Oak Park Elementary School District 97’s efforts to craft its highly anticipated “Portrait of an 8th Grade Graduate” are moving into its third version after officials incorporated months’ worth of community feedback into it.
Data and feedback analysis will be taking place this month by senior leadership from the district office, school principals, the teacher design team and the affinity groups that participated in the fall, officials said.
According to Eboney Lofton, chief learning and innovation officer, the affinity groups included Black families, multilingual families, families with students with special needs, and LGBTQ+ families. Oak Park senior residents also participated.
The data was collected over months and included 16 feedback sessions held over 10 schools, three virtual sessions and a PTO listening session. Feedback was also received online through the districts Let’s Talk portal, as well as a middle school survey conducted at both Brooks and Julian Middle School.
Oak Park Elementary School District 97 has been working on getting the district through early-stage planning of designing a portrait, an idea that was introduced to the district by Supt. Ushma Shah, who had seen the work conducted in other districts.
Portrait of a Graduate is not a new concept. School districts across the country have implementing them for the past 15 years.
According to national magazine EducationWeek, at least 17 states have pushed the “traditional definition” of what it means to be successful in school. Traditionally, this would have solely been seen through a lens of academic achievement: good grades, high GPA, attending college.
But with the concept of social emotional learning moving to the forefront of how educators approach teaching, the idea of portraits that illustrate a “whole” student began gaining popularity.
According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, based in Chicago, social and emotional learning can be defined as the “process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals.”
Several states have begun adopting the idea on a state-wide level and mandated school districts to follow a state-wide portrait. In 2012, South Carolina became one of the first states to adopt them, and codified it into law three years later. Utah, Virginia and Washington state created similar profiles.
The concept of a portrait began to gain traction after the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which permitted state-specific accountability measures to permit states flexibility to craft holistic benchmarks for what students in pre-K through 12th grade should know and do when they graduation.
In Illinois, the decision to sketch a portrait is up to the districts because they have local control, said Lindsay Record, press secretary for the Illinois State Board of Education.
“As long as school districts meet the state graduation requirements, they have local control to establish additional graduation criteria, create a shared vision among the school community, or incorporate learning standards in a way that reflects the unique needs and priorities of each community,” Record said.
In Oak Park, the district is looking at the “bigger picture,” said Shah.
According to Shah, D97 is trying to execute its responsibility to the district’s equity policy and to “redesign the system.”
“That is what the portrait is about,” said Shah. “It is a way to operation-wise these huge ideas that are very difficult to put into practice and this is our first step in trying to transform the district so it works in alignment with the equity policy.”
“We are kind of designing backwards from the end,” she explained. “What is at the end is ‘what exactly are we doing here?’ That is a question that we know all good organizations, first of all, ask themselves and, second of all, know the answer to.”
These portraits can respond to evolving contexts, said Colon Lewis, chief learning officer for Battelle for Kids, a national non-profit organization focused on helping educators design portraits for their district.
“[Educational leaders] are thinking about how the world has changed and what these changes mean for learning experiences for students in schools,” Lewis said.
Lewis explained that each profile is unique to the community it serves and that timelines vary.
“The beautiful thing and also the most confusing thing about this work is that there isn’t a linear path where you finish your portrait where you do this first, this second, this third and next thing you know magical things happened for the kids,” Lewis said.
One thing that is important is for districts to work alongside the community.
“When they involve the community in the creation of the portrait, you are building that stakeholder buy-in so that you can avoid that pushback on the backend,” Lewis said. “If the district did this work in isolation that makes it harder for the community to get behind because they didn’t have input.”
Having student input also helps avoid “pushback,” Lewis said.
The district intends to introduce Version 3 before the start of the 2024-25 school year.
