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As Portland Public Schools braces for a difficult fall that will be marked by a contentious school closure talks, a 150-page report it commissioned outlines impacts from its most recent enrollment balancing attempt among Southeast Portland schools.
The report, which will be presented to the Portland School Board on Tuesday, is authored by Dr. Terrance Green, an associate professor of education and leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, and Dr. Havala Hanson, a local quantitative education researcher. It examines the aftermath of the Southeast Guiding Coalition, or SEGC, a multiyear effort to redraw boundaries and even out resources in elementary, K–8 and middle schools in Southeast Portland, culminating in a number of changes in the 2023–24 school year.
The evaluation’s authors indicate the intention of the report is not to justify school closures, but to help the district better understand how rightsizing decisions might affect students, families, staff and school administration.
“The findings from this evaluation are intended to help PPS learn from SEGC as it considers future decisions related to enrollment balancing, school consolidation, boundary changes, program relocation, school size, and access to robust educational experiences and learning environments,” the report reads.
Little long-term research around school closures exists. In recent years, however, the practice has become more appealing to a number of urban districts across the U.S. as student enrollment suffers and costs rise. There’s debate on everything from whether school closures affect student achievement for the better or worse, to whether closures save schools money. (On the latter point, research often indicates districts save money from closures only when they reduce personnel as well.)
Yet the report provides the most local insight into how rightsizing affected a substantial portion of the PPS community in Southeast Portland. That matters as the district looks to achieve many similar goals with a broader consolidation process, namely to better optimize its limited resources across a smaller number of buildings and ensure equitable resource distribution.
The report finds both wins and drawbacks that came alongside the SEGC process. Notably, it found that after enrollment balancing in Southeast, enrollment became more balanced than in other quadrants in PPS, and that student achievement was not affected for the worse by the redrawing process. In middle school rebalancing efforts, researchers found “no significant academic differences” in performance. At the elementary school level, researchers found some positive associations in English and language arts performance, though such improvements were not statistically significant.
The SEGC also weighed streamlining the district’s dual language immersion programs. The report finds that some of the choices made allowed for more coherence in managing DLI programs, and that those programs were better able to attract heritage speakers. Yet while language programs in Spanish and Vietnamese saw growth, other languages like Mandarin and Russian saw decreased participation.
One of the most dramatic consequences of the SEGC’s work appears to have been among PPS staff. The report finds that there was significant turnover in administrators and principals ahead of the major changes, with 55% departing in the 2021–22 school year compared with 26% at non-SEGC schools. That turnover also affects staff retention, which the report notes is typically lower when a school can’t hold a principal.
After the 2022–23 school year, ahead of the implementation year, the report also notes that 32% of staff at SEGC schools left their roles, compared with 19% at non-SEGC schools. That gap largely closed the following year.
Staff members who partook in the transition period told researchers in focus groups that they were ill-prepared to support families and students through the process. Staff at one school described the experience as “flying blind” and others remembered struggling to answer families’ questions. “Participants also described feeling under-informed and left to absorb parent frustration after the central SEGC lead disappeared,” the report notes.
Many also shared that their struggles in the years after SEGC weren’t entirely caused by the boundary process, but by a combination of an undersupported transition and reductions in the district’s budget. Those reductions meant larger class sizes and less support for at-need students, some noted.
The report outlines a number of suggestions that researchers recommend district officials keep in mind as they approach the consolidation process on a districtwide scale. Particularly, it recommends the district take a more proactive approach to community engagement by engaging those affected before any decisions are made so they have a hand in shaping the plan, instead of just reacting to it.
Its authors also emphasize that how PPS implements consolidations matters. “Rebuilding trust requires follow-through, accountability, and visible support for affected schools and communities,” it reads. “SEGC members…stressed that the district should only make promises it can keep [and] publicly track commitments.”
The evaluation ends with a section that looks forward to PPS’s upcoming consolidation process, particularly to address district officials’ questions about what enrollment, school size, and conditions are necessary to craft “well-resourced schools.” Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong has put creating “well-resourced schools” at the center of her rationale for weighing school closures.
The report offers some broad guidance around what PPS will have to weigh as it determines what constitutes a well-resourced school. Namely, it emphasizes that enrollment numbers and utilization rates (how much of a building’s capacity is being used during a school day) are just pieces of a much larger picture.
It suggests that smaller schools may allow teachers to build better relationships with the students they teach, and better catch when students are falling behind. Larger buildings may offer more flexibility and collaboration between staff members, alongside more resources. (Research, it notes, finds school size effects on academic achievement are “mixed, modest, and highly dependent on context”).
The report recommends the district develop enrollment ranges that it will aim for as it broaches school consolidations, ones that will account for even numbers of students across grade levels, ensure schools can remain sustainable after projected enrollment declines, and provide educational value and strong relationships to its students. It will be up to the district over the next few months to determine a sustainable and productive staffing model that supports students and meets program expectations, the report’s authors write.
“Given PPS’s structural deficit and sustained enrollment decline, the district cannot define well-resourced schools without asking both what students deserve and what the system can reliably and feasibly sustain,” it reads. “A well-resourced school cannot be defined only by building utilization…it must be defined by the actual teaching conditions, student supports, staff roles, and learning opportunities that make a school educationally equitable and robust.”
In a memo to the School Board, district officials wrote that key PPS teams have begun weighing the report’s findings, and incorporating it into work around consolidations.
“The report calls for us to evaluate rightsizing decisions through an education equity, sufficiency and implementation-readiness lens,” wrote Dr. Jon Franco, PPS’s senior chief of operations. “Ultimately posing the question: Will the change create stronger and more equitable learning environments?”
