News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters High School is crafting its own "report card" to grade how well the school is preparing students for life beyond the classroom.
Principal Boyd Keyser has hosted two community forums to seek ideas from parents, community members and teachers about what kind of school they want Sisters High School to be.
People have spoken of goals such as "school feels more like a community than an institution; high standards are the norm; learning is seen as a positive experience; students leave feeling confident about their journey into the adult world."
The report card will rate the school on how well it works with those goals.
The self-evaluation is, at least in part, a response to a state evaluation, due at the end of January, that "grades" schools primarily on their performance on state tests.
The state Legislature mandated the report card to hold schools accountable for progress toward meeting state education standards. It will grade schools based on how well students did on 1996-97 multiple choice tests and how much better they did on 1998-99 tests.
"The major factors will be performance on state tests and gains on state tests," said state Department of Education spokesman Larry Austin.
That criteria is too narrow, according to Keyser.
"I think it's almost impossible to measure their performance of a school with data that is strictly empirical," Keyser said.
Sisters school officials acknowledge that Sisters will likely rank "in the middle of the pack" according to the test-based state evaluations. That, according to Keyser, is partly because Sisters students did well on tests to begin with and rates of improvement will be smaller than in other schools.
"We're a pretty high-performing school, so we're not seeing a lot of gain," Keyser said.
Curriculum director Lora Nordquist acknowledged that school staff is concerned about public perception based on a middling grade.
"Yes, our school cares about our perception," she said. "I don't think we'd be a good school if we didn't care about our community perception.
"We think the way the state is measuring us is unfair and incomplete," Nordquist said. "It doesn't really tell who we are as a school."
The Department of Education agrees that the state report card does not provide a complete picture, according to spokesman Larry Austin.
"People wanted more information on safety and finances, but we don't have that (data) yet," Austin said.
Austin noted that the state report card is "a new animal" and that it will evolve and become more sophisticated. Austin said the efforts of schools like Sisters to evaluate themselves on broader criteria were appropriate.
"I think it's very commendable, what they're doing there," he said.
Keyser insists that the Sisters High School report card is not an "end run around the (state) analysis," but rather a tool for evaluating how well Sisters is doing at preparing students for a new and different kind of work and society.
"Are we preparing our kids for the world we lived in or are we going to prepare them for the world they're going to live in?" Keyser asked parents and teachers at a community forum on Tuesday, November 30.
In a world where information is both a product and a kind of currency, "they have to learn how to use it and how to problem-solve with it; how to connect it with other bits of information," Keyser said.
That requires flexibility, motivation and experience not necessarily found in an "industrial model" of education where memorization and the ability to follow instructions are emphasized.
Keyser acknowledged that educational values such as a sense of community are hard to define and to measure, but that is what the Sisters High School report card will attempt to do.
According to Keyser, the school site council will go to work on the ideas generated in the community forums and hammer together a draft report card in the next few weeks. The draft report card will be mailed out with other school materials and will be on the school's web page, so that parents and community members can respond to it.
The final report card should be out at about the same time the state report card is issued.
"I'd like them to come out at the same time," Keyser said. "It would be a nice comparative thing for people to do."
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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