themes for separate smaller schools at Marshall. They polled the students for suggestions and compiled the results by early December.

Wilhelmi knew he had to gain wide support from his staff. So he sent out another dispatch of his Softies, this time to New York. They visited Union Hill High School, Morris High School, Brooklyn International School, Bronx International School, Wings Academy, and the Julia Richman Education Complex.

As one team returned, he sent another out, this time to California, to visit the New Tech High School, High Tech High School, and the Preuss School. Within the next week, he and another team flew down to Oakland for more site visits. By mid-December, 17 fact-finders from Marshall had visited 16 schools.

After the holidays, they dove back into planning, attending several meetings each week. At the end of January, Principal Wilhelmi, Gail Whitted, and Kara Mortimer went to Lewis & Clark College for E3 training to prepare for the grant application. They had just two weeks to write the grant, and they faced more than two dozen competitors.

On February 6th, they gathered in one room and for the entire day pored over the complex school change "rubric forms," where they had to detail and self-assess their readiness to convert from a comprehensive high school into small schools. For the next two weeks they revised and finalized the application. In their own hearts, they knew that Marshall sorely needed the grant; by reputation, the community knew Marshall needed the help. But Whitted and the others who helped write the grant also knew that 28 schools were competing and they had been told only four would be chosen. (In the end, E3 decided to double that to eight grants).

They submitted their application, but didn't wait for the results to continue planning. They were united now and focused. Through the beginning of March, each of the four proposed small schools—PAIS, BizTech, Renaissance Arts, and the Linus Pauling Academy—took all-day retreats.

In mid-March, they got the call from E3. Marshall High would be getting a site visit. They had been selected as a finalist.

There was no turning back. They had a mission and a deadline. They rallied with a singular purpose of preparing for the visit. If they had been running hard since October, now they saw the finish line. They began to sprint. Meetings were held nearly every day for planning budgets, human resources, and IT changes. The BizTech team faxed an application to the New Technology Foundation, applying for funding to replicate the New Tech school model. The local newspaper started calling. Wilhelmi and a team presented at the state capital before the senate education subcommittee. Then, April 16th, E3 came to visit.

Seven short, fast-paced months had passed since Wilhelmi drafted his first small-school proposal. Seven months to totally overhaul a system in place for 44 years. They hadn't gotten a lot of sleep, but they did get the grant.

Naysayers

When the news broke that Marshall would be broken down into four small schools, students wondered if they'd get to see their friends at lunch, if they could still sign up for the elective they wanted senior year, or if the football team would dissolve.

The students were asked to rank their choice of academies. Wilhelmi divided the student body in fourths by age, gender, and socioeconomic background. All students received their first or second choice. Some grumbled. Some went to his office. Some parents called. But overall it was understood: Change had been a long time coming, and it had arrived.

"This is a cultural change," says Whitted. "Students and parents have to get used to the idea that from now on, school is a different place."

While each of the academies centers on a theme, Wilhelmi emphasizes that the importance is "teams, not themes." Eighty percent of students' courses will fulfill core requirements; the remaining 20 percent will be integrated with the subject of interest. While some worry that having to pick one school over another may limit their options, Wilhelmi counters that even in the old system students could only take a limited number of electives. "If you sign up for ceramics, you can't take metal shop," he says. "That's life. You have to make choices. We're trying to give students something good to choose between." He adds, "If they change their mind, they can transfer after a year, like any public school."

Eddie James, a junior enrolled in the Linus Pauling Academy shrugs. "I mean my friends are my friends, whether they're down the hall, or in another district. When I'm at school, I'm here to learn. It's no big deal, really."

New Model, New Hope

"It's not a question of scale," says Troehler. "If we made four small Marshall High Schools, it would probably fail. We're making a totally different learning environment." Cross-disciplinary courses will be redesigned around a project-based curriculum, and internships and expeditionary learning encouraged. Smaller clusters of students will spend more time with fewer teachers, with the potential to help develop longer-term relationships of tutoring and mentoring. "You know, they tried this concept a long time ago," says Wilhelmi. "They called it Oxford University." Indeed, under the new structure Marshall officially becomes a college preparatory school, aligning required credits for graduation to the Oregon university system.

"It puts you on the kids' side," says Taylor. "You don't impart knowledge, you facilitate it."

As much as this is a change for the students, it's also empowering for educators. "It used to be that we were handed our marching orders from on high," says Taylor. "Now we're the on high." In the last year, Marshall teachers who confess to once skipping or snoozing in staff meetings have found themselves spending hours preparing, drafting, revising, and collaborating.

"I finally feel like educators are being allowed to make decisions on education," says Troehler. Nannette West adds, "I've been a teacher for 14 years and never talked to the school board. Now I've done it twice."

Wilhelmi describes the first new year as being totally consumed with implementing the change; the next year will be revision, adjusting to what worked or didn't; and by the third year, he hopes maybe they'll be able to look back and see what happened.

"We will be in flux this year," says science teacher Kara Mortimer, "but it will play out—one way or another."

Answering The Call

This is the challenge, then, the call to greatness... wrote Marshall's first leader. In 1960, Principal Petrequin wondered if John Marshall High School would become known as a great American high school, but he probably never imagined its last day in June 2004.

As summer break begins, the brick building stands silent on the hill. The floor tiles are waxed, the rows of lockers still stretch as far as the eye can see, now open and empty. A yellow school bus is parked in front of the double glass doors. Outside, a dumpster overflows with poster boards of science reports on autotrophs, wads of yarn, torn art collages, and a stray gym shoe.

Down the hall, a graduating senior writes the final article for the student newspaper, 44 years and 43 volumes since the first. Two students help Troehler take down posters. On her door, she has taped a small piece of paper with a quote by Mark Twain, advice she offers to her students as they set off into the world. It is advice that she and the teachers and administrators of Marshall High School, now known as the Marshall Campus, have taken to heart: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour."

John Wilhelmi moves the last box of files from the principal's office.