Transparency at Grant High School
The Grant parents are back. No, they aren’t pretending to be concerned about other schools again. This time one of their own has been criticized.
On Wednesday, Willamette Week made Vivian Orlen (Grant’s new principal) Rogue of the Week for an ill-advised office makeover. Orlen says the office changes were intended to increase transparency. Her supporters argue that transparency is a good thing. That makes me laugh.
It was the Grant Google group that revoked my membership for sharing what was being said in their members only group. These same people met with the mayor behind closed doors.
And isn’t it a little hypocritical for Grant parents to say that they support transparency then attack Willamette Week for writing the story.
So for the Grant parents that value transparency, here’s some Grant data:
| Ethnicity | Number Enrolled | Number of Incidents | Percent of Incidents | Number of Students Involved |
| American Indian/Alaskan Native | 17 | 16 | 2.5% | 4 |
| Asian/Pacific Islander | 116 | 17 | 2.7% | 13 |
| Black (Not of Hispanic Origin) | 392 | 354 | 55.2% | 150 |
| Hispanic | 79 | 38 | 5.9% | 14 |
| Unknown/Unspecified | 17 | 2 | <1% | 2 |
| White (Not of Hispanic Origin) | 1006 | 214 | 33.4% | 122 |
| Total | 1627 | 641 | 305 |
How is it that Black students make up only 24.1% of the student population but 55.2% of the Student Discipline Incidents? More than 1 in 3 of Grant’s Black students have been involved in a disciplinary incident.
Student achievement data looks even worse for Grant’s Black students. In 2008/09, 95% of the White students met reading benchmark but only 45% of the Black students met benchmark. Math results are similar….83% of White students and 32% of Black students met benchmark.
And what opportunities are available for Grant’s Black students? In 2008/09 Black students made up 24.1% of Grant’s student population but represented only 6% of the students enrolled in AP/IB classes.
It looks to me like it might have been a better use of district resources and Orlen’s time if she’d spent it trying to figure out how to eliminate those disparities.
(All of the data above came from an August 2009 Grant Data book produced by PPS)
4 comments
These types of disparities won’t get addressed until the whole student behavior issue gets addressed. Not only does the district refuse to address the behavior issues, but communities also refuse to discuss in a sensible manner the same issues. With the district hiding the issue and communities disregarding the issue
the misbehavior continues unaddressed and unabated. In the meantime education in the district continues to crumble. It ain’t the teacher skills, nor the curriculum deficiences, nor the rotten districwide communication skills, nor the lack of money, nor the obstinence of the school board and their supporters from the more well-to-do neighborhoods that are most responsible for the poor education — it is the disregard for the need for orderly, engaging classrooms.
Now go ahead and attack the messenger, I’m used to it. But 43 years of teaching school, caring about my students, and analyzing the problems says what I have said for years makes sense.
Steve I have seen the light and agree with you. I would just like to see something consistent in regards to behavior. I get that each school and cluster is it’s own little universe and needs some autonomy but in regards to a vision for addressing behavior you need to be on the same page across settings. We just started Envoy at Ockley and I will keep an open mind which is hard for me when it comes to behavior.
Steve the enrollment and transfer committee meets tonight and they are public meetings…….
Steve Buel, Can you be more specific about the behavior issues? The disparities are racial disparities. Are you saying that Black student’s behavior is as bad as the numbers suggest or that Black student behavior is worse than White student’s?
I’m saying, as I have for years, that until the district makes a serious effort to adequately deal with the behavior problems in “classrooms” the discussion of disparities is pretty much meaningless and the rotten education which is so prevalent in lower economic neighborhoods (black, white, or whatever) will continue despite other efforts. It is no surprise that suspension rates can be much higher in poorer neighborhood schools. Say a school has a 33% suspension rate and another has a 2%. Suspensions are usually given for serious misbehavior or for continued more minor misbehavior. So, if I am a student in the first school 10 out of 30 kids in each of my classes has misbehavior problems. If I am in the second school then in every two classes of thirty kids I would have one kid who has serious misbehavior problems, and unlike the first classroom where a kid has nine other students to feed off of; in the second school the one kid has no kids to feed off of. So, why is this not recognized and dealt with by the district? The same reason it hasn’t yet dealt with the other disparities. It is not a problem for the kids of the SFC parents on the West Side and other upper economic neighborhoods. The retort is always that Grant say has lots of misbehavior so it should be a problem there and in the other three high schools. But the reason it isn’t a priority with the school-board-supporting parents is that their kids are often in AP classes where the kids less engaged in school, the ones who most often misbehave, are not. Note I said misbehavior in classrooms, not schools. Another major problem is this type of misbehavior is pretty much unobservable by the administration or the general public. Kids know not to screw up in front of guests in the room. It disrupts the delicate balance between them and the teacher.
But in the meantime these misbehaviors disrupt the learning process beyond any other factors, way beyond any other. The answer is systematic support for teachers and systematic changes in what we are willing to accept in classrooms and other behavior from kids. We have a tendancy to think this problem is academically based and we address it with academic solutions … if teachers were paid more, if we made them more academially skilled, if we taught kids better, if the curriculum were more rigorous, if more kids met benchmarks etc. But these are not solutions, but minor helps in dealing with the problem. Solutions need to be directed at the misbehavior itself, not the surrounding context which is way, way too complicated to have immediate effects. I mean, let’s clean up the poverty problem, the books in the home problem, the drug problem, the racial prejudice, the societal anti-academic influences, the teacher expectation problem, the extended family problems, the peer influence problems … see those types of problems are way too massive and not solvable in a reasonable time frame. But addressing behavior in a classroom, now that is possible.
There are lots of reasons kids misbehave, ranging anywhere from their homelife, to a rotten teacher, to a poor school, to a disablility which is not appropriately met, to an inability to read or a million more reasons. But in the end the child needs to take responsibility for their behavior in a general classroom. And we need to figure out how to have classrooms in poorer neighborhoods which give the same opportunity for learning as those in the AP classes in our more favored high schools. And, in fact, it is more important in those schools which have students who struggle more. Yet, we do the exact opposite — demand less from those students who need the orderly and engaging classrooms the most.
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