Oregon Small Schools Initiative

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Small Schools, BIG IMPACT
The Changing Landscape of High School Achievement

The Oregon Small Schools Initiative, the largest high school reform demonstration project in Oregon history, aims to address graduation rates and student achievement by creating small high schools characterized by:

• rigor in the classroom instruction,

• coursework with a high degree of relevance, and

• meaningful relationships.

This preliminary report explores encouraging early outcomes of the Initiative, including quantifiable results and examples of successful practices. In 2009-2010, the final funding year of the Initiative, expanded analysis will continue to reveal trends in student achievement. Additional data and reports will be made available online as open source. For a full report, click here.

Reinventing High Schools
What exactly are small schools? What is unique about their approach to teaching and learning? What exactly happens inside the classroom? How is student learning personalized?

Watch how leaders describe what happens in their school, and hear how the lives of students and teachers are being forever changed in small schools.

Part I: Theory and Design of Small Schools (6:54 minutes)

Part II: Samples of Innovation in the Classroom (5:53 minutes)

View school profiles in the
Initiative or click a town
on the map to go directly to a
specific school.

Graduation Rates
Graduation and dropout rates are two of the most closely watched comparative statistics in education today. Calculating them is complicated. Oregon’s Department of Education recently modified its method of calculation to align with emerging national standards. The new, cohort-based method is oriented around the percentage of freshman who earn a diploma within four years.

Initiative schools have made steady gains with graduation rates. In the 2007-2008 school year, Initiative schools exceeded the Oregon state average graduation rate based on both methods of calculation. View results:
Cohort Graduation Rates, and
Non-Cohort Graduation and Dropout Rates

Get Involved

Thriving schools depend on strong and active community support. Want to get involved?

Get In Contact

Find contact and location information for the Initiative.

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