Making investments where it matters most at Beaverton School District.

AuthorKavanagh, Shayne

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Beaverton School District, located in suburban Portland, Oregon, was facing many of the same challenges for its 40,000 students as other districts across the country with graduation rates foremost among them. Oregon's 69 percent graduation rate is one of the worst of any state. (1) The national average is 80 percent. At 77 percent, Beaverton was doing better than the state average, but there was clearly significant room for improvement.

Part of the reason for the low graduation rates was another challenge that Beaverton shared with other districts: a persistent achievement gap between the mainstream student populations and students from underperforming segments of the student body, including English language learners, special education students, and students from families living in poverty. These groups had graduation rates of 65 percent, 62 percent, and 66 percent, respectively.

Coming out of the 2008 Great Recession, Beaverton was under pressure to restore services that had been cut during the revenue downturn. However, the district superintendent recognized that trying to play catch-up and simply attempting to restore things to the way they had been before the recession was not the best way to improve student achievement. Instead, the district needed a new planning and budget process that would align its resources with its goals.

Beaverton used GFOA's Smarter School Spending program to guide the district in designing and implementing its own approach. The most important feature of this new method of budgeting was making what the district referred to as "strategic investments." The district chose to fund specific programs that were tied to the academic needs of students, targeting the areas where students struggled most. Specifically, strategic investments were aligned with two of Beaverton's most pressing needs: improving graduation rates and closing the achievement gap.

STRATEGIC INVESTMENTS IN GRADUATION RATES

Improving graduation rates over the long term would require interventions with underperforming students in early grades; this approach would ultimately be less expensive than waiting to provide additional instruction for students in high school. Designing an intervention for the early grades would require Beaverton to understand the reasons behind why students struggle in high school. Smarter School Spending advocates the use of root cause analysis to work backward from the immediate problem (students not graduating high school) to the underlying problems, allowing an organization to develop the most effective and permanent solution. Using root cause analysis and examining student performance data, the district first found that failing algebra and physics in 9th grade was correlated with dropping out of high school. Looking deeper still, the district realized that poor basic math skills were a root cause of struggles in algebra and physics. Hence, students that don't do well in the foundational skills taught in middle school math classes were unlikely to do well in 9th grade algebra or physics.

Hence, the solution was not to remediate kids after they fail 9th grade algebra or physics, but to prevent it from happening in the first place. Therefore, the district implemented a program called "Grade 8.5" for students who don't meet benchmarks (2) in 8th grade math. They are invited to attend summer school at the high school they will be attending in the fall to revisit key math skills, become familiar with the school and teachers, and...

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