Portland Public Schools: Backward Together?

This week, Portland Public Schools Board of Education took one small step for one man, but one giant leap backward for its students and teachers. The Board renewed Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero’s contract through June 30, 2024, raising his salary to $322,354 with a 3% cost of living adjustment kicking in on July 1. In addition to a generous insurance and retirement benefit package, Guerrero is to receive a $25,000 bonus per each of the goals met, up to $75,000 annually. The goals are: 

1. The percentage of Grade 3 Black/African-American students demonstrating at or

above grade-level proficiency in English Language Arts will increase by at least 3.0 percentage points (e.g., 16.9% to 19.9%), as measured by students’ attainment of Level 3 or 4 achievement levels on the annual summative Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC), when outcomes are compared year over year (e.g., Spring 2022 to Spring 2023; and Spring 2023 to Spring 2024).

2. The percentage of all Grade 3 students, in the Underserved Race/Ethnicity student

group*, demonstrating at or above grade-level proficiency in English Language Arts will increase by at least 3.0 percentage points (e.g., 29.4% to 32.4%), as measured by students’ attainment of 3 Level 3 or 4 achievement levels on the SBAC, when outcomes are compared year over year (e.g., Spring 2022 to Spring 2023; and Spring 2023 to Spring 2024).

*The Underserved Race/Ethnicity student group is defined by the Oregon Department of

Education as consisting of the following racial/ethnic groups: American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/African-American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

3. The percentage of Grade 5 Black/African-American students demonstrating at or

above grade-level proficiency in mathematics will increase by at least 3.0 percentage points (e.g., 9.2% to 12.2%), as measured by the students’ attainment of Level 3 or 4 achievement levels on the annual summative SBAC, when outcomes are compared year over year (e.g., Spring 2022 to Spring 2023; and Spring 2023 to Spring 2024).

What about those who teach?

In all of the Board meeting discussion surrounding the Superintendent package deal, curiously the topic of supporting those most intimately involved in student learning, also known as teachers, was virtually absent. This is telling of the district priorities since research in the field of education has shown that collective teacher efficacy– “the collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students"–is the single most influential factor on student learning gains. Meanwhile, the opposite has been the dominant climate in schools. Teacher stress has soared for the past two years of the pandemic, and teacher morale plummeted to an all-time low with half of public school teachers seriously considering leaving the profession. Wouldn’t it make the most sense to then, as leaders, focus on fostering collective teacher efficacy?

Instead of showing appreciation for the district’s educators and concern for their physical and mental health in the height of the pandemic, Chief Human Resources Officer, Sharon Reese, the very person presenting the Superintendent as well as administrator pay raises at the Tuesday Board meeting, penned a punitive letter last month accusing PPS teachers of and resolving to punish those who may have engaged in organized “sick outs.” Needless to say, the widely publicized letter caused further stress, even lower morale, and division among teaching staff rather than inspiring the kind of morale or efficacy boost educators need under the current working conditions.

The pay raise fits in with a statewide trend of substantial salary increases for Oregon’s superintendents whose average pay has jumped by nearly fifty percent over the past twelve years while teacher salaries have essentially remained flat.

The Trouble with Smarter Balanced Assessment

Rewarding superintendents with bonuses for improved student standardized test scores has been a practice in major cities including Baltimore and Philadelphia, from where district leaders have recently come to work for PPS. The trend is apparently just now arriving to Portland despite the fact that standardized test scores have been proven to correlate to students’ socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and parental education level rather than to learning gains. High-stakes standardized testing is rooted in the Eugenics movement's white supremacist assessment scheme designed to weed out "undesirable" populations from major American institutions.  The SAT, as an example, was created in 1926 by eugenicist Carl Brigham, who believed that whites were intellectually superior to darker-skinned people. The original purpose of the SAT was to manufacture a pseudoscientific justification for racial superiority. U.S. colleges have recognized this and increasing numbers have stopped requiring SAT and ACT scores for college admission.

Scholars and activists have demonstrated over the past several decades that standardized testing is biased, racist, useless as a diagnostic tool, and has been used to punish and often close or privatize schools with low scores. 

A recent article NEA Today addresses the racist nature of standardized tests: 

"Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

'We still think there’s something wrong with the kids rather than recognizing their something wrong with the tests,' Ibram X. Kendi of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at Boston University and author of How to be an Antiracist said in October 2020. 'Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.'"

In her article, “What You Need to Know About Standardized Testing,” former assistant secretary of education and historian, Diane Ravitch writes: 

“In 2001, President George W. Bush put forward his No Child Left Behind legislation, which required every student in grades 3 to 8 to take a standardized test in reading and mathematics every year, as well as one test in high school. Test scores would be used to judge schools and eventually to punish those that failed to make progress toward having every student achieve competency on those tests. The NCLB law proclaimed that by 2014, virtually every student would achieve competency in reading and mathematics. The authors of NCLB knew the goal was impossible to achieve.

When Barack Obama became president, he selected Arne Duncan as secretary of education. The Obama administration embraced the NCLB regime. Its own program — Race to the Top — stiffened the sanctions of NCLB. 

Not only would schools that did not get high enough test scores be punished, possibly closed or privatized for failing to meet utopian goals, but teachers would be individually singled out if the students in their classes did not get higher scores every year.

The Bush-Obama approach was recognized as the ‘bipartisan consensus’ in education, built around annual testing, accountability for students, teachers, principals and schools, and competition among schools. Race to the Top encouraged states to authorize charter school legislation and to increase the number of privately managed charters, and to pass legislation that tied teachers’ evaluations to the test scores of their students.”

In their succinct history of standardized testing as tied to school privatization going back to the Reagan era, education professor Wayne Au and Director of the Alternative Pathways to Teaching Program at Central Washington University, Jesslyn Hollar, discuss the close ties of high-stakes standardized testing to school reform and privatization:

"It is critical to recognize that ( . . . ) profit-making from new standards and standards-aligned materials, as well as the more general perversion of public education into a competitive marketplace, relies on high-stakes standardized testing. The entire education reform industry depends on the data produced by these tests, because tests render children, teachers, administrators, schools, districts, institutions, and communities into numbers. In this rendering, social and historical conditions, complex issues of power and culture, even the life and spirit of people, are flattened into simple quantities for inspection, comparison, and ranking. In turn, test scores become a form of currency, used as the basis for decisions about educational 'choice,' school closures, charter schools, and the evaluation of teachers and schools. Within the neoliberal educational framework, test scores become both the means and ends of education, alienating students and teachers from their labor while turning the test scores themselves into fetishized commodities that obscure the very people they purport to represent."

As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, "merit pay" for high test scores does not correlate to better outcomes for students. In fact, it has been associated with widespread cheating. 

Scores of leaders who initially believed that standardized testing leads to improved student learning have come out against the test culture that these assessments create. One example is Paymon Rouhanifard, former Superintendent of Camden, New Jersey public schools. His language describing the purpose and rollout of a high-stakes test-based reform reveals the essence of the for-profit motive driving the plan, which is to designate low-performing schools as failing, and to turn over their control to charter chains, thus opening doors to public school privatization: 

"Our theory of action was relatively straightforward, and one we continually discussed with our community. We believed it was important for the district to segue out of being a highly political monopoly operator of schools, but one that instead focused on regulating the system. That involved us asking high quality non-profit charter organizations to help turn around existing schools.( . . . ) Across the country, we’ve attempted to create a KPI – a Key Performance Indicator – to ensure we’re tracking progress against one or two units of measurement. We focus our energies there. ( . . . ) When I was running the Office of Portfolio Management for the New York City Department of Education, I was a devout believer that every decision should be predicated on math and literacy tests."

Though  Rouhanifard has not exactly become an opponent of school reform, he has realized how much high-stakes test culture hurts students and teachers. He says: 

"We are spending an inordinate amount of time on formative and interim assessments and test prep, because those are the behaviors we have incentivized. We are deprioritizing the sciences, the arts, and civic education, because we’ve placed most of our eggs in two baskets. We are implicitly encouraging schools to serve fewer English language learners and students with an IEP. We are spending less time on actual instruction, because that’s the system we’ve created. ( . . . ) The drawbacks currently outweigh the benefits. ( . . . ) Mostly affluent, mostly white schools shy away from heavy testing, and as a result, they are literally receiving an extra month of instruction – and usually with less overall time allotted to the school day.

I often share the 'Is this OK for our own children' thought exercise with education reform friends and colleagues as it relates to testing, and it’s amazing how often I hear twisted logic.

Simply put: time spent on testing and test prep is not time spent on instruction. It’s time spent on testing. Often, we’ve become better at taking the assessments, but haven’t mastered the standards behind them." 

Unjust test with a history of resistance

High stakes testing has inspired protests from educators, parents, and students all across the country for years.

When Smarter Balanced was adopted locally in 2015, Portland Public Schools parents, teachers and members of the Don't Shoot Portland activist group took a stand as well, calling for parents to opt their children out of taking the new Smarter Balanced state test. Portland Association of Teachers passed a resolution opposing the test. The concerns included the prediction that approximately 65 percent of students would fail the test , and that Smarter Balanced test scores have not yet been determined to be valid or reliable. PAT took issue with the fact that exorbitant sums of federal and state dollars were being used for testing, and that the preparation and testing were prohibitively time-consuming. 

Clearly, there is no institutional memory within Portland Public Schools revolving door-style leadership.

A way forward

Guadalupe Guerrero should take heed of the standardized testing analysis by fellow Latino education leader, Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig. In his Social Justice Keynote for The California Association of Latino Superintendents and Administrators (CALSA) Sixth Annual Research to Practice Academic Conclave, Dr. Vasquez Heilig criticized the rebranding of standardized tests as tools to use to redress past injustices committed against students of color. He said: 

“High-stakes tests were created to sort, they were not created for civil rights and social justice purposes. However, now that the federal government is requiring and monitoring high-stakes testing, they have been retread as civil rights and social justice ( . . . ) High-stakes tests are an ancient sorting mechanism and they have not improved the education system in the United States."

Vasquez Heilig makes the case for more accurate and authentic ways to measure student learning--"multiple measures qualitative and quantitative community-based" approaches.

The district should invest money into ongoing professional development--with teacher buy in--that hones educators' abilities to accelerate literacy skills using proven, effective strategies. PPS should structurally promote teacher-driven professional learning communities which center authentic assessment and culturally responsive, critical pedagogy while building collective teacher efficacy-- the single most powerful influence on student learning gains. 

On a policy level, recommendations center around boosting access to quality early childhood education programs, funding for effective intervention strategies on the K-12 level, and wraparound services. Quality ethnic studies programs are known for boosting the academic and social outcomes of students of color. For Black students in particular, both the physical presence and attributes of Black educators have made tangible differences in student literacy gains. Funding and supporting ethnic studies programs, as well as investments in training, recruitment and retainment of educators of color have made solid differences for students of color. But in order to make a real difference, district culture must change from its emphasis on standardized test performance and monetary priorities at the already inflated top to a culture of trust and support for those on the frontlines closest to the students and families.