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Q&A

Leading a Revolution: Karen Phillips and the Oregon Small Schools Initiative

Portland, Oregon—At first glance, blonde and petite Karen Phillips may not look like the prototypical revolutionary. But as the director of the Oregon Small Schools Initiative (OSSI), she's in a position to fundamentally change the state's 200 high schools.

Phillips works for E3: Employers for Education Excellence, the organization charged with the enviable though difficult task of creating a cadre of new and restructured high schools that are small, rigorous, and personal. Backed by $25 million from the Portland-based Meyer Memorial Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle—the largest private investment ever in Oregon's K-12 school system—the multiyear initiative will provide funding and technical support to two dozen existing or new high schools. More important, it could act as a catalyst to transform policies and practices statewide.

The first eight "Partnership Schools"—including Marshall High School (see article, Anatomy of Change)—were selected last spring. A second cadre of sites will be chosen during the 2004-2005 school year. To qualify, applicants must be new innovative public high schools or existing ones with an enrollment greater than 700 students. They must meet criteria tied to demographics and readiness to change. Perhaps most significant, the schools also must have a strong commitment to raise graduation rates and eliminate the achievement gap by breaking into autonomous institutions of fewer than 400 students; designing curriculum around active inquiry, performance assessment, and indepth learning; and incorporating attributes of high-performing schools.

Before coming to E3, Phillips—a home-grown product of a small high school in Central Point, Oregon, and a former math teacher—helped orchestrate improvements in the much-lauded North Clackamas School District. She spoke to Northwest Education's Rhonda Barton about her current challenge.

Q: In traveling around the country and visiting successful high schools, do you see a pattern emerge?

We find a consistency in terms of outcomes for students and teachers, not in how they chose to put the school together. We're learning that there's no one right answer for what these high-achieving schools should look like: They might be a career-based technical school or an arts magnet or a school organized around a high-interest area like the music recording industry. But, they have common components:

• A clear mission of the school's shared vision; a collaborative decisionmaking process
• Time for teachers to work together during the school day
• Students held to high standards and required to demonstrate levels of skill through performances, portfolios, exhibitions
• Students active in their own learning

They also have commonly held beliefs regarding questions such as: Is high school just the end-all or is it the transition to the next step; and should every child be college-ready?

Oregon is one of just four states (along with Washington, Maine, and North Carolina) where the Gates Foundation is investing in a statewide high school initiative. What role does state policy play in helping or hindering reform on such a large scale?

It can really stop this work in its tracks. The good news is that in Oregon, our state policies and graduation requirements are incredibly supportive of innovative high schools. For instance, the policy that just passed a year and a half ago (that grants credit for learning outside the classroom) truly gives schools permission to do things in a completely different way... away from a seat-based (system) where the only learning that counts for graduation is if you're within the four walls of a classroom with a teacher.

I recently heard Constancia Warren of the Carnegie Corporation say that there's no way you can solve the problem with high schools "one school at a time: This is as much about district reform as it is about school reform." Would you agree?

It's definitely a systems change we're talking about. Sometimes you can get innovative schools started, but if they are to be sustained, then you need state policy, district policy, and financial support from both of those.

How critical is community buy-in in sustaining these schools?

It's absolutely critical. But I would say buy-in isn't even the right word anymore if you're talking about a case where you build it and then convince me it's the right thing. We want to push it to where our community—parents, business partners, students—are actually sitting at the table when we build it, so they're authors of the changes. It's the difference between how you treat your home when you own it versus when you rent it or when you've built it from scratch.

Your grants, based on school size and what schools need to change, run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How tough is it for a school to make radical changes without that kind of financial support?

It's not impossible—we've seen examples—but it will be a challenge without the extra resources to find the time (for teacher planning) and training. One way schools are addressing it is to build in two hours a week every week to use for training.

We're seeing both revolutionary and evolutionary change these days: cases where high schools radically reinvent themselves or make smaller adjustments, a little at a time. What are the inherent advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches?

The disadvantage with the revolutionary approach is that you're going so fast you aren't able to change the culture and give people time to gain the skills they need to be ready for this new approach. A great example is 10 years ago, many schools went to block scheduling but teachers didn't have time to learn how to teach in a period that was twice as long as what they were used to. So they took their old skills, which might be lecture-driven and might not fit the new model very well, and gave twice as many lectures. With evolutionary change, a school can build a solid foundation toward larger change, but they can also be lulled into a false sense of security (and think) "we really don't need to be doing more." The small schools supported by our initiative will run the gamut from revolutionary to evolutionary. It's our job—with our coaching, research, and professional development networks—to help them maximize the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of either approach.

If someone were contemplating reinventing a high school, what are the key areas to focus on?

The staff at E3 has found—through research review and school visits—that a lot of the work of high school reform takes place in four general areas:

• Addressing the structure and culture of the school, because those create the environment in which change and good teaching come about
• Addressing teaching and learning to be sure teachers have the skills they need and students are asked to do their work in more authentic, performance-based ways
• Focusing on community engagement in both designing and sustaining the school
• Developing leadership

The research for many years has told us—and still tells us—that the principal is the key piece to this work. But, we're finding it's not enough. Effective leadership really has to be distributed. The principal can't do it on his own—there's not enough time in the day to run the ship and do this as well. But also, teacher leaders, student leaders, parent leaders, and business leaders all need to have part of the responsibility as well as the power.

On Karen Phillips' Bookshelf

Here are some of the "bibles" that Phillips and the E3 staff recommend:

High Schools on a Human Scale (Thomas Toch)—"The most concise view of what we mean by innovation," says Phillips.

A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools (William Ayers, Michael Klonsky, Gabrielle Lyon) and Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (Lisa Delpit)—"These address the issues of equity and equal outcomes, not just equal access."

Breaking Ranks II: Strategies for Leading High School Reform (National Association of Secondary School Principals and The Education Alliance at Brown University)—"This offers wonderful guidelines; everyone should have it."