Background

Like many urban school districts, Portland Public Schools is passionately committed to educational opportunity for all students. The district’s stated policy is to provide every student with access to high quality and student centered instruction, curriculum, support, facilities and other educational resources, even when this means differentiating resources to accomplish this goal.

But as any seasoned educator can tell you: commitment and attainment are two very different things.

“I think we’ve all spent lots of time in spaces where we’re studying the problem, and we’re seeing the same trends and patterns, but most often, we’re short on answers for what to do,” said Dr. Filip Hristić, who spent 16 years as a school principal before becoming Portland Public Schools’ Senior Director for High School Academics.

Much of the challenge of being “short on answers” boils down to resources. Schools are short on time, tools, human capital, and funding. Yet more and more is demanded of them – often from state and federal lawmakers who may be well-intentioned but are out-of-touch with what educators in the classrooms are dealing with everyday.

Portland Public Schools has found an answer, and unlocking one solution – a tool that saves hundreds of hours of staff work in creating strategic school schedules – has led to a cascade of new concepts, ideas and approaches to deal with some of the most complicated and persistent problems schools today are facing.

And it’s showing results.

By fall of 2022, Portland Public Schools had not only recovered to pre-pandemic levels in just one academic year, they showed growth beyond their starting point.

Between the cohorts of 2021 and 2022, students who were prepared for college and career increased 6 percentage points, a 9.6% rate of increase. African American students prepared for college and career increased by 18 percentage points and Hispanic students prepared for college and career increased by 5 percentage points.

It Started With Scheduling

When Portland Public Schools first came to Abl, it was for a clear-cut, precise reason. The district was looking for a modern way to create a school schedule – one that would eliminate countless hours of work by principals, assistant principals, counselors and even administrative assistants who would print the thousands of pages necessary to create complicated master schedules using whiteboards and magnetic tiles. Because the year was 2020, there was a new compelling reason for a digital, visual platform – all the administrators and support staff couldn’t be in the same room working on the schedule. Due to the pandemic, for the first time ever, they were all working from home.

But it wasn’t long before Hristić, then a high school principal, realized Abl’s Scheduler offered many more benefits beyond scheduling.

“It had all kinds of tools and capacities and provided rich, deep data that allowed me to do things that I wasn’t able to do before,” he said.

Abl provides software that can navigate numerous inputs at once. Abl’s Scheduler creates multiple sandbox environments, separate from a school’s Student Information System (SIS), to visualize shifts to schedules, previewing the impact on teacher and student experiences. Users can understand how resources are distributed by switching seamlessly between views of courses, staff, student, and room schedules, and can easily drag and drop courses to build schedules that best support student success. And all of it comes with live support and personalized coaching to create schedules, providing real-time feedback on the impact of every decision.

Before using the Scheduler, Portland Public School’s primary goals in creating a master schedule were making sure minimal conflicts were created for teachers and students so as many students as possible could get the classes they needed to stay on track, and ensuring enough seats were available in those classes. Those tasks alone were so cumbersome and complicated that prioritizing teachers’ schedules for strategic planning time or grouping students in a way that provided needed support seemed like a distant dream.

“It took so much time to get to a point where every kid had a schedule that we really didn’t have the bandwidth to do much beyond that,” Hristić said. “We would just be excited when the schedule was done and a majority of our kids had a full schedule.”

With Abl, Hristić said, accomplishing those goals is the easy part. Portland school administrators and counselors soon began to understand all the tools that would help them not only create a workable schedule, but a schedule strategically designed for the best learning outcomes.

“Now, we’re eliminating the predictability and disproportionality in which student groups are most likely to achieve post-secondary success,” Hristić said.

Using data analysis to drive campus planning and strategy

Armed with this new way of visualizing data, district leaders moved on to Abl’s Educational Opportunity Analysis. These new tools unveiled an innovative set of strategies to achieve Portland Public Schools’ long held educational opportunity goals.

“What we realized is now we can focus on these other priorities. Like prioritize collaborative opportunities for teachers to have common planning periods, or be intentional about which students are scheduled for which courses,” Hristić said. “Or be strategic about looking – even before we start scheduling – to see which students are forecasted for what courses and if there are any changes we want to make there.”

In other words, the tool went far beyond a schedule. It allowed educators to advance strategic initiatives in a meaningful way.

With Abl’s digital tools and expert coaching, PPS analyzed more than 5,000 student transcripts to identify key enrollment and access trends. A year after the initial analysis in 2020, the district partnered with stakeholders to provide additional school-level analysis and engage in campus action planning. The tools are now guiding policy and setting targets, including ensuring all students are successfully meeting indicators for postsecondary success.

One of the ways PPS has been able to operationalize the data is through forecasting. Abl’s advanced course recommendation tool allows administrators to quickly identify students who have the potential to succeed in rigorous pathways, but who aren’t signing up for those classes.

Once they’re identified, counselors receive a list of students to reach out to and encourage. The tools also allow for course planning to ensure students are in cohorts that can contribute to their success, such as social groups or specific pairings, scheduling a language support teacher to be available in core class for English language learners, and other creative strategies.

While all campuses are working toward district-wide goals, they use their own site-level analytics and reports to determine areas of focus.

“We’ve seen this really helps center the conversation at individual campuses,” said Carol Wright, a Customer Success Manager at Abl, who provides school-level coaching and support. “At one campus, we’re talking about a focus on every student completing their third or fourth year in a CTE program. At another campus, I was working with a brand new team that had never scheduled before. Their goal was to make sure their audit of course requests was accurate and every student was enrolled in the classes they needed.”

Wright said yet another campus decided to focus on CTE recruitment and developed an outreach program for eighth graders to get them excited about CTE pathways.

“The individual goals are based on where the campuses currently are, but they are all tied to meeting the district’s goals,” she said. “It’s not about different goals – it’s about how we are going to get better as a team.”

One specific goal is to prioritizing representative student enrollment in college preparatory coursework, such as four years of math and science. When students submit their course requests, Abl’s tools allow campuses to see immediately what the demographic breakdown is and identify where counselors may need to intervene.

The right data at the right time

District leaders and education policy experts have long looked at graduation rates as one of the single most important metrics for high schools. But graduation rates are a lagging indicator, meaning once you have the data it’s too late to help those students. The most accurate – and most actionable – predictor of success is the intensity of the high school experience.

Abl’s tools offer leading indicators that can predict a student’s success in high school and beyond. One of the ways Abl is able to do this is through the Academic Intensity Measure (AIM) that provides critical information regarding inconsistent outcomes between student groups. AIM scores provide a picture of an individual student’s academic journey over four years of high school. Higher AIM scores correlate to college and career readiness. Portland Public Schools have used Abl’s tools, including the Academic Intensity framework, to focus on focus specific things: persistence, advanced coursework, course progression, and consistent student experiences.

Hristić is closely studying AIM scores with his high school principals.

Hristić acknowledged that student motivation comes into play when looking at what classes students are choosing. But, he said, more frequently it’s structures in place that govern a student’s course selection. He pointed to several schools where, instead of treating advanced courses as optional electives, all students register for Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or college credit courses. By incorporating advanced courses into the core curriculum, these schools are ensuring that all students are exposed to college-level coursework. The deep transcript analysis provided by Abl shines a light on how these schools addressed inconsistent educational opportunities that are commonplace in most schools.

In order to ensure that advanced course classes are student-centered, Portland school leaders leverage a variety of Abl’s tools throughout the scheduling process.

For example, teams of principals, teachers, and counselors regularly examine their student rosters to identify who should be in rigorous courses – who has signed up for them and who hasn’t. Counselors follow up with individual conversations, letting students know their teacher believes in them and in their potential for success.

The Results

In just three and a half years – including a pandemic that was the single greatest disruptor to public education in a century – Portland Public Schools have shown impressive progress. In 2020, 66% of seniors were ready or highly ready for post-secondary success as measured by AIM scores. The disaggregated data showed clear disparities in the academic rigor based on demographics.

In 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, PPS began setting goals to increase student academic intensity. One goal was to increase the number of students completing four years of math, as opposed to the minimum three-year requirement.

Not surprisingly, AIM scores decreased during the pandemic, particularly for students of color, English language learners, and students with Individual Education Plans. But by fall of 2022, Portland Public Schools had not only recovered to 2020 levels in just one academic year, they showed growth beyond their starting point.

Between the cohorts of 2021 and 2022, Portland saw a 2 percentage point increase in students taking three or more years in a single career pathway, from 28% to 30%. This school year, district leaders are working with secondary school administrators to establish additional CTE Pathways, to increase student access to AP and IB courses, and to broaden their portfolio of college dual credit courses.

“I think all school leaders are interested in figuring out how to make our commitments to students tangible and operational. How do we actually make improvements,” Hristic said. “This is the answer – data-driven analysis, intelligent scheduling, and policy and practice adjustments in order to increase student success in high school and beyond.”