Seventy Oregon schools found themselves added Thursday to Oregon’s official list of schools that need to do much better for their students.

Most of those schools were mid-sized elementaries in districts including Corvallis, Springfield, Portland and Gresham. McKay High in Salem, Bend’s Mountain View High and Portland’s Mount Tabor Middle School also made the list of schools in serious need of improvement.

They joined nearly 200 schools already singled out for special attention and scrutiny due to rock-bottom achievement by some or most of their students.

All 270 schools will get small to medium federal grants and technical assistance and oversight from the state as they work to generate better outcomes. Some were singled out for improvement based on poor outcomes for one group of students – Latinos in Mountain View’s case, for instance, and black students in Mount Tabor’s.

The updates to that school improvement list were the main upshot of Oregon’s newly issued performance ratings for 1,225 of the state’s public schools. The ratings also give parents, taxpayers, community leaders and school faculties a sense of each school’s strengths and weaknesses and its relative standing to other Oregon schools.

In a change that began last year, the Oregon Department of Education now rates schools on a broader range of metrics, including what share of students they get to attend regularly, their success helping non-native English speakers learn the language and, for high schools, how many freshmen they help stay on track for graduation. High schools hit a new high in the latter category in 2018-19.

As has long been true, schools’ performance also is judged by how many of their students score well on state math, reading and writing tests and how much progress schools help their students make in those subjects over the academic year.

Judged that way, Oregon’s lowest-performing neighborhood schools with more than 50 students were all high-poverty schools: Boise-Eliot/Humboldt and Sitton elementaries in Portland, Weddle Elementary in Salem and Lorna Byrne Middle School in Cave Junction.

KairosPDX, a Portland charter school whose performance the state had not previously rated, also was rated among the very lowest performing in the state. Kairos’ rating was based in part on the year-over-year gains made by the small number of its students who were tested in both spring 2018 and spring 2019: 16 children.

The state no longer identifies high-performing schools. But based on the state’s ratings on individual categories, such as students’ progress in math skills over the year and the share of students who read and write well, Oregon’s best performing neighborhood schools are Clackamas High, Victor Point Elementary in Silverton, Lake Oswego High, Laurelhurst K-8 and Alameda Elementary in Portland, Forest Hills and Westridge elementaries in Lake Oswego and Riverdale High. Two Beaverton magnet high schools, the International School of Beaverton and Science & Technology High, also registered top-notch performance.

Clackamas High’s achievement was arguably the most notable since it has the highest rate of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals, 25%.

Federal law requires states to evaluate each schools’ performance on a yearly basis and to make those ratings available to parents and the public. But Oregon makes those ratings hard for the public to see, and to date, no news outlet besides The Oregonian/OregonLive has reported on this year’s ratings.

In its news release about the new performance ratings, the Oregon Department of Education didn’t mention it had issued ratings, let alone name schools it found to have bottom-tier performance. Instead, the release focused on the plateauing of Oregon’s very high chronic absenteeism rate – 20% – after four straight years of the rate worsening.

The performance reports, issued Thursday, were the first to show how much progress schools helped their students make during the 2018-19 school year.

Based on how students performed on reading and writing tests the previous year or years, nearly 100 elementary and middle schools helped their students make impressive gains including Gilbert Park and Menlo Park in the David Douglas district of East Portland, Durham Elementary in Tigard-Tualatin and Butler Creek Elementary in the Centennial District that spans the Portland-Gresham border. All four of those large elementary schools serve a hefty share of low-income students.

Portland Public Schools stood out at the other end of the spectrum. Among the 57 elementary and middle schools where students made very little progress in reading and writing over the school year, 14 were in Portland. No other district had more than five. They included six of Portland’s middle schools: Beaumont, George, Harriet Tubman, Ockley Green, Roseway Heights and Mount Tabor.

The same was true for the district in math, although less starkly so. Nine of the 78 schools that produced the smallest year-over-year gains for their students in math were in Portland. Again, they included Ockley Green, Tubman and Mount Tabor along with six elementary schools.

Russell Brown, Portland Public Schools’ chief of systems performance, noted that a handful of the district’s schools elicited big gains from their students and others achieved solid growth. But, he acknowledged, the school board’s commitment to closing achievement gaps for Latino, black, Pacific Islander and Native American students won’t be fulfilled if schools don’t deliver big year-over-year growth for those students.

“To be blunt, we didn’t get it done last year,” Brown said. “We recognize the importance of growth and that it needs to be happening more widely across the system.”

Release of this year’s performance ratings was much more subdued than last year’s, which happened abruptly and to great public attention. That’s because Gov. Kate Brown’s hand-picked state schools chief ordered the release delayed until after her hotly contested reelection race was decided. The day The Oregonian published a front-page story about Oregon Department of Education head Colt Gill’s decision, he reversed course, acknowledging the large public backlash.

In its news release, the state Education Department urged parents to look at the two-page report it issued about their children’s school or schools.

“The data points represent a more comprehensive approach to evaluating and measuring a school’s impact on students,” the release said. “In five minutes or less, parents can get the comprehensive look at their school or district that they’ve been requesting.”

They won’t, however, find a school’s ratings. To find those, a person must bore deeply into the department’s website and know to click on a link called “accountability details.” Or they can find it on OregonLive in an easily searchable color-coded database.

In an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Gill said parents, educators and other community members can use the information in the performance reports to help guide their thinking on how best to spend the new money coming to schools in 2020-21 from the new tax on businesses gross receipts. He urged people to seek out the information and use it for that purpose.

-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@oregonian.com; @chalkup