Portland's high-stakes school plan will be unveiled Monday night | OregonLive.com

Portland's high-stakes school plan will be unveiled Monday night | OregonLive.com

Portland's high-stakes school plan will be unveiled Monday night

By Kimberly Melton, The Oregonian

April 26, 2010, 11:00PM

View full sizeStephanie Yao/The OregonianPortland Public Schools Superintendent Carole Smith, shown here meeting with a student advisory committee in 2007, will unveil her long-awaited plan tonight to reorganize the district's high schools.On Monday night, Portland Superintendent Carole Smith is expected to recommend the most sweeping changes in the history of Oregon's largest school district.

She wants to do something almost no other big-city superintendent has done in recent years -- upend the city's high schools to end racial and income disparities without a judge forcing the district to do so.

Read previous coverage

Read earlier storiesabout the Portland school district's effort to overhaul high schools.

Smith's main goal is to help reduce the stubbornly high dropout rate -- less than 60 percent of Portland Public Schools' high school students graduate in four years -- and end glaring inequities between the curriculum offered to most of the city's white and middle-class students and its minority and low-income teens.

Her plan would affect students and families in every sector of the city, particularly east of the Willamette River. One or more high schools would close, many schools' attendance boundaries would be redrawn, and the wide-open neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers that have been a 30-year hallmark of Portland high schools could end.

Most big-city school districts have the same sort of disparities Portland does -- big, popular, high-achieving high schools in some parts of town and

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