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Story and photos by Denise Jarrett

A large suburban school personalizes its approach to teaching and learning, boosting student achievement and thrusting the school into national prominence as a New American High School.

MILWAUKIE, Oregon—A shy boy like Jesse measures his approach to life. Friends, for example, are made with care, but once earned, are cherished in the fiercely offhanded manner of boys everywhere. So, when it comes time to cross over from childhood into the adult-making years of high school, a boy like Jesse will want to go where his friends go. And this is how Jesse happened to enroll at Rex Putnam High School.

To look at, Putnam is unremarkable. It's much like any big, suburban high school. Its territory, a dozen miles from Portland, ranges from forested neighborhoods and small farms going comfortably to seed, to the thoroughfare at the bottom of the hill overgrown with franchises and a local strip joint. What's different about Putnam lies inside, at the heart of the school.

Jesse's parents didn't know this when they opted to send their son to Putnam to be with his friends, rather than to the high school prescribed for their neighborhood. But their choice proved provident.

"We dodged a bullet," says Shannon Evans, 40. Not because the other school was a bad school, but because Putnam happened to be embarking on a restructuring that would transform and personalize the way it teaches its 1,300 students. And Jesse Evans was a kid who needed that kind of attention. He got distracted easily, and learning was often a struggle. Naturally reticent, he shrank from competing for the attention of his teachers or from buddying up with classmates he didn't know well. As he approached ninth grade, Jesse seemed poised to sink out of sight in the swell of big-school crowds and competition.

But before classes started that fall in 1997, Shannon got a letter from Deno Edwards, Putnam's principal, inviting parents to consider placing their youngsters in something called the GATE House (meaning, Gaining Access to Excellence). This "house" would consist of three teachers-one each from social studies, language arts, and science—who would stay with a group of 90 freshmen and sophomore students for two years.

Because they would share the same students, this trio of teachers could collaborate. They could create extended projects integrating all three subjects so that learning in one class would reinforce learning in the other classes. Coordinated schedules would enable teachers to share class preparation time when they could plan curriculum or discuss how a particular student was coming along. In this arrangement, teachers and students would get to know each other very well. The GATE House was Putnam's first structural innovation in what was to become a realignment of the large school into kindred smaller learning communities.

Making Connections
Research shows that smaller learning environments usually lead to positive student outcomes, state the authors of Key High School Reform Strategies: An Overview of Research Findings, published in 1999 by the U.S. Department of Education. School size, they write, has an indirect but important effect on student learning, facilitating teacher collegiality, personalized teacher-student relationships, and less differentiation of instruction by ability—characteristics that promote increased student learning.

"Small schools are more likely to create and sustain conditions that are conducive to improving student outcomes" such as better test scores, college-level course- taking, attendance, and self-esteem, the authors conclude. However, smaller learning environments alone, they stress, are not sufficient. "Most successes of whole-school reform efforts are not the consequence of one practice or another, but instead the gathering of many practices under one roof and the interactions among them."

From the time it embraced standards-based reform 10 years ago, Putnam has been carefully constructing multiple and complementary approaches to improving its teaching and learning. The twin pillars of its edifice became "houses" for freshmen and sophomores, and career pathways for juniors and seniors. Three years after opening the GATE House as a blended model for ninth- and 10th-graders, Putnam established seven more houses, enough to accommodate all of its first- and second-year students. Today, each house varies in its structure and approach, depending on the house teachers' preferences. Some are looped, meaning the house teachers stay with one group of students for two years, through their freshman and sophomore years. Some are shared houses, in which a group of freshmen have the same teachers their first year, then advance to three different teachers for their sophomore year.

After reading the letter from Principal Edwards that fall, Shannon Evans wrote back: Put my son in GATE.

"If the school hadn't had this house, I don't think my son would have made it," she says today. "He might have dropped out."

Instead, Jesse is now a senior eager to graduate with his best friends, all pals he first met in GATE.

While the GATE House started as a blended model for ninth- and 10th-graders, it has evolved to become a shared house of freshmen only. Though blending grades had many benefits—sophomores tended to model more mature behavior for the freshmen, and ninth-graders often worked academically at the 10th-grade level—a change this year in the sophomore curriculum required something different.

A career pathways program was introduced to 10th-graders to allow them to explore their interests, aptitudes, and postsecondary career and learning opportunities. This exploration prepares them to choose a Focused Program of Study that they will follow as juniors and seniors. Because most students aren't ready to make these kinds of explorations in their first year of high school, freshmen are now separated from the sophomores. The Focused Program of Study, introduced by the North Clackamas School District and aligned with Oregon's curriculum standards, requires students at the end of their sophomore year to choose a focus from six career pathways: natural resources, health services, human resources, business and management, industrial and engineering systems, and arts and communication.

Though juniors and seniors are not grouped into houses, the school intends for these older students to have personally meaningful learning experiences, as well. While following one (or more) of the career pathways, students come together with peers who share their interests. Through close contact with each other, and with teachers and professionals from the community, students experience real-world learning—linked to rigorous academic standards—with strong ties to adults and the worlds of work and college.

In fact, to graduate, all students must participate in Career-Related Learning Experiences (CRLEs, or "curlies" as they're often called). This districtwide program involves students in a structured learning experience in the community, workplace, or school that connects students' academic work with life and work beyond the classroom, says Claudia Holstrom, school-to-careers coordinator and a key player in Putnam's reform efforts. Her office in Putnam's Career Center is one of the busiest in the building as students come by seeking advice or to use the computers and library to research professions. Last year, students participated in 2,225 CRLEs, says Holstrom, including job shadows, site tours of businesses, events with guest speakers, and other projects and activities. Many students also regularly attend the district's venerable Owen Sabin Skills Center, a professional-technical school serving the area's high school students since 1963. The center offers students hands-on learning in the district's six career pathways as well as in information technology.

Houses and career pathways aren't the only places where relationships are purposefully fostered at Putnam. The school reserves an 87-minute block of time every other day for an Access Period for all of its students. This period is an inviolate time for students to confer with their designated Access teacher who becomes a guide, a friend, and an advocate, or to meet with other teachers for help with school work, or to visit the media or technology laboratories.

Looking Back
A singular event galvanized the school to bring students and teachers together in smaller gatherings where relationships, social maturity, and learning could be fostered. Though the school's population is nearly 90 percent White and middle class—with few students experiencing the socioeconomic factors that typically put children "at risk"—a survey to parents, students, teachers, and community members delivered a big surprise to Putnam staff. The 1994 poll showed that, while teachers and administrators believed the school was doing pretty well on all counts, students and their parents decidedly disagreed. They believed teachers weren't connecting with students, parents were isolated from the life of the school, and drugs and alcohol were major problems. The survey jolted Putnam's staff. They thought of themselves as caring stewards of these young people's learning and social development, and yet they were being told they were missing the mark by a mile.

Swallowing that bitter pill, they decided to heal themselves. As one staff member wrote in a short history of the school: "Leadership had changed at Rex Putnam High School." Principal Edwards opened the doors wide for teachers to lead the way, urging them, like the former football coach he is, to take risks and double their efforts to take the school where it had never been before.

"Kids have to feel good about themselves," says Edwards. "If they don't feel loved and appreciated, and that you care about them, you can't get to where they can self-reflect and learn. So we decided we needed to change."

They mustered the school community to gather information, formulate action plans, and solve problems. A Site Council of elected teachers and staff and selected parents and students became the school's primary decisionmaking body. The council created better lines of communication, placed teachers in charge of staff development, established an annual planning retreat, recommended hiring a full-time drug and alcohol counselor, and conducted research and visits to other schools to determine which exemplary programs and practices would be right for Rex Putnam.

One school they visited was Sir Francis Drake High School, another New American High School, located in San Anselmo, California. Like Putnam, Drake is a large, comprehensive high school that is undertaking whole-school reform by finding ways to create smaller and more meaningful learning opportunities, with strong school-to- career links. Putnam based GATE on a house Drake had formed for a single group of first-year students. When Putnam later began forming additional houses to serve all of its first- and second-year students, Drake staff flew up to Milwaukie to see how they did it. Before long, Putnam's staff had taken the school a long way, capturing the attention of others far outside the region.

Improvements were soon evident in grades, test scores, and student behavior, says Holstrom. Sixty percent of students in GATE improved their grade-point averages. While 20 percent of Putnam's students typically received failing grades in language arts, only 4 percent of GATE's students failed the course. And GATE's absentee rate was low, less than 4 percent compared to Putnam's typical absentee rate of 10 percent.

By 1998, improvements were being seen schoolwide. Students' combined SAT score of 1082 exceeded district, state, and national averages that year, and rose above the 1075 score they obtained two years earlier. Fewer students were dropping out of school, about 4 percent compared to 6 percent in 1996. In fact, 65 percent of Putnam's graduating students were enrolling in postsecondary education.

Gaining Recognition
In November 1999, U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley named Putnam a New American High School. The award recognizes the school for its commitment to educating all students to high standards and preparing them for postsecondary education. As an awardee, Putnam is encouraged to share with others its reform strategies, which emphasize personalized teaching, project-based curriculum, performance assessments, indepth staff development, connections with caring adults, and links to careers and college.

Putnam uses its $5,000 one-time award to host educators, policymakers, and community members who come to the school to observe its programs—which Principal Edwards stresses will always be "under construction." Putnam has hosted several Design Studios, three-day events in which teams of teachers and administrators from around the country come to the school to observe, to hear testimonials from teachers and students, and to craft action plans for restructuring their own schools. Learning and sharing with others has been the key to Putnam's success, says Edwards.

"I certainly don't want to reinvent the wheel," he says. "We borrowed everything that's helped us become a New American High School except the talent of our people. There's no substitute for that."

Sharing knowledge and experience is exactly what the New American High School initiative is all about, says Director Gail Schwartz. Schwartz works for Assistant Secretary Patricia McNeil in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education in Washington, D.C. When McNeil was appointed to the office in 1995, she discovered that 65 percent of OVAE's local-level funding was spent on high schools, and she immediately realized the important role the office could play in high school reform.

Urged into action by her own children's uneven high school experiences and by watching, with the rest of the nation, news coverage of horrifying violence at high schools around the country, McNeil began formulating her idea. She wanted to give momentum to a movement stirring in communities and boardrooms to utterly change the high school experience. She asked Schwartz to help her launch a plan.

"We decided to establish a recognition program," says Schwartz, and ask the awardees to "serve as technical advisors, in a sense, to let the rest of the country know what they're doing. We asked schools to disseminate information about their good practices. We asked them to work on refining their data collection systems, because we'd have to legitimize why we thought [what they were doing] was a good way to go."

After visiting high schools across the country, McNeil and Schwartz worked with a research organization, MPR Associates, Inc., of Berkeley, California, to identify the core strategies exemplary high schools were taking to transform the way they educated their students. These schools were creating places of learning based on respect, high expectations, and exemplary practices. (The 12 strategies of the New American High School initiative)

To date, some 60 high schools have been recognized with an NAHS award. Each group of awardees, it is hoped, will serve to widen the ripple effect, carrying NAHS principles throughout the nation's 17,000 high schools. (For more information about New American High Schools, visit OVAE's Web site.)

"Schools like Rex Putnam and the other New American High Schools are really beacons of light," says Schwartz.

Embracing Change
Rex Putnam still has much work to be done, says Edwards. He would like to see even more integration of curriculum and more teacher collaboration. He'd like to see the school's standardized test scores in math and reading improve. He'd especially like to send more of his teachers to visit schools to see other innovations in whole-school reform. And Edwards may well get his wish. The district was recently awarded a $519,041 grant from the Smaller Learning Communities Program of the U.S. Department of Education. The grants are to help districts and schools implement strategies for personalizing the learning environment for students.

"Staff development is critical to us," he says. "There's more of a correlation between a great teacher in the classroom and student improvement than there is anything else."

But staff development must be matched by a teacher's inner drive to excel and be open to new ideas, he says.

"If you're really going to change, change is going to be hard work," says Principal Edwards. "But if you have fun and laugh together, too, it's okay."

Jill Colasuonno, a ninth-grade house teacher in language arts, embraced the change at Putnam because she saw the potential power of deepening relationships and relevancy in the classroom. How does she forge those bonds with her first-year students?

"By lovin' 'em up," she says. The returns are ample. "We feed off each other. I'd rather be in my classroom with my kids than in a meeting or conference. I come in and I just feel better."

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