Gates, Meyer foundations give Oregon schools $10 million

PORTLAND – Oregon schools will get $10.6 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Oregon-based Meyer Memorial Trust, with the lion’s share of the money going to the Portland school district, Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s top education adviser and others said Wednesday.

The grants, which are to be formally announced today, are designed to help Portland and the state in the ongoing push to improve high school graduates’ readiness for college and the workforce beyond, James Sager said.

Kulongoski pledged that Oregon would be one of 13 states that raised high school standards at a Washington, D.C., meeting last February attended by 34 of the nation’s governors.

At that meeting, Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave a withering assessment of the nation’s high schools, dismissing existing models as obsolete, and calling for high schools to be redesigned to “meet the needs of the 21st century.”

Both the Gates Foundation and the Meyer Trust have been deeply involved in school reform issues over the past few years. In Oregon the two have previously banded together to bankroll an initiative aimed primarily at helping large high schools subdivide into smaller “schools-within-a-school,” to give students more academic focus and guidance from teachers.

But this grant marks their first foray into Oregon’s ongoing push to raise high school graduation standards, on the heels of reports that about one-third of all Oregon students don’t graduate from high school.