Oregon Proficiency Project

Employers for Education Excellence and the Oregon Business Council

After two decades of developing high achievement standards for Oregon schools – without seeing corresponding results in student attainment – Oregon’s education leaders are focusing increasingly on improved classroom instruction as the missing link between demanding standards and desired student outcomes.

The Oregon Proficiency Project is one promising component of that effort. Conducted by Employers for Education Excellence (E3) and the Oregon Business Council (OBC), it is being implemented at two small high schools in their final year of participation in the Oregon Small Schools Initiative. The Oregon Proficiency Project is supported by grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which co-funded the larger Initiative that created 38 small schools.

In 2009-10, the Proficiency Project is providing intensive support to Beaverton’s Health and Science School (HS2) and Woodburn’s Academy of International Studies (AIS) as they develop proficiency-based practices in teaching and assessment. HS2 opened a year ago as a stand-alone school dedicated to proficiency practice. AIS, one of four autonomous small schools on the Woodburn campus, has made a strong commitment to adopt proficiency.

Proficiency practice has a number of distinctive attributes. It links curriculum, learning targets, and lesson plans to high postsecondary standards. It involves students in understanding learning targets and the assessment process. It gauges student progress on an ongoing basis through formative assessment. And it allows students to learn at their own pace. Formative assessment includes test taking, but relies just as much on student presentations, student discussion, problem solving, group projects, or other forms of evidence that the student has acquired proficiency. In a proficiency-based system, student grades and transcript credit are based exclusively on demonstrated student proficiency.

With support from the Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) at the University of Washington, the Proficiency Project is working to improve classroom practice at the two school sites as well as strengthen instructional leadership skills and teacher collaboration. This work and its outcomes will be documented on CEL’s website through blog posts, videos, and attached resource material and examples throughout the 2009-10 school year.

The work of the Oregon Proficiency Project is also being informed by a panel of leading Oregon educators, many of them teachers and administrators involved in proficiency practice. Based on field work at the two sites and complementary project research, the panel will make recommendations in 2010 to Oregon’s education policy makers on how to scale and support proficiency-based education.

Proficiency-based education has a grassroots history in Oregon, arising among teachers and principals in school districts such as Beaverton, Redmond, and Scappoose. In the spring of 2008, a conference of state education leaders convened by E3 and OBC cited proficiency-based education as one of the most promising innovations in education delivery. A subsequent white paper growing out of that conference confirmed the impact and promise of proficiency-based instruction among several best practices.