Sisters schools earn high marks

Are Sisters schools really excellent?

Are Sisters public schools excellent? By anecdotal accounts, yes. Are Sisters schools preparing their students to compete on the world stage? Maybe. Is academic excellence a major goal in Sisters? Let's look at what is happening on the larger stage.

Are excellent schools a national priority? A recent Time magazine poll found that Americans rank education as their third biggest national concern with only "the economy" and "the war" ranked higher.

Last week NBC News devoted major blocks of programming to "Education Nation," a series designed to enjoin the debate on the current quality of education in America. The President of the United States kicked off the series with a full half hour sit-down interview on the topic of education.

On September 24 the highly anticipated new film by Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim, "Waiting For Superman," was released. Bill Gates, whose foundation has donated more than $500 million to U.S. schools over the last eight years, has become an evangelist for the film that is being reviewed as ". . . a searing indictment of our education system and a desperate call-to-action to save our struggling schools."

Also last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the New Jersey schools in a matching grant to help save the New Jersey public school system.

Closer to home, the September 8 Statesman Journal quoted one Oregon gubernatorial candidate: "Kitzhaber budget would put education No. 1" while Kitzhaber's gubernatorial opponent Dudley states that, "A quality K-12 public school system is critical to protecting and improving Oregon's quality of life and our economic growth."

Some of the causes of all this concern?

The national average high school dropout rate is 30 percent, with many troubled districts reporting 50 percent and higher. In contrast, Sisters High School is consistently reporting a less-than-one-percent dropout rate.

The national average shows 68 percent of eighth grade students can't read at grade level, and 33 percent are not college-ready when they graduate. However, the Sisters School District (via OAKS testing) report 81 percent of eighth graders at or above their grade level in reading.

From recently released results of the Oregon state OAKS tests, Sisters schools outperformed other Central Oregon schools in 15 out of 20 categories. The 2009-2010 State Schools report card released on October 7 designated all three Sisters schools as "Outstanding," a rating that typically only one in three schools in Oregon achieve.

The federal No Child Left Behind program rates schools on an ever-tightening national scale. All three of Sisters' public schools have "met" standards every year for the five years that the program has been in place.

In a third-party Nelson Report survey taken this year of Sisters High School class of 2005 graduates and their parents, 95 percent reported that they felt that their high school education adequately prepared them for furthering their education or employment. In that same survey 82 percent of the students reported that they continued on to college or other related training.

In a September 13 essay entitled, "Why School Reform Fails," the conclusion of Robert Samuelson, a noted Newsweek columnist, places the blame squarely on shrunken student motivation.

But at Sisters High School, better than 80 percent of the students are involved in athletics or other after-school activities.

During the recent superintendent selection process, candidate Brooke MacNamara noted that

". . . I was (struck) by how engaged the students were, in their classes and in the halls. They were energized, open and friendly. I've been to a lot of schools around the world; I've never seen so many kids so involved."

It would be surprising if this level of quantifiable academic performance didn't bring pride to students, parents and those associated with Sisters' public schools and to the community at large.

And all these facts and figures don't even attempt to directly address the extensive arts, environmental, and international exposure that Sisters students enjoy.

However, if the goal of Sisters' public schools is to prepare their students to be competitive in the world market place, there are some other facts and figures that need to be taken into account.

Almost all of the ratings for U.S. schools are based on test performance, yet a new Time poll found that only one out of five people surveyed felt that testing has had a positive effect in schools.

Although the Sisters schools are performing very well against Oregon state educational criteria, Sisters' students are reporting nationally normed ACT test results just barely above the national average.

Results from the NAEP, an organization chartered to evaluate and compare the performance of the nation's schools, ranks Oregon 25th out of 50 states. The United States in now ranked 15th in a comparison with the 30 most highly developed nations of the world.

The new Sisters school superintendent, Jim Golden, presented his "dashboard gauges'" for Sisters schools at the October 6 board meeting.

These gauges will address many of the performance issues that can be measured today.

But given Oregon's ranking in the nation, and the nation's ranking on the world stage, perhaps those interested in preparing the youth of Sisters for the world stage should be working to develop a more rigorous or perhaps a radically different approach to education.