‘Solvable problems’: superintendent outlines reading improvement plans at chamber lunch

Andrea Castañeda, superintendent of the Salem-Keizer School District, was blunt in her assessment of students’ academic achievement across the state.

“Oregon should be worried.”

She showed a room full of business leaders a graph of 8th grade math test results — for the state and her district. Just 29% of Oregon 8th graders were proficient in math when tested last spring. In Salem-Keizer, it was just under 23%.

Her Monday speech to a Salem Area Chamber of Commerce-organized lunch walked a line between concern and optimism. She said it’s clear that both Salem and Oregon have needed to improve basic education for a long time. Locally, efforts to do so are starting to pay off, she said. 

“These are solvable problems. Places all throughout the country have solved them. Districts have solved them. There are turnaround stories everywhere. Oregon doesn’t have them yet, but Salem-Keizer is on the way,” she said.

Castañeda is in her third year as superintendent of the state’s second largest district, overseeing the education of about 38,000 students and managing 5,600 employees.

State tests last spring showed a slight increase in the share of district students who can read and do math at the levels expected for their grade, but the numbers remain far lower than educators, politicians and community leaders would like. Just one in four of the district’s 2,700 third graders were proficient in reading last year.

The Salem Health Foundation was among the sponsors of the talk, with Chief Development Officer Jim Bauer introducing the speakers.

“Communities with higher educational achievement enjoy lower health care costs, longer life expectancies and greater economic stability,” he said during the introduction. “Simply put, when our schools succeed, our entire community succeeds.”

Castañeda said it’s taken time to get pieces in place to enable sustained and faster improvements in reading. Those include having a common system of in-class tests that regularly show teachers how students are progressing, ongoing training for teachers on how to teach reading and preparations for a new elementary-level reading and writing curriculum that will roll out next fall.

She said with those pieces in place, the district should improve the share of students who are proficient by 3 to 5 percentage points each year. At that pace, it would take at least five years before half of the district’s third graders are proficient in reading.

Castañeda said moving more quickly would indicate the district is prioritizing results that look good on paper over actually improving student learning meaningfully.

For example, about 200 third graders who took state tests last spring scored just below the state’s cutoff point to be deemed “proficient” in reading.

“What I am uninterested in is moving these 200 kids, the ones who are closest to the line of proficiency, just jumping them over the bar,” she said. “I’m not interested in the headline that this produces because that is not real change for our community.”

She said she’s more encouraged by data showing fewer district students last spring with very low scores on the state test. 

Joining the superintendent was Scott Elementary Principal Nubia Green, who spoke on the importance of building relationships between students and staff.

“We pair a staff member with a student who has a significantly lower attendance to incentivize them to come and so they built that relationship with that attendance mentor,” she said. Those relationships mean staff are excited when students hit their goals and stop needing the one on one help.

“They have that relationship for life,” Green said.

Castañeda asked listeners in the room to fill out a brief survey toward the beginning and end of her speech, rating how they felt the district was performing academically and the clarity of its plans for improving.

The results showed she won over a share of the audience, though most who filled out the survey remained concerned about the district’s academic progress.

At the start of her talk, just 13% said the district’s academic progress and trajectory were adequate or good. By the end, 20% agreed.

Nearly half gave Salem-Keizer schools good marks on the clarity of its purpose and vision. That was up from 36% at the start of the speech.

Keeping a sustained focus on academic progress amid other challenges facing schools, including budget cuts, will be key, Castañeda said. That means ensuring the school year isn’t cut further in response to budget challenges, she said, and making sure teachers have the materials they need to teach reading.

Her goal is to make progress for all of the district’s nearly 3,000 third graders, she said.

“Teachers taught our children to read. …They have the skill and it’s them, it’s our teachers, that are going to move 3000 kids,” she said.

Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.

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