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Noel Gutierrez's father worries that his 16-year-old son won't graduate from high school.
As a freshman, Noel earned decent grades only in study hall and gym. Now a junior, Noel's still making up classes.
It doesn't help that Noel attends a Portland high school whose one-year dropout rate is more than twice the state average, according to data released by the state this week. "His school has problems," says Francisco Gutierrez, Noel's father. "Sometimes I have doubts, but we hope he makes it."
You would not be alone if you thought Noel attended Jefferson High School, which is widely considered to be the most troubled high school in the city.
Jefferson is the Portland high school that receives the most headlines and stirs the most intense political debate. As a result, Jefferson, Portland's only predominantly black high school, has become ground zero for most discussions concerning the achievement gap in this city. But an analysis of test scores, graduation rates, dropout numbers and other data shows that it is far from the most woeful high school in the Portland Public Schools, still considered one of the best urban school systems in America.
The high school Noel attends is Roosevelt, which does far less well by its students than Jefferson, by many measures.
Yet few people are aware of the troubles facing this 85-year-old school serving the St. Johns neighborhood—in the far reaches of the peninsula carved out by the Willamette and Columbia rivers.
Within weeks, Portlanders will be asked to vote on a $187.5 million, five-year local-option increase in their property taxes to help Portland Schools pay for 380 new teachers, new textbooks and other classroom supplies. Volunteers—elected officials, teachers and parents—will be calling up voters until the last possible moment, but most of those voters are more likely to know about what has been happening at Jefferson than Roosevelt.
The fixation on Jefferson and the almost willful neglect of schools like Roosevelt are a consequence of a simmering brew of white guilt, black activism, limited public attention span and, to some degree, a lazy news media. And at a time when virtually every politician seeking office talks the talk of the need to support education, it's a remarkable case study of what happens when one school like Jefferson becomes the poster child for a failing system—to the exclusion of others.
"Portland still sees itself as a black-and-white town," says Martín González, who lost a bid for School Board in 2003 and now runs the advocacy group Portland Schools Alliance. "The historical reality is that the school system has not delivered on its promises to deliver a quality education for African-American students. People feel guilty about that."
Asked if Roosevelt would get more attention if it had more black students, School Board member Dan Ryan, who graduated from Roosevelt in 1980, didn't exactly answer the question.
"Race and class play a role in everything in our city," Ryan says.
Douglas Morgan, one of Ryan's colleagues on the board, came closer to answering the question, allowing that Roosevelt's fortunes in the district might have been different had it historically had more black students.
"It would have gotten more attention," Morgan says.
While WW is aware of no polls taken recently, it seems a pretty safe bet that if you were to ask the next 10 people you saw on the street to identify the worst high school in Portland, a majority of them would say "Jefferson."
It would make sense.
Among the 10 public high schools in Portland, none receives the attention that Jefferson does.
This newspaper has written about the inner North Portland school more than any other during the past 10 years. And outside of the sports pages, Jefferson garnered more mentions in The Oregonian than any other high school, according to a search of the daily's records from the past 18 years.
Over time, much of that coverage has focused on Jefferson's dropping enrollment, its low academic achievement and the seemingly futile attempts by the district to reform the school. In The Oregonian, the word "beleaguered" was applied to Jefferson High School six times between 1991 and 2005, but never to other Portland high schools.
To be sure, local media coverage of Jefferson has not been without cause. No other high school in the state, for instance, has ever been "reconstituted," as Jefferson was in the spring of 1998. Near the end of the school year, every teacher at the high school was fired with very little notice and forced to reapply for work—at Jefferson or other schools in the district.
Reconstitution came at a time when school officials believed only extraordinary action could save Jefferson, which was being funded at an "incredible level" (receiving, for example, an extra $1,400 per student in "desegregation" money) without producing any meaningful results, according to Marc Abrams, a former School Board member who voted for reconstitution.
He calls it the "nuclear option."
"Student achievement was falling sharply from an already low level, enrollment was falling sharply, and it appeared we didn't have the right administration or blend of staff to turn it around," Abrams says.
The move generated intense political heat at Jefferson, where parents, teachers and community members rallied to put a stop to reconstitution. The school district moved ahead with its plan anyway.
"Jefferson is a collective failure," a 1998 editorial on reconstitution in The Oregonian reads. "There should be no greater priority in the Portland schools—and across the city—than turning around this school and others failing in their mission to educate every child who steps through their door."
The headline read, "Blowing up Jefferson."
Today, if you go to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that allows virtually anyone to add or change information on a subject's entry, Jefferson High School's listing echoes the public's perception of the school. Jefferson, the website notes, "has consistently had the lowest test scores in the state of Oregon."
But for the past two years, that has not been true.
In fact, in 2004, when the school district broke Jefferson, Marshall and Roosevelt high schools into smaller "schools within schools," one of the new schools, called the Pursuit of Wellness Education at Roosevelt (POWER), had lower test scores than Jefferson in all categories, including reading, math, science and writing. And four other small schools, at Marshall and Roosevelt, performed worse than Jefferson in one out of four categories.
The following year, four small schools performed worse than Jefferson on the reading and writing exams.
Two of those schools were at Marshall, the other two at Roosevelt.
As at Jefferson, Roosevelt is also bleeding students, teachers and resources.
But Roosevelt High School actually fares worse than Jefferson in areas other than test scores (see table, page 25).
In 2005, the most recent year for which there are data, the school's one-year dropout rate of 9.1 percent was six times as high as Jefferson's 1.5 percent (the statewide average is 4.2 percent).
More Roosevelt students come from low-income families than do Jefferson students, as measured by the number of students receiving free and reduced-price meals.
Last year, too, more Roosevelt than Jefferson students were identified as "homeless," according to Project Return, meaning more of them were couch-surfing, doubled up in other people's homes or living in motels, cars and on the streets.
And far more students at Roosevelt than at Jefferson are still learning English, which tends to be a predictor of lower student achievement.
Even by subjective standards, Roosevelt seems to fare worse. For all its troubles, the crowds at Jefferson High School football games are decidedly more energetic than the crowds at Roosevelt. And Jefferson's cheerleading team didn't have to make do with homemade uniforms, as Roosevelt's squad did when the season opened in the fall.
The Roosevelt Roughriders have 25 football players on their varsity roster. Jefferson has about 42.
Jefferson has nine runners on its cross-country team. Roosevelt has two.
"And yet relatively few Portlanders are aware of the troubles that Roosevelt faces," says city Commissioner Sam Adams, who adds Marshall and Madison high schools to that list as well.
"Maybe if Roosevelt had more black students it would get more attention," says Chad Debnam, president of Portland's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "That's a distinct possibility."
Among Roosevelt's 800 students, 21 percent are black while 39 percent are white, 28 percent are Hispanic, 9 percent are Asian and 4 percent are Native American.
Debnam makes this point because Jefferson's black alumni and black advocacy groups like the NAACP have demanded for decades that white Portlanders pay more attention to Jefferson.
"Jefferson's always the one they talk about in this community," says Debnam. "Roosevelt's not considered a black high school."
In the 1980s, when Ron Herndon and the Black United Front stormed Portland School Board meetings and raised hell on behalf of Portland's black students, Jefferson was one of their causes. And in 2000, when Herndon and the Education Crisis Team put pressure on the School Board to improve opportunities for minority students, Jefferson was again an important part of the discussion.
"There's always a call to arms to do something for Jefferson," Debnam says.
Roosevelt has never enjoyed the benefits of that level of organizing, says Richard Garrett, a former Roosevelt teacher and a past president of the Portland Association of Teachers.
But class is as much a factor as race in that equation. And for all the talk of poverty among the Jefferson student body, Roosevelt students are hardly any better off.
Nestled in the St. Johns community, Roosevelt has long educated the children of working-class parents, who may not have as much time as their counterparts in other communities to devote time to their children's schools.
"There hasn't been any ethnic unity or parent unity for years," Garrett says. "And that's to their disadvantage, because they have the same problems."
Black students at least have advocates, Herndon says. "The children who had no advocates were poor white children," he says.
Roosevelt's relative isolation in the upper reaches of Portland's "fifth quadrant" does not help the school remain connected with the rest of the city.
Simply because it's so far away, the St. Johns school is on few people's radar screens, says Eileen Wende, a retired Roosevelt special-education teacher.
But, as the demographics in the neighborhoods around Roosevelt have changed, no powerful group has formed to lobby district-wide on behalf of Latino students, says González, of the Portland Schools Alliance.
As a result, the needs of those students are not being championed as visibly. Some people might not even have noticed that there's a need for advocacy, says Commissioner Adams. "I don't think people have noticed that there's a critical mass of Latinos in North Portland," says Adams, who lives in North Portland.
The lack of attention has consequences for Roosevelt.
Consider the scenes at two home football games on a recent Friday evening. As the Jefferson "Democrats" were cheering their team, they were waving hundreds of blue and gold pompoms that were given to the school this year by an anonymous donor. Five miles to the north, Roosevelt's "Roughriders" were saluting a flag pole without a flag as a graduate from the class of 1993 sang the National Anthem.
No one is denying that Jefferson's supporters have the right to do what they can to improve their school. And no one is suggesting that increased attention on other schools would have to come at the expense of Jefferson. But to some extent Jefferson manages to benefit from its poor reputation even as it struggles to get out from under it.
This summer, the school district spent $1.15 million to improve Jefferson's physical plant, which dates back to 1909.
This summer at Roosevelt, which was built in 1921, the district spent a total of $3,000 removing gas lines from a classroom that is no longer being used as a science lab.
Of course, different schools require different resources, and Superintendent Vicki Phillips says she's most concerned about what's coming out of the schools—the students.
"The issue we're trying to get to is equity of outcomes," Phillips says.
Rather than feel neglected by the lack of media attention, some at Roosevelt appear to enjoy the fact that the public's attention is focused elsewhere.
"No press is better than bad press," says Deborah Krum, who's been an English teacher at Roosevelt for 25 years.
Beyond the glare of the flashbulbs, then, Roosevelt teachers and administrators, working with the district, have been trying to implement drastic changes at the North Portland campus in the past few years.
In the fall of 2004, Roosevelt became three "schools within a school," the idea being that students would benefit from more personalized attention, which could be achieved by splitting kids into smaller academies.
Now in its third year under the small-schools model, Roosevelt students have made gains, Principal Deborah Peterson says. In fact, last year, students at Roosevelt experienced the biggest overall increases in test scores and were responsible for a significant decrease in disruptive behavior. "When you look at all those measures, our transition to small schools is pretty successful," Peterson says.
Noel Gutierrez, who one day wants to customize cars for a living, says he plans to graduate from high school, even if it takes him longer than four years. Right now, he's depending on Roosevelt to help him do that.
But he views the task in front of him as a highly personal one. "It's your responsibility to do your own work," he says. "That's how it is."
Paying more attention to Roosevelt could go a long way toward making sure Noel's graduation isn't only his responsibility.
The NAACP's Debnam says people's perceptions of Portland schools, including Jefferson and Roosevelt, color their understanding of what is happening at those schools.
"Reality should drive people's reactions," he says.
Head to Head
School team name
Jefferson: Democrats
Roosevelt: Roughriders
Location
Jefferson: Humboldt (North Portland)
Roosevelt: St. Johns (North Portland)
Enrollment, 2004-2005
Jefferson: 661
Roosevelt: 804
Spending per student on school activities
Jefferson: $306
Roosevelt: $221
'05 grads who entered four-year colleges
Jefferson: 31%
Roosevelt: 20%
Dropout rate, '04-'05
Jefferson: 1.5%
Roosevelt: 9.1%
Students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, '04-'05
Jefferson: 67%
Roosevelt: 72%
Number of students identified as "homeless" in '05
Jefferson: 40
Roosevelt: 160
Number of free pompoms circulating at home football games
Jefferson: 500
Roosevelt: 0
Football record as of Sept. 29 (wins-losses)
Jefferson: 1-3
Roosevelt: 1-3
Roosevelt's Races Divided By Three
Portland School Board member Dan Ryan says Roosevelt High's ethnic diversity is its great strength.
"Those kids are being prepared for the real world," says Ryan, who was senior class president before graduating from Roosevelt in 1980.
But splitting Roosevelt into small schools in 2004 divided an otherwise integrated school into three academies largely separated along racial lines, according to several teachers and students.
Apparently, segregation is back. Only this time it's socially acceptable self-segregating because students are picking their schools on their own.
The school district says that segregation makes perfect sense in one case anyway: The Spanish-English International School attracts a largely Hispanic student body, and that's because teachers reinforce lessons taught in English with separate activities conducted in Spanish.
But the Pursuit of Wellness Education at Roosevelt is widely considered to be the black school. And the Arts, Communications, & Technology High School is where more white and Asian students enroll.
"A lot of people don't like it because it's segregated," says Carmita Ramos, an 18-year-old senior at the Spanish-English International School.
Principal Deborah Peterson says, "We have an open enrollment policy in this district." —BS
Geography plays a role in discussions concerning schools. Struggling high schools Roosevelt, Madison and Marshall are farther from the city center than Jefferson. They're farther from our minds, too.
WWeek 2015