Average proficiency in all subjects among Oregon students remains, on average, about 10 percentage points below 2019, pre-pandemic, proficiency levels.
(Photo by Getty Images)
There was good news and bad news in the data released over the past few weeks on how Oregon’s school kids are doing. Then, the bad news got worse, and so did the responses of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
First, the good news. Oregon’s high school graduation rate ticked up to nearly 82% last year, a slight improvement from the previous year and a big improvement since 2016, when Oregon voters approved Measure 98 and boosted funding for career and technical education. Notably, the graduation rate for high schoolers who took two or more of those courses climbed to about 98% last year.
That was exactly what supporters of Measure 98, myself included, had hoped for. Kudos to Stand for Children Oregon, a nonprofit advocating for better educational outcomes, for sponsoring the measure and insisting on adding a program that offers extra support for high school freshmen to get them on track to graduation.
Now for the bad and even worse news.
The latest data on math and reading test scores for Oregon students was more alarming than we first thought, as The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. When adjusted for household income and demographics, our kids are not “near the bottom,” they are “at the bottom” of all 50 states!
The responses from the governor and the education establishment at the state and local level were, according to the report, “crickets.” But even worse was the defensiveness of some Democratic lawmakers and the reflexive overreach of their Republican counterparts.
When presented with the test score data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, two Democratic legislators on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Education rallied to the cause of defending the indefensible. Test scores don’t tell the whole story, they said; many kids are smarter than the test results would suggest.
That’s a tired argument we’ve been hearing for years now from defenders of the status quo. Its faults should be obvious. The national assessment rankings were gathered from kids nationwide — good and bad test takers alike. So, unless one has reasons to believe that Oregon kids are exceptionally bad test takers than kids in the other 49 states, there’s no basis for clinging to excuses of this kind.
The Democratic lawmakers who trotted out this old argument didn’t offer any evidence to support it. What I heard instead was more like a rationalization than a reckoning and a continuing refusal to recognize the consequences of decline in our K-12 school system.
Not that their Republican counterparts were any more reasonable. They led with vouchers for private school alternatives, which one can view as both raising a white flag for our public school system and waving a red flag at Democrats. But, compared to silence and denial, at least one can say Republicans came out swinging.
I feel like we’re in the midst of that scene in the movie, Ferris Bueller’s “Day Off,” where the teacher keeps asking a classroom of the bored and the surly: Anyone? Anyone?
Is anyone offering a compelling and reasonable response to the report cards we’ve been seeing from our K-12 schools over the past decade?
For years now, the hands being raised in support of education reform in Oregon have been coming from outside the Legislature and the education establishment. Nonprofits like Stand for Children, Foundations for a Better Oregon and the former Chalkboard Project have been developing, fine-tuning and advancing the best strategies for fixing our K-12 system. Meanwhile, lawmakers, the state’s Department of Education, local school boards, district administrators and the teachers’ union have become second responders at best to the most compelling ideas of these organizations.
I was reminded of this dynamic when I read last week’s Capital Chronicle commentary by Sarah Pope, executive director of Stand for Children, and Christine Vernier, co-founder of Vernier Science Education.
Their commentary focused on the need to expand the state’s Early Learning Success Initiative for third-grade reading — a prescription for reform that goes beyond setting goals to getting things done with techniques, such as regularized tutoring and ongoing summer school programs, that have been forced to the forefront by the tireless efforts of these nonprofit organizations, their donors and volunteers. Even more importantly, Pope and Vernier sounded like those new, high-energy teachers in a classroom who are able to remind us what we’re here for and convince us why it matters.
As Pope wrote to her organization’s members last weekend, “We can do hard and important things in Oregon, and our steadily climbing graduation rates are proof of that.”
No tired old excuses. No jockeying for advantage in response to failure. Just a confident and clear-eyed prescription for what to do next.
Anyone up for that? Anyone?
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