NORTHWEST
EDUCATION
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Beaverton, Oregon—A hall sign in both English and Japanese points the way. It is 6:30 p.m. and Jerry Colonna walks into the fluorescent-bright maroon and teal library at Beaverton’s Southridge
Waiting for the Beaverton School District superintendent are a dozen Japanese women. Attentive, quiet, hands folded, the women remain parked in their seats around library tables pushed together meeting-style. Their children are English language learners (ELL) in Beaverton’s elementary, middle, and high schools. Altogether, there are 200 Japanese students in Beaverton’s public schools. Forty of them are in
Jerry Colonna is not a man who will or wants to take over a room. No big toothy grin. No showy glad-handing. Rather, Colonna’s neat, trim appearance and serious but warm demeanor translates faultlessly to
Every two months, the 60-year-old Beaverton school superintendent meets separately with a different group of parents of the district’s approximately 5,000 English language learners. These students account for roughly one-seventh of the 35,447 students in the Beaverton School District. Colonna wants both parents and students to feel welcome, and never “lost in translation.” Not an easy task when you realize there are 74 different languages and dialects spoken by
Beaverton’s diversity extends to its American-born students as well. Minorities account for one-third of all students. Beaverton is also the fastest growing school district in Oregon, and in a decade’s time, it could overtake Portland as Oregon’s biggest
Colonna—with two full years under his belt as Beaverton’s education leader—is determined to meet with as many district parents as possible. He greets each parent tonight with the same respectful nod they
“Thanks for being such tremendous parents. Your children do as well or better than other children in our schools because of the model you set in your expectations for their education,” he tells them, waiting patiently for his words to be translated by a
The Beaverton School District employs 16 translators of Japanese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Russian, Somalian, and Arabic. It’s the diversity that attracted Jerry Colonna to the Beaverton job. Perhaps that’s why he sometimes spends his lunch hour visiting the district’s schools and
gazing at the
“It is something to be nourished. It is not a problem to be fixed,” Colonna explains in
Challenged by the racial and ethnic makeup of Beaverton’s student population, he’s determined to see that every single student not only meets literacy targets but continues to make progress, whether native born or not. Here in Beaverton, he has taken on the mantle of leadership in Oregon’s literacy push. Beaverton is one of the few districts in Oregon with a K-12 literacy plan. Colonna’s number one goal: Each and every student should show progress over the next
The superintendent is putting the weight of his office and his district’s spending power (including Title I funds) behind the literacy initiative. And he’s also gotten help and support from voters who passed a local option providing an extra $22 million to fund staff training and to make changes wherever needed to support literacy. Every single department in the district is required to support literacy goals. Not just those departments directly involved with educating students, but those in supporting roles as well. For example, the district’s transportation department now provides additional bus service to students who need to stay late for extra coursework. And the food services department labels pork with icons of pigs in the school cafeterias. This practice began after one of Colonna’s meetings with Somalian ELL parents. They told Colonna their Muslim children weren’t eating lunch because they couldn’t tell which food choices
Colonna cites statistics that show the vast majority (83 percent) of inmates in the Oregon State Penitentiary are dropouts and poor readers. He mentions other studies, too, demonstrating that children who are poor readers may become frustrated readers and then stop
Illiteracy, Colonna says, leads to low self-esteem, behavioral problems, and a host of other social problems and societal costs that can last a lifetime. Colonna labels this the literacy-failure cycle: “The good students do better and the weak students
Colonna also promotes literacy development in pre-kindergarten education. Kindergarten, he believes, needs to be more academic. Three elementary schools in the district started offering pre-kindergarten this year. It’s a pilot program, but Colonna expects these pre-K programs to pay huge dividends down the road. He will know in four years when these kindergartners are third-graders and take the
Colonna also wants to expand full-day kindergarten. Eleven of the district’s 31 elementary schools now offer expanded instructional time in kindergarten—providing four or more hours of instruction a day. They are the Title I schools, but Colonna thinks full-day is necessary for every
“It’s kindergarten where you get ‘the most bang for your buck,’” says Colonna. “It is our feeling that the best use of resources for literacy can take place in kindergarten and the greatest gains can be made in first grade.” Colonna calls first grade a “make-or-break year” for literacy. “One of the greatest contributors to student success is a child’s ability to read at grade level by the end of
The district now has half-time literacy coaches at every elementary school. The coaches teach classroom teachers to assess, diagnose, and teach literacy to this young group of readers. This past school year, coaches concentrated on the five basic reading skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This coming school year, they’ll emphasize writing along with reading. Coaches meet monthly to share resources and talk strategy and interventions for students
Key to making an early reader is frequent monitoring. Beaverton’s Literacy Task Force of Principals chose a three-prong approach to assessing K-5 students. In K-2, all Beaverton elementary schools have begun using DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy) in at least one class in each grade. Next year, the district will begin also using High Frequency Vocabulary and Developmental Reading Assessments for all K-2 grades. By next year, all three components will be
For Colonna, early reading has become a moral imperative. He argues that remedial reading programs don’t work, and he wants the district to move away
“The most difficult problem in public education today is how to deal with the struggling older reader,” says Colonna. Literacy is the pathway to all other subjects, he says. There’s a high correlation between reading well and success in other subjects, such as the sciences, math, and social studies. Unfortunately, in Beaverton’s secondary schools—as in other secondary schools across Oregon—the achievement gap only
Colonna believes children who can’t read at grade level in the higher grades (whether they’re ELL or native-born struggling readers) need less rather than more curriculum. His approach is to double, even triple, “the dose of literacy … flooding in the resources” to help students focus on learning to read. So, instead of a middle or high school student with poor reading skills taking just one literacy course, he or she should take another, and maybe even a third,
Eventually, under Colonna’s plan, every teacher in the Beaverton School District will be a reading teacher. Every teacher. Secondary math and science teachers who think of themselves only as content teachers will be required to teach literacy in their classrooms in terms of their specialty. Colonna knows there is some resistance to this among teachers, but the superintendent believes that’s because they lack the professional development to teach reading. The district’s secondary literacy specialist Janet Fortier is working with teachers, and she’s established cross-curricular literacy teams in every Beaverton middle and
Saunter down Five Oaks Middle School’s yellow brick hallway just before school begins at 9:05 in the morning and you might feel you’re in a mini-United Nations. African American, Asian, Hispanic, and Caucasian students lean against lockers, donned in Che Guevara
T-shirts and camouflage pants, sporting green hair and ubiquitous headphones. You will not find a more diverse secondary school in all of Beaverton than Five Oaks
But other, challenging statistics are also in the mix:
Five Oaks has the lowest test scores of all nine middle schools in the Beaverton School District. The latest state assessment data show that almost one-third of Five Oaks students are not meeting reading benchmarks. The numbers look even grimmer when you break the data down into student subgroups: 91 percent of ELL students, 61 percent of special ed students, and 48 percent of low-income students did not reach
Despite or because of those test scores, Five Oaks teachers are challenged and motivated. Staff turnover here is low, and staff job satisfaction is high—93 percent according to a survey. Literacy specialists from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory and Beaverton’s secondary literacy specialist Fortier have been working with Five Oaks to help the school develop literacy strategies. They agree there’s a need here for more staff development. Not only so that teachers can teach literacy along with content, but also so that they can accurately assess students’ progress. The plan is for every Five Oaks teacher to become a
Already, as part of the district’s new literacy plan, changes have been made at Five Oaks. Periods are one hour long, not the normal 48 minutes. Fewer curriculum choices means fewer transitions; students here may get one elective period a day, while in other middle schools students get two electives a day. Some
students will take as many as four
The sign on Chris Ann Daugherty’s classroom door says No Mas Chicle [no more chewing gum]. Inside the English Lit One class are eight students—and a medley of accents from six different countries: Korea, Japan, China, Laos, Mexico, and Guatemala. Most of these students have been in the United States for only
“Omar, you read page seven!”
Omar reads smoothly even if he has trouble with some pronunciation. Afterward, Daugherty asks the sixth-grader if he understands what he’s just read about the Trojan War. The textbook is written at a grades 2-4 level, but the Ancient Greek subject matter is mainstream sixth-grade curriculum. So while students struggle with words like “furious” and “captured” they also must tackle “Menelaus.” While these ELL students learn English, they are also learning required
At times, Daugherty cranes her neck to hear a shy and soft-spoken Japanese girl intone the tricky, foreign sounds of English. With more exuberant students, the veteran teacher waves her arms as she explains
Daugherty speaks very distinctly: “What do you think the Greeks
One student accurately predicts, “The Greeks will fight
“OK, so the Greeks are ‘enemies’—that means ‘I don’t like you,’”
When students are slow to answer, Daugherty perches on the edge of her stool, pursing her lips, practically willing the ELL student to blurt out what he or she is thinking. During this give-and-take, a teacher’s assistant walks among the rows of students checking to make sure each student is following along in the text, even if a student has to track every word with a
In another class called Academic Content English, the lowest-level ELL class taught at Five Oaks, first-year teacher Sandy Boe stands in front of 15 students from eight different countries including the Congo, Sudan, Argentina, and Somalia. The Somalians come to Beaverton by way of refugee camps. Many of these teenagers have never
Carlos is a new student from Mexico. He’s only been in the United States three weeks. Today, he’s stumped by a textbook about the Ancient Mayans. Unfamiliar with English, he asks his Spanish-speaking classmates questions in Spanish to see if he understood what he
In English Lit Three, students are Hmong, Pakistanian, Iranian, Ethiopian, and Mexican, as well as several American-born struggling readers. Many of these students are nearly ready to advance out of their special literacy program into
Five Oaks has begun a three-year-focus plan to improve reading instruction in the classroom and to increase the percentage of students meeting reading standards at Five Oaks. The goal is to see a 13 percent hike in those numbers so that roughly three-quarters of Five Oaks students will meet or beat standards by 2008-2009. For some student subgroups, this will mean doubling performances by the end of
Meantime, back in Chris Ann Daugherty’s ELL classroom they’re making headway: “‘Captured.’ That means they took the Greek King’s wife, Helen of Troy,” Daugherty steps forward as she says this, full-body action illustrating
One boy speaks up, “Because she’s so beautiful,” illustrating that he understands not just the words, but the inference 
As the federal government increasingly holds states accountable, Oregon is doing the same with its 198 school districts. Accountability kicks in full force this coming school year when every one of Oregon’s 551,656 public school students is expected to read at grade level or above.
Long a local-control state—with the Oregon Department of Education rarely intervening in the work of local school districts—the Oregon legislature is called upon, more and more, to fund improvements in education. In part, this is a response to No Child Left Behind, but educational reforms in terms of requirements and school funding began in Oregon in the 1990s. There were “common curriculum goals” for school districts, but no real statewide standards until 1995.
It was actually one year before No Child Left Behind—2000—that Oregon began reviewing its standards in terms of accountability, defining and delineating “rigorous” standards for each grade level. Oregon’s new English language arts standards represent the first time that the state has addressed K-2 literacy in terms of foundational expectations to prepare students to meet standards in grades 3-10, says Julie Anderson, the state’s English/language arts curriculum specialist.
This past school year, the state implemented a continuous improvement plan (CIP), an effort to coordinate district planning with state and federal requirements. Districts must identify improvement goals based on current practices and performance. CIP requires an action plan and a corresponding budget outline.
“It’s about targeting your resources and delivering so all kids will be successful”—these are State Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo’s marching orders.
Meantime, Oregon’s latest literacy test scores from 2004 show a disturbing trend. While 82 percent of all third-graders met standards, by fifth, eighth, and 10th grades, there’s a marked decline. In fact, by 10th grade, only 51 percent of Oregon public school students reached standards. This downward trend is even more dismal for minorities. For example, while 63 percent of Hispanic third-graders met reading standards, by 10th grade, only 22 percent of Hispanic students read and comprehended at grade level.
There are a couple of caveats here: First, state educators believe the performance standards—cut scores—may be set too low in the primary grades and need to be adjusted to reflect the growth needed in the lower grades to be on track to meet the high school standards. And second, Castillo doubts that current reporting systems are giving educators an accurate picture of how to target the achievement gap in their classrooms. She expects to have better data by 2007.
With its emphasis on disaggregating student subgroups, NCLB changed the way Oregon views “accountability.” Until recently, there was little testing data to suggest just how these subgroups fared. Now, the state has the numbers, separate scores for special education students, talented and gifted students, English language learners, the poor, the homeless, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, multiracial. Even male and female scores are now distinct. No longer will Oregon blanket literacy scores with one overall statistic. In the past, that often hid the bleak scores of some of Oregon’s minorities. According to Castillo, the major focus now is to close the achievement gap and meet the needs of all school children.
Oregon’s new literacy initiative focuses on K-12 education in two ways: From kindergarten through third grade, the spotlight is on learning to read; from fourth to 12th grade, the focus is reading to learn increasingly complex subject matter. Oregon’s mission to improve literacy includes accelerated reading programs for delayed readers: programs such as Lexiles, Great Leaps, and Reading First. Key to the state’s literacy initiative is teaching classroom teachers to assess literacy. The state’s goal is to train every teacher in literacy including content teachers.
Besides state assessments and writing samples, Oregon is also relying on frequent, efficient tests to help teachers understand their students’ abilities. Schools are using programs such as DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), a one-minute measurement of early literacy; and SIPPS (Systematic Instruction in Phoneme Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words), a program that also helps with word comprehension and fluency.
Reports of adequate yearly progress (AYP) should help Oregon improve its current accountability system. Schools and teachers will have to revamp their educational practices if students aren’t improving. NCLB does not measure school success beyond students reaching “minimum” thresholds, but Oregon, through an Oregon Report Card, will. Here, educators recognize that literacy is the gateway through which every child must pass.
Original URL: http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/10-04/walk/
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