In The News: School district addressing curriculum gap

Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic 

Newberg's graduation requirements and course offerings do not match the rhetoric of providing curriculum that is both college- and career-ready

Like many school districts in Oregon and across the country, Newberg has changed its stated goal in recent years to put the focus on preparing all students for both college and careers. That deviated from previous approaches, which put more emphasis on college readiness.

Unfortunately, Newberg is also like just about everybody else in that it has not changed quickly enough that the results in high school classrooms and after graduation match the district's stated mission.

The national trend was identified in research report conducted by the Education Trust and released in April, which spurred Newberg director of teaching and learning Stafford Boyd to examine how well the district the district is fairing.

Boyd presented the national and local findings to the Newberg School Board at its Nov. 8 meeting to set the stage for the changes district and NHS staff are planning to address the problem.

The national report set out to examine how many high school graduates are completing curriculums that prepare students for both college and career, how many students demonstrate mastery in those areas and how those rates are affected by factors like race, socio-economic status and student goals.

Researchers Marni Bromberg & Christina Theokas found that just 8 percent of 2013 graduates completed a full (both college- and career-preparatory) curriculum, but perhaps even worse, nearly half (47 percent) completed neither. When accounting for those who pursued but did not achieve mastery of one or both curriculum, which was defined as finishing with a 2.5 GPA or higher, that figure rose to 61 percent.

The rates were also found to be even lower for students affected by poverty.

After examining transcript data, Boyd found the rates to be very similar in Newberg among 2016 graduates, where just 7.2 percent completed a full curriculum and 27.8 completed neither college- nor career-ready coursework.

In the class of 2016, 63.9 percent did complete a college-ready curriculum, which Boyd said is partly because the district's graduation requirements are very close to the study's definition of college-ready.

That is certainly not the case for career-ready curriculum, which the researchers define as three credits of Career and Technical Education (CTE) in the same field, as just 0.7 percent of 2016 graduates in Newberg met that level. That's mostly because while NHS does offer CTE courses in a wide variety of fields, it simply doesn't offer enough within each of those fields for the curriculum to qualify.

That, however, is expected to begin changing as soon as next school year, because NHS is expanding the depth of some of its CTE pathways by adding new courses.

That process was set to begin at Tuesday's board meeting, as Boyd and Newberg High School principal Kyle Laier were scheduled to present new course proposals for approval.

Some of them will be second-year courses in recently-added subjects like computer science and engineering, but others will be foundational or first-year classes in new CTE pathways like agriculture.

For example, NHS offered a first-year computer science course for the first time this year and 119 students signed up and are taking the course now.

"Clearly we're hitting the mark because that is exactly what our business partners are saying they want and kids are interested," Boyd said. "That's the match we want."

Boyd and Laier ultimately envision students taking a capstone class, in which students from different pathways work together to solve a real-world problem in the community, as their third CTE credit.

"In the real world, it's not just a group of engineers sitting solving problems," Boyd said. "It's a bunch of people with mixed backgrounds tackling problems. A-dec is the perfect example. Yes, you need engineers to build the things, but you need dentists that understand the human body and what dentists do with the human body. That's the team that designs solutions."

Boyd and Laier are also proposing the addition of the first CTE capstone class for the 2017-2018 school year, but because all of the various pathways are not yet established, any student with two years in a CTE field will be eligible to participate.

Next year, most of those students will be from engineering or manufacturing, according to Boyd, but over time administrators will establish full pathways in a variety of career fields, from culinary and business to health care.

"Teams of kids will tackle one project and then they have to pitch their idea in the spring to business partners, actually community members and engineers and business people," Boyd said. "It's really cool."

That national report addressed the fact that in order to achieve the new curriculum and outcome expectations, significant changes will have to be made. The researcher offered three recommendations for schools and administrators: making radical changes to school culture, structure and instruction; aligning courses to student interest in order to make them relevant; and not to treat high school graduation as an end goal.

Boyd said the district is currently focused on addressing the first recommendation, specifically pointing to the work of its innovation teams. They are currently aligning instruction around the 5 Cs of 21st century learning, skills that have been identified as crucial to success across subjects and career paths, but are also incorporating STEM instruction in early grades so students will be well versed by the time they reach high school and choose a CTE pathway.

"That's going to be really fun to watch as we start to see kids going into middle school with richer experiences, kids going into high school with richer experiences and then really having space for them really to take off," Boyd said.

While the district is certainly focused on improving its graduation rate, and believes changes that already are being planned or adopted will play a major role in that, its stated goal and vision seem to have already accounted for the principle behind the third recommendation.

As far as being able to offer a full curriculum, Boyd said the district's ultimate goal is to provide both college- and career-ready aspects to all students, but the more immediate goal is to offer all students a career-ready curriculum. It will do that by expanding CTE course offerings in the next few years and changing the district's graduation requirements will take a back seat until then.

"I think the goal is that kids do both and get both experiences," Boyd said. "That's the vision we want for all students, but it's not okay for them to have neither. That's the really important thing, that we want really rigorous experiences and we want the outcomes of both so kids have opportunities for choices with a diploma. But if they have neither, they really have no choice."