Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek at a 2024 ceremony where she signed a $30 milllion summer school funding bill. Kotek is calling on the state Legislature to allocate record funding to Oregon schools for the 2025-27 biennium, as well as to pass new education accountability laws. (Courtesy of Gov. Tina Kotek’s office)
The Oregon Department of Education would have historic power to intervene in struggling schools and districts across the state under two new bills backed by Gov. Tina Kotek.
Both House Bill 2009 and Senate Bill 141 would bring statutory teeth to the state’s education agency, which has long been treated more like a bureaucratic granting institution and source for school guidance than a regulator, and where top-down school reform has been a choice rather than a mandate for chronically underperforming districts.
Kotek’s proposal, which had its first public hearing Monday afternoon, comes as Oregon students continue lagging their peers nationwide coming out of the COVID pandemic. The state’s fourth graders had some of the nation’s lowest scores in math and reading on a recent national assessment.
“When things aren’t getting better, I believe it’s on us to lean in, get involved, and work with the school districts to get them on the right track,” Kotek said at a news conference Monday.
Among the biggest changes that would come from Kotek’s education spending accountability bills are two new powers. The first would give the department the ability to require coaches in schools that don’t meet growth targets by 2029.
Those coaches would help with improvement plans, learning interventions, budgeting and progress monitoring over a period of four years. If districts continue to miss growth targets two years in a row, the agency would further be given the power to take over and redirect up to 25% of the district’s State School Fund allocation and Student Investment Account allocations.
House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene and Senate President Rob Wagner joined Kotek at the press conference. Fahey said assessments showing Oregon students struggling to regain ground in key subjects since the pandemic are “unacceptable.”
“Oregon has made significant investments in our K-12 education system, but our student outcomes remain amongst the lowest in the nation,” she said. “That is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to the governor, to the Senate president and I, and it’s unacceptable to educators, families and administrators all around the state.”
Oregon was in the bottom half of states in reading and math scores among fourth and eighth graders in the most recent results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress.
House Bill 2009 had its first public hearing Monday afternoon in the House Committee on Education, and Senate Bill 141 will get a public hearing Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee.
Other components of the legislation would peel back cumbersome grant applications and reporting for districts, streamline data collection at the state education department and make data more publicly accessible. It would also expand benchmarks for student improvement and rely more on interim assessments of student progress throughout the school year rather than on annual standardized tests.
Money matters
Kotek is proposing more accountability for education spending alongside a proposal to send schools more money. She has asked the Legislature to allocate almost $11.4 billion to the State School Fund for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 school years, up from $10.2 billion during the last two-year budget cycle. The fund provides districts with about two-thirds of their annual budgets.
“I don’t believe in writing a blank check, and I don’t believe in accepting the status quo when it comes to delivering for our students,” Kotek told reporters.
Wagner, who previously served on the Lake Oswego School Board, said he expects schools would try to avoid the state taking over a quarter of the district’s budget at all costs.
“I can tell you from being on a local school board, as soon as this goes into place, you’re gonna see behavior starting to change,” Wagner said. “They’re not going to wait until the state ultimately will need to step in. You’re gonna see school districts starting to align with what the legislation identifies as best practices.”
Four struggling districts have already accepted an invitation from the department to intervene in planning and improvement coaching, according to Tim Boyd, the education department’s director of district and school effectiveness. He told lawmakers at the House Education Committee meeting that the agency has capacity to provide support for meeting growth targets to about 10 districts every two years.
“We would need significant additional staffing,” Boyd said of the new requirements for intervention under House Bill 2009. “If we just consider that 10% of districts in the state did not meet those growth targets, we would be requiring 19 school districts to participate in the program.”
The lack of capacity at the state education department to handle greater interventions worries Emielle Nischik, executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association. Nischik said in an email that the group supports Kotek’s calls for more accountability, but worries about the agency’s budget and those of districts who spend about 85% of their money on fixed costs and personnel.
“Our school districts have legal commitments and little flexibility in their budgets for spending decisions,” she said.
The bill has the support of the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Oregon Education Association, as well as Charlene Williams, director of Oregon’s Department of Education, who testified in support at the House Education Committee meeting.
Measuring success
The legislation would add two new performance goals to measure district performance: Eighth grade math proficiency, as measured on state standardized tests, and regular attendance among students in kindergarten through second grade.
Eighth grade math proficiency is a strong predictor of a student’s performance in math in high school and likelihood of graduating, and regular attendance in kindergarten through second grade is a strong predictor of future attendance in middle and high school.
The state’s current performance goals include third grade reading proficiency, ninth grade on-track to graduate, and four-and five-year graduation rates.
The legislation would also standardize and incorporate in improvement measurements the results from interim assessments most teachers give to students to see how they are doing mid-year, rather than relying solely on state standardized tests administered near the end of each school year.
Less paperwork
The bills would also attempt to reduce the growing amount of reporting and paperwork districts are required to file each year to the state and federal government in exchange for receiving funds. Kotek told reporters that the goal is to get districts from applying, monitoring and reporting on more than 100 grants per year to just seven.
Williams, the director of the education department, said she recently hired an Interim Deputy Director of Operations — former Oregon Department of Transportation Director Matt Garrett — to start taking on this work.
Garrett and staff would also be expected to study what other states are doing, streamline multiple state and federal grant applications into a single application and reporting process, and find ways to provide multi-year grants to districts and partial upfront funding for initiatives that require big investments.
Transparency
Lastly, the bills would require the education department to develop a dashboard for sharing with the public more of the data it collects about spending, workforce statistics, discipline patterns and student performance and to regularly update the public on statewide and local progress on metrics of student success.
Kotek and Fahey stressed the urgency of the bills to lawmakers and reporters.
“We cannot leave this session without this bill,” Kotek told the House Education Committee members.
Fahey said Oregon can not afford another year at the bottom among states for student outcomes.
“We need genuine accountability and real results for our students now. Oregon students cannot wait for us to get this right down the road,” she told reporters.
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