Oregon’s low youth literacy rates spurred a new candidate to announce a write-in campaign for governor on Monday.

Most Oregonians have at least some experience with the candidate, but it’s never held elected office before. It’s not even human.

J. Schuberth, a former teacher for Portland State University’s general education program and one of the founders of reading advocacy group Oregon Kids Read, launched the Pencil for governor campaign Monday to raise awareness about persistent reading proficiency issues among the state’s students. To “get education on the ballot” Schuberth created and funded the Pencil Political Action Committee in early February with $14,000 of their own money.

“It sends a message that if Pencil starts showing up in the primary, that the governors might want to pay attention to this issue and start doing something,” Schuberth said. And if Pencil barely makes a mark, it will still be worth it, they added.

“We have a crisis. We want people to be talking about it,” they explained. “It is not children’s fault. It’s not their parents’ fault. The Department of Education in Oregon is failing our students. There’s a systemic problem that we need to address. And we can fix this.”

Oregon’s fourth and eighth graders scored in the bottom half of all states for reading proficiency in the 2025 National Assessment for Educational Progress, often referred to as. And despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment during the last 25 years, those levels .

Despite making major investments in tutoring, curriculum overhauls and teacher training geared toward improving how reading is taught in Oregon, Gov. Tina Kotek’s Early Literacy Success Initiative has to address the most high-needs students, or to hold schools accountable, Schuberth said.

Calls to modernize reading instruction for kids to align with the large body of cognitive and neuroscience research, and evidence — often referred to as “the science of reading” — have led some states to mandate certain literacy curriculum that can be used in schools, and to require new teachers pass an exam demonstrating knowledge of the science of reading in order to get licensed.

Oregon has not gone as far, but schools receiving Early Literacy Initiative grants must use the money on state-approved materials and teacher trainings.

Schuberth pointed to states including Mississippi, Louisiana and Colorado, which saw improvements in student reading proficiency when their education departments mandated schools use approved reading curriculum and began requiring teachers to demonstrate knowledge in the reading science to get licensed.

Pencil’s campaign also calls for ensuring kids in poverty were adequately counted in the state. Reporting from found the state has been using a formula that results in an undercount of such students for years.

Schuberth appeared in pencil costume Monday at Portland State University along with Sarah Dougher, associate executive director of Portland State’s General Education Program. Dougher said she sees the downstream effects of students’ reading struggles.

“We have majority students from the Portland area here and and we’ve seen since COVID, a real sort of softening of some skill areas, especially persistence in reading and also in writing,” she said.

The department has had to create an increasing amount of material responsive to a screen reader, or make videos of people reading material to share with students alongside the readings.

“We don’t have a reading center at Portland State. We expect that when students come here, they’re going to read,” Dougher said.“But the thing is that people’s orientation towards reading, because of their spotty background in the public system, they need more ways in, and it’s our responsibility to meet them where they’re at.”

Schuberth said the campaign is about taking advantage of the “Pencil pulpit” to make education one of the biggest issues in the governor’s race.

“When we look around at so many of the other problems, education is where it starts. If you don’t know how to read, you cannot compete for jobs. Addiction issues, a lot of our homeless issues, a lot of these issues come from people who have not been given the education that they deserve,” they said.

A write-in campaign for a pencil wouldn’t work — Oregon law requires write-in candidates to meet the same criteria as every other candidate. In Oregon, candidates for governor must be human, at least 30 years old and a U.S. citizen who has resided in Oregon for the past three years.

But Oregonians inspired to write in “Pencil” on their primary ballots can still do so — as long as they use a black or blue pen.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.

State test results released last fall in math and English scores since 2024, yet still lagged far behind the standard set before the COVID pandemic. Meanwhile, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam administered biannually to hundreds of thousands of students, recently placed Oregon in the country. Adjusted for student demographics and poverty levels, it ranked 50th among states in fourth-grade math and reading, 49th in eighth-grade math, and 47th in eighth-grade reading.

Now local observers are pointing to Oregon’s relatively brief school year, as well as high rates of absenteeism, as one explanation for the dismal results. In released by the nonprofit group Stand for Children, researchers show that sizable gaps in seat time between Oregon and other states — and even larger ones separating districts within Oregon — compound over years into massive disparities in opportunities to learn. Advocates argue that loose rules governing how states report attendance data also contribute to the problem.

Sarah Pope, the executive director of Stand for Children’s Oregon affiliate, said her state was “definitely on the low end” in terms of instructional time made available to children. On average, their school year lasts 165 days (compared with 179 days in the U.S. as a whole), and students receive 9 percent fewer instructional hours than their counterparts around the country; over time, that adds up to well over one year of missed schooling.

“When we tell people that we’re 9 percent short, their eyes glaze over because people can’t imagine what that means,” Pope remarked. “But when we tell them it’s a year difference over the course of a K–12 experience, which is like graduating as a junior, they’re like, ‘Oh gosh.’”

The group’s report notes that Oregon is one of just 10 states that sets no minimum of total school days per year, allowing districts to set their own schedules so long as they hit an annual minimum of instructional hours (900 for students enrolled in kindergarten, elementary school, and middle school, and slightly more for high schoolers). In practice, the state’s average K–8 student receives 1,111 hours of designated school time each year, considerably below the national average of 1,231 hours for K–12 students. Only Maine, Nevada, and Hawaii provide less schooling.

Those figures are drawn from by Brown University economist Matthew Kraft, which also found that differences in instructional time between states can be dwarfed by those within states. By the end of elementary school, for example, Oregon students living in a district at the bottom of the state’s school time rankings receive a full 1.4 years less education than those in a district at the top. The gap explodes to nearly three years’ worth of instruction by the time those students graduate high school.

Aside from the length of the school year, the pandemic-era spike in chronic absenteeism (the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year) has further eroded the amount of time that kids spend learning. And while that trend has proven stubbornly persistent in nearly every jurisdiction, Oregon’s spike has been higher and longer-lasting than most. , a think tank based in Washington, D.C., Oregon’s rate of chronic absence reached a stunning peak of 38 percent in 2022–23, only falling to 33.5 percent by 2024–25 (compared with a national average of 22 percent the same year). 

Kraft, who on the subject before the education committee of the Oregon House of Representatives, said it was “wildly inequitable” for students in different parts of a state to enjoy vastly less time with teachers than those elsewhere. Both researchers and elected officials needed to examine the intersection of poor attendance and inadequate instructional time more closely, he continued.

“The outliers offering substantially less time have wound up with far less learning opportunities for students,” Kraft observed in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “Curriculum is built around having x amount of minutes in a day to teach math or science, and when teachers and students don’t have that, the results illustrate the negative consequences.”

‘We should not be proud’

Those consequences could be reversed with policy changes, according to Stand for Children’s analysis. 

Using existing estimates of the of and on student test scores, the authors calculated that Oregon would dramatically improve its NAEP performance by lifting statutory requirements for schooling time and cutting absenteeism to pre-COVID rates. If those conditions were both reached, they found, Oregon students enrolled in kindergarten today would move from 48th in the nation in reading to sixth-place by the beginning of high school. A somewhat smaller leap, from 49th place to 25th place, could be achieved in math scores.

As of yet, no such sweeping changes are in the offing. If anything, a combination of diminished enrollment figures — the product of both lower fertility and a COVID-era flight from public schools — has led at least some districts to consider paring the school year back further. Reynolds School District, which enrolls around 10,000 students in the suburbs east of Portland, from its school calendar in response.

During , the state was around the country where districts chose to compress learning time. It has also been one of the national leaders in popularizing the four-day school week, with operating on a truncated schedule. While sometimes popular with family and school staff, that shift often leads to a deterioration in learning and comparatively few benefits in faculty retention.

Given Oregon’s clear decline in academic achievement, Stand for Children’s Pope said that district leaders should refuse to shorten their school year at the very least. Her organization is backing the passage of , a bill that would require state authorities to report on absenteeism four times during the school year, rather than just once, as is now mandated. Such a law — scheduled for hearings before the state Senate’s education committee in the coming days — would allow for school systems to conduct earlier outreach to families when their students are at risk of becoming chronically absent.

She also supports the adoption of a more exacting definition of learning time. At the moment, she said, up to 60 of the required instructional hours can be filled through activities like professional development and parent-teacher conferences, which occur when children aren’t in school.

“Do we think it’s right that our definition of instructional time has an allowance for approximately 10 days when kids don’t have to be there? And it can count for instructional minutes?” Pope asked.

Emielle Nischik, the executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, said that the state’s students deserved “as much time in school as students around the country. But she added that more instructional hours and better data reporting could only be gained through increases in education spending. 

“Oregon school funding adjusted for inflation has essentially been flat since the 1990s, even as Oregon and the federal government have added staffing and services requirements that cost money,” Nischik wrote in an email. “We are open to any discussion of increasing class time as long as it comes with the understanding that more days will cost more money.”

Last summer, Gov. Tina Kotek of $11.3 billion to cover the K–12 system through 2027. According to by the National Education Association, Oregon spent nearly $19,000 per pupil in daily attendance in the 2023–24 school year, ranking 20th among all states. 

Kraft compared the resource of time to that of money. While lawsuits have been won to force states and districts to spend more money on schools, no such litigation has focused on learning time as a necessary educational input. 

“That has not been the case around time, in large part because schools are following the law, and the minimums we set in many states — not all, but many — are very, very low. We should not be proud to have met these minimums.”

Nearly 30,000 Oregon students took advantage of literacy-focused summer school programs and most made learning gains in 2025, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

The findings, shared in a recent from the agency, show that the $35 million per year in consistent funding for summer school that lawmakers in law last year is working, according to education officials. They were supposed to discuss the findings Tuesday in the Legislature’s Joint Subcommittee on Education, but the meeting was cut short due to scheduling changes.

“Continued investment in summer learning is not only justified; it is a proven, accountable strategy that delivers measurable returns for students, communities, and the state,” officials wrote in the analysis.

Districts were required to report measured learning outcomes, but how learning was measured was largely left to districts, some of whom reported standardized test scores or teacher and student feedback, along with credit recovery numbers. Improving outcome measures and tracking gains over time are among the education department’s priorities for improving the summer learning programs in the year ahead, according to the presentation officials had prepared for lawmakers.

Applications for funding for upcoming 2026 summer programs on February 20 and grantees will be announced in April.

More than 106 school districts in 30 of the state’s 36 counties received funding for programs in 2025, and many partnered with community groups to reach a broader range of students, according to the analysis. Of the nearly 30,000 students who participated in programs, more than half were elementary aged kids in kindergarten through 5th grade. Another 31% were in high school and 15% were middle schoolers. Many were English-language learners and most attend school in rural areas.

“The big takeaway for us is, as the education department noted, the force-multiplier effect of those partnerships,” said Louis Wheatley, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Foundations for a Better Oregon.

The group was among those advocating for lawmakers to pass consistent summer school funding last year.

“This aligns what we see in tons of research on the power of partnerships with community-based organizations, particularly in rural regions,” Wheatley said.

Improving student literacy was the primary focus of all summer school programs, and 77% of schools reported that students maintained or improved their reading and writing skills, according to the report. Most of the high school programs focused on credit recovery, and 80% of high schoolers who participated earned credits needed to graduate, mostly in English Language Arts and Math.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.

The one in six Oregonians who rely on federal SNAP food and nutrition assistance to pay for groceries each month will be left with nothing in November due to the ongoing government shutdown, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Oregon Department of Human Services.

The federal government funds nearly all the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, with states administering the program. But USDA to states on Oct. 10 that they should not distribute November assistance if Congress’ lapse in appropriations continued, because there would be insufficient funding to send to states for their program beneficiaries.

On Monday, the USDA notified states that there would be no November funding, and Oregon’s human services agency on Monday notified recipients they would not be receiving the assistance after Oct. 31.

Oregon’s acting human services director, Liesl Wendt, said in a statement that they would keep SNAP recipients informed throughout the shutdown about any further delays or lapses in assistance beyond November.

“In the meantime, during this time of uncertainty, we encourage everyone who receives SNAP to familiarize themselves with the free food resources in their community and to make a plan for what they will do if they do not receive their food benefits in November on time” Wendt said.

More than 42 million Americans, and more than 750,000 Oregonians, rely on the program. Among Oregon recipients, more than one-quarter are children and nearly 20% are adults 65 and older.

“This is a cruel and unacceptable situation. President Trump should focus on feeding families by negotiating a deal with Congress, not doing other things like deploying troops in American cities on taxpayers’ dime,” Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Trump has said he would ensure back pay to federal immigration and border police, Transportation Security Administration police, Secret Service and FBI agents when the shutdown ends. He and his administration have not been clear about what assistance, if any, will be offered retroactively to SNAP beneficiaries when the shutdown ends.

USDA has already in tariff revenue into its Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, through Oct. 31.

The shutdown started Oct. 1 after Congress failed on a short-term government spending bill.

Senate Democrats have pushed for negotiations to extend enhanced tax credits meant to help Americans afford health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, which are set to expire by the end of the year.

Republicans have insisted on passing a short-term government funding bill that does not address rising insurance premiums.

The GOP mega bill passed by Congressional Republicans in July includes $200 billion in cuts to SNAP during the next decade, along with new work and income requirements that are likely to cause about 2 million Americans to lose assistance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com.

But recently, the state’s legislature has taken steps aimed at rolling back some of the Beaver State’s early care and education progress — and now it’s on a path toward becoming the canary in the coal mine for child care retrenchment. 

Child care advocates have had their eyes on Oregon for some time as the state has developed and implemented its vision for a comprehensive statewide early childhood system focused on access and equity. In 2016, the state launched Preschool Promise, a statewide publicly funded pre-K system for children from low- and moderate-income families. In 2020, voters in Multnomah county in Portland approved the Preschool for All measure, which is designed to build a universal pre-K system while protecting infant and toddler slots, all funded by a tax on high-earning households in the county.

But Oregon’s notable progress in early childhood is now on rocky ground as the state pulls back on its funding for these systems. 

In June, the Democratic-controlled Oregon Legislature $20 million from Preschool Promise, a 10% decrease that, per Oregon Public Broadcasting, could necessitate cutting slots for up to 640 students. Other early childhood programs unrelated to preschool, such as those focused on early health and parenting education, will also see substantial cuts.

Separately, in June, there was a last-minute attempt by Oregon legislators to slip an amendment on the interaction between state and local tax systems that would have sunset Multnomah County’s universal pre-K system by 2027 by forbidding Multnomah from further collecting the tax. The effort was supported by Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, who that “If Portland does not rebound in the way we think it can, the downstream impacts on our economy will end up costing our most vulnerable and lowest income Oregonians the most.” Specifically, Kotek and others have expressed . In the face of vociferous opposition by Multnomah politicians and advocates, as well as research suggesting those fears were largely unfounded, the effort .

The driving force behind the Preschool Promise cuts and the proposed wind-down of Multnomah’s universal pre-K program is a poor economic forecast that has led to declining projections of corporate taxes, which is the primary way Oregon funds its statewide early childhood programs. As one of the top exporting states in the nation, Oregon’s economy — and corporate tax base — is particularly exposed to effects from the Trump administration’s tariff policies. The legislature was clearly, of Democratic Sen. Lisa Reynolds, “reluctant” to take these actions. 

The big question is whether Oregon is an outlier or a trendsetter. So far, the evidence points toward trendsetter. While few states with specialized funding sources or especially healthy economies, such as New Mexico and Connecticut, have been making major progress in early care and education, many states have begun taking worrying steps to walk back funding in 2025. That’s not surprising. As states begin to of the Republican reconciliation package, which will require more state backfilling of Medicaid and SNAP funding if they want to avoid benefit cuts, they’re looking for ways to cut costs.

For instance, as of January, many major counties in Colorado, including Denver, have instituted for their state’s child care subsidy program due to underfunding and compliance with Biden-era policy changes, which required increased per-child reimbursement rates and lower parent copays. In May and August, respectively, and also enacted subsidy enrollment freezes. In early September, Indiana announced it was by 10% to 35% — based on the age group of children served — to help close a state budget gap, a move which will likely cause many programs to stop accepting children from families that use subsidies. And Arkansas announced that it was going to a regardless of program quality, which would result in an average rate cut of nearly 20% — and the move after widespread protestation.

In each of these cases, there are state eccentricities at play. Colorado, for example, sets subsidy reimbursement rates and parent copays by county, not at the state level, meaning the new federal regulations have caused uneven consequences. In Indiana, critics point to the state’s new school voucher system as a big reason for their budget shortfall. 

The common theme, however, is that child care keeps finding itself on the chopping block despite all the political champions that have been cultivated across the years.

This retreat, even among states that have been leaders in early learning, sends a major warning signal to advocates, philanthropists and policymakers. The reality is that it’s easier to cut an issue area like child care, which while popular with voters, isn’t particularly powerful politically, than to slash services protected constitutionally, like schools, or those with huge constituencies, like health care or business. State legislators may be reluctant to drop the knife on child care, but we can already see that they will.

Ultimately, a federally-funded solution for child care is needed to smooth out state differences, but so long as states are holding the bag, it is important that as they envision, develop and implement solutions, leaders are seeking out ways to protect the progress they make. That might include creative alliances with family policy advocates working on school-aged or elder care, building sustainable child care funding streams like dedicated trust funds and to early care and education. 

Efforts like these can help insulate child care from the vagaries of state budgeting and the chaos of the current administration’s policies. If reliably liberal Oregon, a state that’s prioritized early childhood for years, is starting to make child care cuts, then every state should be preparing to stand firm in the face of the approaching storm. 

Leadership changed hands in 114 of those districts — 23% — within the past year, a jump from 20% the year before, according to data, shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��, by the  from ILO Group, a consulting firm. The project — the only current publicly available resource on leadership turnover in the 500 largest districts — listed about 15% of districts replacing their superintendents prior to the pandemic.

One surprise outcome of that turnover is an increase in female superintendents: Women now represent a third of district chiefs, up from 30% last year. Of the 114 new chiefs, 44 were women.

But even with those gains, it would take another 30 years for women to reach parity with men in district leadership, the authors said.

To Julia Rafal-Baer,  CEO of ILO Group, this year’s results offer a mixed picture, coming just days after the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results showed declines in reading for 12th grade girls and in science for all 8th graders.

“There is a continued destabilizing of leaders at a time when we really need to have a coherent agenda that is driving instruction,” said Rafal-Baer, also a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP program.

Even so, she was pleased with the gains for women.  “I’m encouraged by the fact that we’re starting to see some meaningful progress.” 

Superintendent turnover happens for myriad reasons — from stagnant student performance to disagreements over salary. But it’s clear that COVID and the cultural debates that followed — embroiling districts in disputes over mask mandates, “anti-racist” curriculum and sexually explicit books —  transformed the nature of the position. 

“It’s always been political, but it’s never been so partisan,” said Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton School District in Oregon. Since 2011, he has led five districts in the Pacific Northwest and will leave next year to become of the Puget Sound Educational Service District, a regional agency in Washington.

On top of local concerns, today’s superintendents have the added weight of responding to threats of funding cuts and policy shifts from Washington, Balderas said. “I was just visiting a school … that had a family deported.”

‘Worn out’

Researchers who focus on the superintendency and school board politics echoed Balderas’ view. Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, said district leaders are “worn out.”

“I think that the toll of the past few years continues to ripple and really push people out,” she said. Several faced personal attacks, including , from angry members of their communities. “For many who entered education 15-20 years ago, this is not the landscape that one envisioned.”

The skills superintendents bring to the position sometimes don’t match the demands of the job, added Rachel White, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and founder of the Superintendent Lab, a source of research and data on district leaders. Most were teachers and principals before moving to the central office and spent years overseeing instruction, finance or teacher development. 

Now they’re responding to social media, and the “proliferation of misinformation and disinformation campaigns often rooted in ideology,” White said. “This has shifted what superintendents are increasingly spending their time on — debunking stories being told about what is happening in their schools and classrooms that simply are not true.”

As was the case in 2022, some of the turnover is due to school boards firing superintendents before their contracts expire. Since January, the in Georgia, the district in Tennessee and the district in Florida have fired their chiefs.

Most leaders, however, leave on their , sometimes because they’re seeking a new challenge.

Mary Elizabeth Davis spent nearly seven years as superintendent of Georgia’s Henry County Schools, overseeing the suburban-Atlanta district during a period of growth in both and . She eliminated a $12 million deficit and built teams to support instruction, facility planning and operations.

Last year, she started over in Cherokee County, another metro Atlanta district, where she aims to keep board meetings more focused on core academic issues rather than  just building projects and the budget. They still need to keep the public informed about finances, but “it is no longer the only thing,” she said. 

Inline photo

In Davis’ part of the country, women are still the least likely to be superintendents, the data shows. Twenty-two percent of chiefs in the Southeast are women, while the Northeast has the highest percentage of female district leaders — 46%, or 17 of the 37 districts on the list. 

This year’s report also delves into the routes leaders take to the top job. 

In 2018, when ILO began collecting the data, fewer than half of superintendents were internal hires. Last year, the majority, 58%, were hired from within, and about 40% had served as an interim superintendent in their district before the board officially gave them the job. Moving up within the same school district is slightly more common for women than men, 55% compared to 50%. 

Over a 20-year period, Cliff Jones worked his way up from teacher to of the Fulton County Schools in Atlanta. Once he entered the central office, he said he “took notes” during a time of leadership turnover and learned the importance of communication in making relationships work with the board.

“The more successful superintendents that I saw were trying to be out in front, trying to create proactive communication,” he said.  

Newly hired as the superintendent in Horry County, South Carolina — with an unusually large 12-member board — he has work to do. He said he doesn’t want to just be a “911 guy,” contacting members when there’s an emergency. 

‘Priorities and values’

Not all candidates spend that much time in a deputy or other cabinet position, which Balderas said is likely one reason why turnover remains high. He calls it “leadership compression.”

Among the 500 districts in ILO’s analysis, 10 male leaders skipped straight from principal to superintendent. They include , named interim superintendent of Texas’ Conroe Independent School District in May, and , who took over in February as acting chief of the South Bend Community School Corporation in Indiana.

“People are just bypassing roles” instead of serving four to six years in a mid-level role where they might tackle some of the same challenges as the superintendent, Balderas said. Maybe, they’re “less prepared to understand the political navigation that’s needed” to stay in the position long enough to make lasting improvements. 

After leading multiple districts, Balderas said it’s possible to work with a politically divided board. He tried to build connections with members by taking on other responsibilities in the community outside of the education sector, from the local chamber of commerce to the Rotary club.

People active in those groups “see that you care about your community,” he said. That word “gets back to your board in one way or another.”

Despite division among board members, districts can stay focused on academic improvement, said Davis, who was hired in Cherokee on 4-3 vote. 

“I think that when you start from that position, you have a lot of work to do to understand the priorities and values of individuals,” she said. She met with each board member, hearing concerns over teachers spending their own money on supplies and a desire for more presentations on student data. 

Having a divided board was familiar for Davis. The Henry County board hired her on a 3-2 vote. During her tenure, public meetings turned into over a mask mandate and a in 2023 that kept students locked out of the internet for nearly a month. 

But she had plenty to celebrate. The majority-Black district saw enough to come off the state’s list of failing school systems and a 9% increase in students scoring at the proficient level or above in .

“I’ve never seen harmony as a requirement for effectiveness,” Davis said. 

In short, teachers face, “a widening gap between income and housing affordability,” according to . 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines “affordable” as “paying no more than 30% of gross income for housing costs, including utilities.” NCTQ had looked at a select sample of 69 large urban districts and found 18 where beginning teacher salaries met the definition for “unaffordable” as of 2019.

By 2024, that number had risen to 39, or about half the sample. In 10 of those districts, the rent for a one-bedroom apartment cost 40% of a beginning teacher’s salary. In Boston, for example, it would eat up nearly 43%. 

Bowser notes that the picture today is even grimmer when looking at a teacher’s prospects for purchasing a home. Using some (ambitious) estimates about how much an educator could save toward a down payment on a mortgage and comparing it with local real estate prices, Bowser finds that teachers would struggle to purchase a home in 54 out of 56 sample districts.

These are extreme numbers. But who or what is to blame? And what can be done? 

One potential solution starts with a simple premise. If teachers can’t find affordable housing, school districts could partner with developers to build apartments and become landlords to their own employees. This has been a particular focus in , where state Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond and a coalition of legislators and developers are encouraging districts to repurpose empty buildings and unused land to address housing needs.

That may seem like a good idea at first blush, but have been plagued by delays and rules that prevent “low-income” housing subsidies from going to people who are not truly low-income. In other words, teachers often to qualify for extra financial assistance.

The idea that districts can solve teacher housing issues is also complicated by the fact that educators are far from the only group of workers who struggle to make ends meet in high-cost urban areas. Indeed, recent studies have found that high housing costs have led to and for people to climb the economic ladder. If police officers, social workers, janitors and cleaners, bus drivers, food service workers and many other types of low- and moderate-income employees are all being priced out of many American cities, there’s only so much a school board can do. In that case, the “teacher” housing problem is largely a generic, community-wide affordability problem that will be solved only by housing units.

But even if individual school boards cannot solve this big, societal trend, education policymakers are not helping. In fact, their choices have made the housing affordability problem worse. How? By not turning rising revenues into higher salaries, they’ve chosen to prioritize a larger education workforce over a better-paid one. In turn, that makes it harder for teachers and other school employees to afford housing in the places where they work.  

As I noted in a recent project for ����Ӱ��, school spending is keeping up with or even outpacing inflation in many parts of the country, but those investments are not translating into higher compensation for district employees. If those salaries had merely kept up with total education spending, they would be 34% higher. At the national level, that would have worked out to a $22,000 raise for the average school employee. 

In Portland, Oregon, for example, NCTQ’s Bowser that it would take 41% of a beginning teacher’s salary to rent a one-bedroom apartment. But that’s not for lack of investments in the district. As we found in our report, Portland’s revenues rose 54% from 2002 to 2022 in inflation-adjusted, per-pupil terms. (That is, the district revenues increased much faster than inflation.) And yet, the average salary paid to Portland school employees fell by 8%. Portland, like many parts of the country, did not turn budget increases into salary gains for its workers. 

These trends have continued in recent years. While Portland housing prices surged over the last five years, the district lost 10% of its student enrollment. At the same time, it added the equivalent of 445 full-time employees to its (an 8% increase). In other words, instead of leaning into the housing problem and trying to pay its existing workers higher salaries, the Portland school district actually made the city’s housing problems just a bit worse by hiring more, lower-paid workers.
I don’t want to just pick on Portland here. As we showed in our project last month, 90% of districts are making these types of choices. But they effectively mean that school district leaders in some of the biggest, most expensive places to live are making budgetary decisions that add to the housing difficulties in their communities.

Leaders say they have no plans to hit pause on the project despite a from the U.S. Department of Education that warns against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” The strongly worded message from Craig Trainor, the top civil rights official at the department, said schools could be investigated for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” 

The Long Beach community asked for “a space that lifts the experience of Black youth,” said Deputy Superintendent Tiffany Brown, adding that the district has a “commitment to listen to those voices.”

Long Beach is not alone. While many school leaders at the letter’s tone, several left-leaning states and districts have since countered Trainor’s threats with tough statements of their own. 

“We’re going to be as inclusive as we’ve always been,” said Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton School District in Oregon. He called the department’s letter “an attempt to bully” districts. “Let’s not be hyper-reactive to things that come out right now.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey in a statement that DEI efforts make the state stronger. California state Superintendent assured districts that memos can’t override existing law or “impose new terms on existing agreements.” And Illinois state chief Tony Sanders reminded educators that state law on the history of different racial groups and LGBTQ issues. 

The letter is part of the Trump administration’s larger DEI offensive, which has included and the cancellation of millions of dollars in contracts related to equity goals.

On Thursday, the department unveiled , a website where the public can report schools they think are illegally discriminating against students.

Many districts and advocacy organizations like , the School Superintendents Association, have homed in on a footnote in Trainor’s letter stating that it “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards.” 

“It is just a letter. It’s not rules or regs. It’s not changing law,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Association, a network with member schools nationwide. “We have diverse in our name. It’s not something we’re going to fade away from.” 

The letter referenced , a 2023 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions. But some experts say the letter is inconsistent with the court’s opinion. 

“The letter goes far beyond what the Supreme Court said in SFFA, and, indeed, even contradicts it,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute. Trainor, for example, said that when making admission decisions, colleges can’t factor essays in which students write about the role of race in their lives. 

But that’s the opposite of what the court ruled, McCluskey said. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing in the ruling “should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” 

According to Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, officials plan to issue additional guidance. Andrew Manna, an Indianapolis-area education lawyer, said it might also take an actual complaint against a district or an OCR investigation to get clarity on what officials consider to be illegal discrimination. 

But some welcome the department’s more muscular approach. 

“I think, and hope, the department will be at least as strict as the Obama administration was,” said Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. She’s referring to a 2014 alerting districts that they risked civil rights investigations if they disproportionately disciplined Black and Hispanic students. A few months later, OCR launched an investigation into the , later finding over 100 instances where Black students were disciplined more harshly than their white peers for similar infractions.

“This is a fundamental question of fairness, as was SFFA,” Deshpande said. “OCR should absolutely go after schools that undermine fairness via unfair DEI preferences.”

Groups or classes or extra academic support aimed at specific are among the practices that Parents Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, argues are illegal.

The American Federation of Teachers, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, is challenging the letter. They in federal court Tuesday, saying the “vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself.”

‘Target-rich environment’

Leaders in more right-leaning parts of the country said they’re also not worried about Trainor’s letter, largely because lawmakers in their states have already banned DEI.

Last year, Utah, for example, passed that labels diversity, equity and inclusion “prohibited discriminatory practices.” When Utah’s education department gave the legislature a compliance update, there were no violations to report, state Superintendent Sydnee Dickson told ����Ӱ��. 

“We didn’t need to make dramatic changes in our K-12 system,” she said. 

Trainor’s letter followed an from the president that called on the education department to devise a plan for stripping districts of their federal funds if they advance “discriminatory equity ideology.” Officials have until the end of April to devise such policies. 

But the OCR letter accelerates the process, warning districts to “cease all efforts” to accomplish what it calls “nebulous” diversity goals and that it will begin taking “appropriate measures to assess compliance” March 1. The department has yet to specify what those measures might be.

Parents Defending Education has already done a lot of the work for the new administration. The organization keeps a of districts nationwide that have equity-related policies and initiatives. Last year, it forced the Los Angeles district to revise its Black Student Achievement Plan, which provided additional counseling and academic support in schools predominantly serving Black students. All students, not just those who are Black, are now eligible for the extra help. 

 The group’s list has more districts from California than from any other state. 

“California is a target-rich environment for the administration’s causes,” said Laura Preston, director of government affairs for F3Law, which handles education cases throughout the state. 

She suggested that the state might not want to risk the loss of federal education funds at a time when state resources are needed to rebuild parts of Los Angeles ravaged by fire. But she also questioned OCR’s ability to conduct thorough investigations when the department is . The letter, she said, sets up a potential clash between states and the federal government. prohibits the government from mandating or controlling instruction or withholding funds from districts if they don’t comply. 

“Trump keeps saying he wants states’ rights [and] then tries to be the federal school board,” she said. “It doesn’t work in the long haul.”

‘Committed to full compliance’

To show that some education leaders welcome Trainor’s message, the department last week highlighted statements from several state chiefs who agree with the letter. 

“I applaud this directive from the U.S. Department of Education and Florida stands ready to assist other states to end racial preferences in education,” said Manny Diaz, Florida education commissioner. And Ellen Weaver, state superintendent in South Carolina, said her department is “committed to full compliance with the U.S. Department of Education’s directive.”

But Diaz, Weaver and Dickson from Utah were also among the 12 state education leaders who last month told Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary nominee, that they wanted the department to stop issuing “dear colleague” letters intended to push states to “take actions aligned to the current administration’s priorities and opinions.”

McCluskey at Cato said the letter is still consistent with their request, which was to clearly state that dear colleague letters are not legally binding. But he still finds such missives problematic.

“For all intents and purposes they impose new law, while those who issue them simultaneously claim they legally change nothing,” he said. “Of course, they shouldn’t change anything. Changing law is a legislative responsibility.”

Aaron Spence, superintendent of the Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia — which has long been targeted on Parents Defending Education’s — said he’s tried to reassure the community that his district isn’t doing anything illegal, like using racial quotas or hiring staff based on race instead of qualifications.

In January 2022, just after his election, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an demanding that schools avoid “inherently divisive concepts.” But Spence doesn’t view his district’s to be controversial and said under , districts are required to report student progress for different subgroups. 

“People get this pie mentality, which is ‘Oh gosh, if they do more for this group of students, they’re doing less for this group of students,’ ” he said. “The goal for everybody is 100% success. We’re working to ensure all of them get over the bar of achievement that we’ve set for them.”

“I used to be pretty suicidal last summer and I tried to commit suicide about two times.”

Since 2018, more than 36,000 students across the Seattle region have shared their hopes, fears and family secrets in an online questionnaire called Check Yourself. 

“My dog has … untreatable cancer and my great grandma died a week ago.”

“Some time i harm my self by not eating cause i don’t really like my body.”

Questions peer into students’ sexual preferences and romantic lives — even which gender they’re “most likely to have a crush on.” It’s the kind of information a 12-year-old might not tell their best friend.

“Do my parents see this survey?”

Districts promise students their answers to over 50 personal questions will be kept confidential. But a group of parents has been able to obtain reams of sensitive survey data from multiple districts through the state’s .

One of them, Stephanie Hager, is on a six-year crusade to expose what she considers to be the program’s lack of privacy safeguards. To prove her point, the former Microsoft program manager said she correctly identified six students based on nothing more than details they provided in the survey and a simple Google or social media search. 

“We know their school, gender, age on a certain date, grade level, language they speak, their dogs’ names, friends’ names, race, their unique interests, what sports they play, if they are religious, and anything else they feel like writing in — plus their whole mental health record,” said the Snoqualmie Valley mother of four, whose son took the survey in 2019.

 “I can’t imagine any parent saying OK to that.”

Researchers at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington developed the Check Yourself program to better identify students in middle and high school silently suffering from depression, substance abuse or suicidal thoughts. 

Supported by a voter-approved encompasses Seattle, more than $21 million since 2018. The funds help pay for mental health counseling for students and to track trends across the 13 districts that participate. Seven schools in Spokane County, in eastern Washington, and a few districts in Oregon also use Check Yourself.

Backers of the survey have a simple defense: It saves lives.

Valerie Allen, director of social services and mental health in the Highline district, told ����Ӱ�� of a student who jumped into a pond at a city park in 2022 carrying a backpack laden with weights. The boy went missing after an argument with his dad. The family, Allen said, turned to a school counselor who had started meeting with the student after Check Yourself responses showed he was suicidal. The counselor tipped off police to the pond, the kid’s favorite spot, where they arrived just in time to save him.

The question of whether results like this justify the potential pitfalls have mired the program in controversy since its inception.

“The ultimate protection” against privacy risks is not to do the survey, said Evan Elkin, who helped adapt it for schools and serves as executive director of Reclaiming Futures, a project at Portland State University. But, he asks, is ending the program “worth the lives that you lose?” Officials said they could not determine the number of suicides prevented due to the survey.

For Hapsa Ali, a 2023 Highline district graduate, Check Yourself came at the right time. She suffered from “really bad social anxiety” and wasn’t getting along with her mom. Based on her answers, the school connected her to a counselor who regularly checked in on her, texting once a week.

“She was my safe space,” Ali said.

The clash over Check Yourself falls at the intersection of social forces that have only intensified since the pandemic. are experiencing extreme emotional and psychological stress. While show some improvement since 2021, 30% of 10th graders still say they have persistent feelings of depression and 15% reported thoughts of suicide, according to . 

At the same time, school districts house massive amounts of sensitive personal data and rely heavily on ed tech, making them prime targets for hackers. The Highline district, for example, closed for three days in September because of a . Nationally, more than doubled in 2023. Online mental health surveys also face backlash from activists and , who find them frequently intrusive, inappropriate and removed from school’s main purpose. 

“Schools are really under a huge amount of pressure to address student mental health,” said Isabelle Barbour, a consultant who developed a school-based mental health program for the state of Oregon. “But when they try to adopt something that can work in their setting, it brings up all of these other pressure points around privacy.”

‘I shouldn’t be seeing this’

The survey, which takes about 12 minutes to complete, leads students through a series of prompts, from simple tasks such as listing their top goals for the year to deeply personal queries like, “During the past year, did you ever seriously think about ending your life?”

Parents get two chances to opt their children out of the screener, and students can also decline to complete it on the day of the survey. But districts reveal nothing that would alert anyone to its potential risks. Quite the contrary. promotes it as a “successful, proactive approach to providing support to students.” “personalized feedback and strategies for staying healthy.”

In fact, assure parents that only counselors or other “relevant” staff can view individual students’ responses, which are stored on a “secure” platform by Tickit Health, a Canadian company. To participate in the county-led program, districts must sign an agreement saying they will remove all “potentially identifying” student data before submitting records to the county, which uses the information to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and respond to students’ needs. Districts promise that county officials and researchers only see.

But an investigation by county ombudsman Jon Stier, triggered by parents’ concerns, suggests this hasn’t always been the case. A report released last summer revealed that in the program’s early years, county officials were able to connect student names to their responses, although Stier said that practice has ended.

The issue of the survey’s confidentiality first emerged publicly in 2022, when 10 districts released spreadsheets of student answers in response to a public records request from a . Snoqualmie Valley parents asked districts for additional information, released as recently as February 2024, which they shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��. 

A handful of districts concealed some personal details. But several redacted little, if anything.

This could put districts in violation of federal , which require districts to gain parental consent or remove all identifying information from records before releasing them publicly. 

Privacy experts say that wiping information such as race, home language and favorite activities from a document in order to make it is no easy task. But without such measures, a combination of answers could identify a student, in the language of the law, “with reasonable certainty.”

Sometimes, just a simple data point can expose a student’s identity.

During the 2021-22 school year, for example, only one student in the Kent district who took the survey identified as being part of the Muckleshoot tribe, which has about statewide.

Most survey questions are multiple choice. But 13 allow students to write open-ended responses — and it is these answers that experts say vastly increase the chances of identifying potential students. 

At ����Ӱ��’s request, Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, reviewed an Excel document with answers from more than 900 students in the Auburn district from the 2021-22 school year — details that included random factoids like a preference for techno music and proficiency in math, as well as very private revelations such as conflicts at home and incidents of self-harm. 

“I shouldn’t be seeing this spreadsheet,” Vance said. “It feels like everybody’s sticking their head in the sand about what the consequences could be.” 

Districts ‘caught off guard’

Marc Seligson, a King County spokesman, insisted that “student data security is paramount,” but that responsibility for interpreting privacy laws falls to the districts.

“We can’t give them legal advice. Each district has their own lawyer,” said Margaret Soukup, the county’s youth, family and prevention manager, who oversees the program.

She said she was shocked districts released records to parents. “I was very upset because I didn’t even think that that was a possibility.”

����Ӱ�� reached out to the nine King County districts that released records to the public and still use Check Yourself.

Five didn’t respond, and a spokeswoman for Auburn declined to comment. Conor Laffey, a spokesman for the Snoqualmie Valley district, said officials there worked with the county to “safeguard confidential student information” and consulted the district’s legal counsel before releasing spreadsheets. He declined to elaborate.

Tahoma School District Superintendent Ginger Callison, a former Snoqualmie Valley official, said she didn’t remember details about past disclosures and is “confident” that in the future, “nothing will get released that isn’t allowed or required.”

A Seattle spokeswoman noted that records went through “multiple layers of review to remove potentially identifiable comments within student responses.” But the district didn’t redact very specific details about some students, like the one obsessed with reptiles who wanted a pet frog and another who speaks English, Russian, Spanish and sometimes Samoan. The district did not comment on why it included such information in the spreadsheet of students’ answers.

����Ӱ�� also contacted , a University of Washington researcher who helped develop the survey and now evaluates the King County program. She said districts are obligated to protect “the confidentiality of student information,” but directed further questions to the county.

Parents say the county also bears responsibility for students potentially being exposed. 

Hager, Check Yourself’s most outspoken parent critic, obtained an email thread through an open records request that shows officials were well aware of the survey’s potential privacy pitfalls. In one email, a former Tickit Health executive warns county officials that if a student “were to enter identifiable information in the free-text sections, theoretically this would be accessible.”

One wrinkle in King County’s privacy dispute is that Washington has one of the strongest. In 2016, for example, the state Supreme Court upheld over half a million dollars in in a case against a state agency that was slow to turn over records. 

Elkin, from Portland State University, said districts were “caught off guard and panicked” when they received the open records requests. 

But the Washington districts are no different than many others nationally that currently find themselves fielding more public record requests than ever before — often from watchdogs like Hager or activists investigating curriculum materials they believe to be inappropriate. Spurred on by conservative groups like Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty, repeat filers dig for lesson plans, teacher training materials and financial records — particularly those relating to transgender issues and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Allen Miedema, executive director of the Northshore district’s technology department, said the districts that use Check Yourself could “do a better job of letting parents know” about the purpose of the survey.

If staff members failed to conceal student identities, he said, it’s often because they’re “swamped” with requests for documents and lack clear guidance from state or county officials on what’s allowed to be included.   

‘Survey gets dark very fast’

School leaders insist the danger is largely hypothetical.

Officials in King County, and from six districts that responded to a request from ����Ӱ��, said they’ve received no reports of cyberthieves or child predators gaining access to Check Yourself and using results to target students.

They point to internal  showing that students feel more connected to school when they’re referred to an “intervention” after taking the survey. In focus groups, students expressed “favorable opinions” about the screener. In  of almost 400 students referred to a staff member after completing Check Yourself, the percentage saying that an adult at school listens, cares and tells them they do a good job increased. 

“The tool has been indispensable in pinpointing students who would benefit from urgent extra help — some of whom we never would have known were struggling,” said Laffey, the Snoqualmie Valley district spokesman.

But that doesn’t satisfy Hager.

She is among more than 20 Snoqualmie Valley parents who started asking questions about the program after the warned in 2018 that “malicious use” of sensitive student data could lead to identity theft and “help child predators identify new targets.”

Hager, who attended school in King County, doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to be preyed on by a trusted adult. In seventh grade, she said she was a victim of sexual misconduct involving a male teacher. 

“I know the FBI’s scenarios are real,” she said.

She points to students’ written reflections on the survey as proof that some find the questions disturbing.

“This survey gets dark very fast especially for a child.”

“Why does it act like I’m constantly breaking the law? I’m 12.” 

Many students expressed particular concern about questions related to sex and gender. One 12-year-old wrote:

“Female but kinda non binary sorta questioning but not? (Don’t tell my parents).”

Seligson, the King County spokesman, said the survey asks such questions because LGBTQ kids “are one of our most vulnerable populations.” State data released in 2023 showed that were nearly twice as likely as other students to report “depressive feelings.” 

The unease some students expressed about Check Yourself was echoed by several district staffers.

In 2019, an official in the Tukwila district, south of Seattle, wrote in that the survey was “causing considerable angst” and that with many “vulnerable” and “traditionally marginalized” families, educators didn’t want to “create unnecessary harm.”

That same year, a Seattle school counselor called it a “super personal survey,” according to an email ����Ӱ�� obtained through a public records request. She questioned why the district needed the information and whether it would be able to keep it confidential.

‘Absolute data privacy is a fantasy’

To be sure, not all King County parents have a problem with Check Yourself.

Erica Thomson, who works for a cloud communications company, said the notion of “absolute data privacy is a fantasy.”

She has two boys in the Seattle schools, one who is transgender and the other who has ADHD, and appreciates that the program gets her children to open up.

“Kids do not tell parents everything,” Thomson said. “Sometimes it is because they love their parents too much and do not want them to worry or suffer.”

Some students write that they appreciate the survey experience, which includes targeted recommendations based on their answers. A student who reports using marijuana, for example, will get facts about how it negatively affects memory and mental and physical health.

Ali, the former student who found Check Yourself beneficial to her well-being, had a distinctly nuanced take on her experience.

While praising the personal attention she received from a counselor,  Ali described a “rowdy” atmosphere in the sixth-period history classroom where she took the survey, with classmates buried in their phones and chatting with friends. It made it difficult to express some of the conflicts she was experiencing at the time. 

“It was a bunch of juniors just goofing off. I was sitting next to my friend, and she would just ask me, ‘Oh, what did you answer?’” she said. The atmosphere, she added, “felt like it wasn’t as serious as it should have been.”

The information is ‘too valuable’

As King County parents and school officials debate the merits and risks of Check Yourself, other districts have managed to use the program with relative ease.

In Oregon’s Hillsboro district, students’ responses stay on the Tickit platform — unavailable to outside evaluators or the public at large.

Spokane County officials not only eliminated questions about sexual orientation and romantic attractions, but also removed open-response fields.

“Why is it necessary for us to have that information?” asked Justin Johnson, who leads community services for Spokane. Additionally, clinicians monitor the administration of the survey in classrooms, allowing the results to be covered by . 

But Soukup, the King County official who oversees the program, said districts there find the write-in answers “too valuable” to do without because students often use them to open up about their problems.

For some King County districts, however, Check Yourself simply proved to be too much.

The Lake Washington district pulled out of the program three years ago and instead contracts with full-time mental health specialists to respond to students’ needs.

The intensely personal questions — and the resulting risk of privacy violations — also helped push the Bellevue school system to drop it in 2019. 

Officials opted for , and because of their sensitive nature, results are “considered some of the most privileged data the district has,” said Naomi Calvo, who served as Bellevue’s director of research, evaluation and assessment until 2023. “I didn’t even have access to it.”

Calvo understands why districts jumped to implement Check Yourself and most continue to use it. “Students have needs that were going unaddressed and there is a dearth of options available,” she said. 

But as a mental health professional with a young son at the time, she felt skeptical. 

“As a researcher, I believe in surveys,” she said. “But I would not have let my child take that survey.”

This story was co-published with .

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at . For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

Free, confidential treatment referral and information is available in English and Spanish at 800-662-4357, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Helpline.

Oregon’s highest needs schools that are focused on revamping literacy instruction and boosting student reading proficiency will get federal financial help next year.

The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that it will send Oregon schools $11.5 million next school year, and could potentially allocate up to $57 million over the next five years to help the state’s Early Literacy Success Initiative. That initiative was passed by the Legislature in 2023 with an investment of $120 million in state dollars.

An investigation by the Capital Chronicle found the state has spent more than $250 million in the past 25 years to improve reading instruction in schools. But that money has failed to help more than a generation of students, with many teachers not using methods that work to teach reading. Many, the investigation found, were not taught effective reading instruction in the state’s public colleges of education.

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Over the last 25 years, nearly two in five Oregon fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words.

Schools can use the federal dollars for teacher development, reading tutors and specialists, literacy coaches and new reading curriculum, according to the news release from the U.S. Department of Education. Most Oregon schools are using one of the 15 reading curriculum on the state Board of Education’s approved materials list, but about 30% are not, , director of education initiatives for Gov. Tina Kotek’s office.

About 95% of the federal money will be funneled to districts through a competitive application process via the Oregon Department of Education, according to Marc Siegel, a spokesperson for the department. Precedence will go to schools with a high proportion of historically underserved students, including multilingual students and students with disabilities.

The rest of the federal money will help fund a comprehensive statewide literacy plan, Siegel said.

Oregon received the second highest award among the 23 state grants. Only the New Mexico Department of Education received more – about $11.9 million.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Lawyers for Civil Rights and Massachusetts Advocates for Children filed Sept. 18 against Saugus Public Schools seeking the release of records around the district’s admissions policy. The legal advocates claim the policy, which mandates that families fill out the town census among other requirements, disproportionately affects immigrant and other vulnerable student groups. Saugus district officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Just weeks after Massachusetts attorneys flagged two school districts for allegedly denying newcomer students their legal right to an education, researchers examining Oregon and Michigan state data found that English learners were less likely than other students to be enrolled in the core classes they need to graduate. 

Both of these issues were called out in a June undercover investigation by ����Ӱ�� that revealed rampant enrollment discrimination against older immigrant students. These newer findings show many such barriers remain in various parts of the country. 

Boston-based and asked the state attorney general’s office on Aug. 28 to investigate Saugus Public Schools for practices they say single out immigrant children: The school system currently bars entry to students whose families did not complete the annual town census. 

While local census data collection is in Massachusetts, lawyers say it can’t be tied to student enrollment. 

“With school starting in Saugus this week and the School Committee digging in its heels, it is imperative that the Attorney General intervene,” Erika Richmond Walton, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in a statement last week. “No child in Massachusetts should be denied the right to an education based on exclusionary policies.” 

In an earlier interview, attorneys said that the district also applies overly-stringent residency and proof-of-identity requirements that make it difficult for children — especially immigrants — to register, violating their rights under federal and state law. 

The attorney general’s office said in a statement that “it is in touch with the Saugus School District regarding their school admissions policy,” noting that “federal and state law gives all students equal access to a public education, regardless of immigration status.”

Saugus Public Schools, 11 miles north of Boston, served , up from 2,297 two years earlier. In the 2023-24 school year, English was not the first language of and 13% of students were   The district was in the 2022-23 school year, slightly higher than the state at 24.2%. 

����Ӱ��’s enrollment  investigation also found that some school personnel who were willing to admit an older immigrant student wanted to severely limit his participation, including allowing him to take only ESL classes. Researchers in Oregon looked at the practice they call in their own state and Michigan. 

Analyzing statewide data from the 2013-14 to 2018-19 school years, they found that just 55% of English learners in Oregon were enrolled in all the required core classes compared to 69% of those students who had graduated from the English learner program and 67% who were never enrolled in it.

In Michigan, 66% of English learners were enrolled in all of the core classes compared to 71% of former English learner students and those who were never enrolled in the program, according to the most recently available statewide data from the 2011-12 to 2014-15 school years. Under , public schools must ensure that English learners can “participate meaningfully and equally in educational programs,” including having access to grade-level curricula so they can be promoted and graduate.

Researchers said race and socioeconomics were critical factors in exclusionary tracking, noting that English learners in Oregon were more likely to take standalone English language development classes and live in poverty than those in Michigan. 

“The scope of the problem is pretty large,” said Ilana Umansky, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who co-wrote the report. “It’s so important that kids can get through high school and graduate with a regular diploma.”

Immigrant advocate Adam Strom called the actions in all three states an outrage.

​​”Exclusionary tracking and denial of registration for immigrant students not only violate their legal rights,” he said, “but also rob the entire school community of the rich cultural and intellectual contributions these students offer.”

Unwelcome to America

Senior reporter Jo Napolitano spent nearly a year and a half calling 630 high schools around the country trying to enroll a 19-year-old newcomer whose education had been interrupted after the ninth grade. Napolitano posed as the student’s aunt and told schools “Hector Guerrero” had recently arrived in their district from Venezuela with limited English skills. 

Hector was turned away 330 times, including more than 200 denials in the 35 states and the District of Columbia where he had a legal right to attend based on his age.

Those who refused our test student predicted that he would not graduate, a factor that should not have played a part in such a decision, several state education department officials said. Thirteen states and three major cities have now said they are taking action to bolster newcomer students’ educational rights as a result of ����Ӱ��’s reporting.

Three schools in Massachusetts, where students have a right to attend until age 21, denied our test student and two more said they were likely to. Education officials there told ����Ӱ�� last month they would call those districts to discuss the findings, but planned no other statewide corrective measures.

Saugus schools Superintendent Michael Hashem’s secretary, Dianne Vargas, handles enrollment in the North Shore district. She told ����Ӱ�� last week that are lawful and that she’s in regular contact with the state education department and state attorney general’s office. 

She maintained that the requirement that “(f)amilies who move to Saugus must complete the Town of Saugus census” to be eligible to register their children is waived for incoming immigrant students and that the rules were in place before August 2023, when the attorneys say they were adopted.

But, she said, the district does require other forms of paperwork — all meant to protect these students’ welfare.

“We want to make sure they are with a parent or guardian — that they actually have someone who is caring for them so we don’t have doubling up and people aren’t passing children around,” she said. “We have a good amount of scattered living or sheltered students who are refugees or migrants and they cannot be left without guardianship. We have a translator … we have everything up to date and make sure these people feel welcome.”

She said her office asks for — but does not require — a birth certificate and medical records. But Diana I. Santiago, a senior attorney and director at Massachusetts Advocates for Children, said Saugus’s enrollment policies effectively barred at least two immigrant families from enrolling their children in a timely manner, resulting in “substantial time” out of school. 

The enrollment policy warns that parents, guardians or any others who “violate or assist in violation of this policy by submitting false documentation, aiding, abetting or conspiring to admit a child as a student of Saugus Public Schools, shall be subject to all applicable criminal and civil penalties.” 

It also pledges that if a student’s family moves out of the district during the school year, that student’s “immigration records required by law, shall be transferred immediately to the school in the city or town where they are residing.”

It’s unclear why the district would be in possession of a student’s immigration records. Schools cannot, under federal law, turn away students based on their , although conservative forces are now looking  . At an Aug. 30 Moms for Liberty gathering, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump said the country is “being poisoned” and that immigrant students are

Closing doors

Santiago described the language used throughout Saugus’s enrollment policy — including terms like “legal residents” and “immigration paperwork” — as coded and meant to target the city’s growing immigrant community. 

“It’s just inserted there as another way to try to keep students out, especially immigrant students,” she said. 

Massachusetts is generally considered a national leader in education. The state attorney general’s on its website said it’s critical they “ensure that all children residing in their jurisdictions have equal access to public education” by allowing them to enroll and attend school without regard to race, national origin, or immigration or citizenship status. They must also avoid information requests “that have the purpose or effect of discouraging or denying access to school” based on those factors.  

In another Bay State case that set off alarms in late July, Norfolk Town Administrator said a change in the state’s emergency shelter system meant children temporarily housed at one location “will not be enrolled in Norfolk Public Schools or the King Philip Regional School District.” After pushback from immigrant advocates, he . 

����Ӱ��’s investigation revealed a litany of ways that districts make enrollment arduous or unwelcoming for immigrant students. A principal in Green River, Wyoming, said our test student could be admitted but “wouldn’t get to participate in extracurriculars,” while a Caldwell, Idaho, principal said he would “maybe” allow him to enroll in math and science classes, but not English or history.

The Oregon researchers said the practice of keeping English learners out of core classes is significant and undermines , a pivotal 1974 Supreme Court case that requires districts to  

Umansky and co-author Karen D. Thompson, associate professor at Oregon State University, have researching educational inequity for English learners.

Thompson said exclusionary tracking goes against high schools’ mission to graduate students college and career ready. , they said, can boost student access. 

“We want students who are classified as English learners to be able to learn and thrive and have all of the opportunities they can,” she said. “If their access to core content is restricted, some future doors might be closed to them.” 

An audit of the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care found the agency could benefit from stronger oversight and equity training to improve governance of the state’s early learning system.

Auditors’ findings, issued in a letter from the Secretary of State’s audits division to agency director Alyssa Chatterjee on July 24, align in part with critiques of the department voiced by current and former staff  published in March. Employees sounded alarms — including one who contacted Gov. Tina Kotek — about what they saw as the agency’s failures to foster equity, retain leaders and manage programs that serve Oregon’s lower-income families.

Auditors  to learn more.

Their  urge agency leaders to regularly review disciplinary decisions made by child care licensing investigators to ensure they are being made fairly; expand required equity and bias trainings; and improve coordination between regional and statewide authorities and among the various preschool and child care programs that the department manages.

Agency leaders said they welcome the feedback and are already working to implement some of the recommendations.

“One of DELC’s values is continuous improvement,” said Kate Gonsalves, spokesperson for the Department of Early Learning and Care. “In particular, Director Chatterjee valued the recognition of the intentionality that went into the launch of DELC. We are proud of this intentionality and appreciative of the chance to have this review so early in the agency’s tenure.”

The audit examined how smoothly the early learning division transitioned out of the state education department into an independent agency. The Department of Early Learning and Care launched July 1, 2023, and auditors monitored its performance throughout its first year.

Rather than complete a full audit, which takes longer and typically looks at established government practices and protocols, the audits division conducted its analysis in real time, so the findings would be available to the agency in a time frame that allowed leaders to act on them, said Laura Kerns, spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office.

“The benefit of a real-time analysis is that we can get in at the beginning before too much has happened and provide feedback as programs are being shaped and controls are being established,” she said. “Simply put, we hoped our review would help (the early learning department) get off to a good start as a new state agency.”

“We also decided to send a letter instead of doing a full audit because we found DELC was generally on the right track,” Kerns said. Valeria Atanacio was promoted to tribal affairs director of Oregon’s early learning department in 2022. A year later, she was demoted, with little warning, she said. (Amanda Loman/InvestigateWest)

The letter noted the department’s success in taking over management of programs and responsibilities previously handled by other departments, including the Employment Related Day Care subsidy that helps families afford child care. It is a more than $400 million program that is in high demand; since  thousands of families have been waitlisted. Reducing that waitlist is a high priority for staff.

However, the audit said the agency’s recordkeeping and budgeting practices could be improved: One example auditors pointed out was the decision to pay providers of Preschool Promise, the state’s free preschool program, during the pandemic without any enrollment requirement, in order to prevent closures. Preschool Promise is one of the early learning department’s marquee programs, but has come under fire from legislators and the public for under-enrollment, which some employees told InvestigateWest was partly due to mismanagement.

“When auditors asked for documentation to show when and why the initial decision was made and how it was communicated to providers and the public, DELC staff were unable to provide that information,” the letter states. “The pandemic was a chaotic time; it is in these crucial times agencies should provide assurance and accountability for their decisions.”

In a letter responding to the audit, Chatterjee said the programs division will improve such documentation. The agency also launched  to track Preschool Promise enrollment throughout the year and assist in reallocating spots where they’re most needed, and it reinstated enrollment minimums for providers to receive state money.

The agency also implemented a new equity training program for managers in February, and is considering making the training mandatory for all staff, Chatterjee said. Training is one of several strategies mentioned in the agency’s  that was announced in early July.

The department also is completing a “culture assessment” initiated in the spring shortly after InvestigateWest’s reporting was published “to gain a deeper understanding of our workplace dynamics,” Chatterjee said. Leaders expect to review the results of that assessment in the fall, she said.

This story was originally published by , an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Northwest. Reporter Kaylee Tornay covers labor, youth and health care issues. Reach her at 503-877-4108 or kaylee@invw.org. On Twitter .

PORTLAND, Ore. — Before Bailey McQueeny-Rose attended law school at the University of Oregon, she worked in reproductive health care, first as a medical assistant and then as a trainer, teaching others to do the same job. The work opened her eyes to how access to health care differed based on the laws in the six states where she oversaw training, and she began to consider becoming a civil rights lawyer.

She’d planned to take the bar exam after law school, but in late 2023, Oregon began offering graduates an alternative pathway to practicing law. Instead of sitting for the multiday bar exam, which most states offer twice a year, new graduates can be admitted to practice in Oregon through on-the-job training.

The graduates are required to work 675 hours under the supervision of a licensed attorney as well as submit a work portfolio for approval to Oregon’s Board of Bar Examiners. And just like anyone who takes the traditional bar exam, those approved under what’s known as a , or SPPE, are required to pass an ethics test.

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“The bar exam is not going to teach me how to be a civil rights lawyer,” McQueeny-Rose said. “But the SPPE pathway, working with civil rights employers, learning what the day-to-day duties and what the day-to-day job looks like, it’s a hands-on way. That’s what’s going to teach me how to be a civil rights lawyer.”

Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Meagan Flynn said in an interview that she’s been astounded at the various approaches emerging in other states since Oregon’s move. She serves on a national committee of lawyers and court officials who will recommend practical changes to help diversify the bar admissions process through the National Center for State Courts, an administrative organization.

“And really, no two look alike,” Flynn said. “Every state looking at this is coming up with very, very state-specific approaches.”

States administer their own bar exams and determine passing scores. Most states use the Uniform Bar Exam, and some states have their own specific tests. Critics of the bar exam say that in most states, it doesn’t assess minimum competency to practice the law, especially when it comes to skills that involve working directly with clients, such as handling negotiations or counseling people facing incarceration, divorce, bankruptcy or other stressful matters.

Multiple-choice tests fail to assess whether someone has the necessary skills to be a good lawyer, said Catherine Bramble, an associate professor at Brigham Young University Law School in Utah. And research has found that new lawyers perform better if they’ve had practice and supervision.

“We all know this intuitively,” said Bramble, who has been pushing for change in Utah. “Some things are not best assessed through a multiple-choice test. For example, the ability to fly an airplane. We would really hope a pilot has time in the cockpit under observation of an experienced flight instructor before we allow them to fly a plane.”

Real-world skills

In Utah, the state Supreme Court, which oversees licensure, is considering a supervised practice proposal that would require applicants to take a core curriculum during law school. They would be required to complete 240 hours of supervised practice, which could be paid or unpaid. Twenty of those hours would have to be client-facing work, and 50 pro bono, meaning the services are provided to clients free of charge.

Utah encourages lawyers in the state to commit to 50 hours of pro bono work each year, Bramble said, and they’ve found that those who are exposed to such service early in their careers tend to continue it. The proposal would require that prospective licensees take a six-hour well-being online module that teaches lawyers how to manage the stress of a legal career. Finally, there would be a three-hour test, which would require test-takers to write a basic legal motion using a sample law and case materials.

For Nevada, its proposed rules emphasize “the necessity of representing clients well,” said Joan Howarth, a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. There, the proposal in front of the state Supreme Court would allow law students to complete most of the requirements for licensure during law school.

The Oregon Supreme Court is considering approving a similar, third licensure path — in addition to the traditional bar exam and SPPE — that would allow students to take coursework and complete supervised practice requirements during school so that they are licensed when they graduate.

Even the national bar exam is changing: The National Conference of Bar Examiners will begin rolling out a NextGen test in select states in 2026, with a focus on more foundational lawyering skills such as client counseling and advising, dispute resolution, and client relationship and management.

Law schools for several decades have been incorporating more real-world skills into their curriculum, said Deborah Jones Merritt, professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, who has studied the bar exam’s deficiencies in producing good lawyers. Merritt’s research has determined that the exam is far more challenging to pass for people of color, those with caretaking responsibilities, or those who come from low-income households.

Beginnings of change

Many states began rethinking the necessity of the bar exam in 2020 during the pandemic, when gathering hundreds of people together in a big room for an exam was a potential superspreader event for COVID-19.

In place of the test, several states and the District of Columbia issued what’s known as diploma privilege, the ability to practice without passing the bar. Utah, for example, required their graduates to fulfill a pro bono requirement first. It was an eye-opening experiment, said Bramble, in part because “nothing crazy happened.”

Then in 2021, the American Bar Association for the first time released statistics breaking down bar exam passage rates by race. White test takers were far likelier to pass the exams in 2020 than those of other races or ethnicities, according to the group. Although there are other barriers to a legal career, including law school entrance exams and the time, expense and quality of the schooling, the numbers made it clear that the bar exam itself had flaws that kept many candidates of color from becoming lawyers.

One of the biggest flaws of the bar is that it’s an expensive and time-consuming exam, said Brian Gallini, the former dean of the Willamette University College of Law in Oregon and one of the architects of the licensure push in the state. Law school graduates often pay for a law review class, which often can cost more than $1,000, to study for the test in the months following their graduation, as well as put off earning a living in their degree field until they’re licensed and can begin working as lawyers.

Those who work a job while they study are more likely to fail, but many students cannot afford not to work — they carry an average of $160,000 in student loan debt when they exit school.

Gallini, now the dean of the Quinnipiac University School of Law in Connecticut, fielded a lot of angry emails when he first introduced the idea to the Willamette law school’s alumni in 2022. Many objections were reflexive: Critics of the proposal said they had suffered through the bar exam, so aspiring lawyers who followed them should face a similar rite of passage.

So far, only a handful of 2024 graduates from the state’s three law schools have chosen the new pathway; McQueeny-Rose said many of her peers haven’t been able to find supervising attorneys who are familiar enough with the program to oversee their work.

That’s also expected to change quickly. The state’s law schools are beginning to establish prestigious post-graduate fellowships aimed at placing SPPE participants in communities of need, including immigration law, public defense and rural law practices. Judicial clerkships also are eligible to fulfill many of the program’s requirements.

McQueeny-Rose will be joining the team at Levi Merrithew Horst, a Portland, Oregon, firm, where she’ll work on police misconduct cases, class-action suits on behalf of incarcerated people and other civil rights work. Instead of studying for the bar, she’s taking the summer off to devote time to her artwork and to move to Portland for her new job. She anticipates she’ll fulfill the requirements of the SPPE program in early 2025.

“For me, it was a pretty easy decision,” McQueeny-Rose said. “I knew I wanted to stay in Oregon. I’m committed to practice here, I love it here. I have a lot of ideas how to make Oregon better, and I want to stay and do my part.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

CORVALLIS – More than 700 teachers from across Oregon have spent the last two days in classrooms and lecture halls at Oregon State University in Corvallis to tackle post-pandemic learning gaps.

With $7 million in federal COVID relief money, the Oregon Department of Education launched in late 2023 the Equitable Accelerated Learning Project, which culminated in the two-day summit Tuesday and Wednesday. The project goal was to bring teachers from around the state together to address gaps and inequities exacerbated by the pandemic through better instruction.

Among the issues teachers are dealing with are chronic absenteeism; low reading and writing proficiency; middling math skills; and growing achievement gaps among students with disabilities, students from low-income families, rural students and English-language learners. The project aimed to get teachers to research instructional methods that can help close those gaps, said Angelica Cruz, director of literacy at the Oregon Department of Education.

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It also was designed to help teachers learn from one another about how to better instruct struggling students, she said.

She said the gathering focused on ways to invest in teachers and encourage leadership. Those who participated are expected to return to their districts and share takeaways.

The state launched the Equitable Accelerated Learning Project in December, asking teachers to join workgroups to hone in on pervasive education issues exacerbated by pandemic school closures. In all, more than 550 teachers in 89 districts joined 16 work groups to come up with projects and solutions for improving Oregon’s schools. They also looked at solutions to absenteeism and teacher shortages and improving student mental health and well-being.

In October, the Oregon Education Department will create materials and professional development sessions for teachers statewide, based on the workgroup findings and suggestions.

The money spent on the project is the last of the more than $112 million the state education department received from the nearly $1.6 billion that the U.S. Department of Education sent the state and its 197 school districts between 2020 and 2021. The Oregon Department of Education and the districts have until September to use up all the money.

Proposed solutions

There were no silver bullets proposed at the Oregon State University summit, but teachers discussed methods for math instruction that rely less on formulas and more on questioning and inquiry. They also looked at assessment techniques that ensure all kids are getting the same amount of class time and exposure to content even as they learn at different speeds. Some ideas were as simple as getting parents to read to their kids by ensuring everyone in the family has a library card, or organizing parent nights at schools, where teachers model for parents what good reading instruction looks like.

“Some of these parents have never been read to as a child. They don’t own books. They don’t know what that looks like,” said Elaina Lambert, an English-language development teacher in Medford.

A major focus of the education department’s Equitable Accelerated Learning Project has been getting Oregon teachers exposed to the state’s new literacy framework adopted in May 2023.

The 100-page guideline is an attempt to move instructional standards away from reading instructional methods that have been found to be detrimental to kids, such as using pictures or guessing at words based on the first letter or sentence context, and instead preparing teachers to instruct kids to read and write according to proven methods. The science of reading encompasses a large body of cognitive and neuroscience research and evidence that has shown that the human brain does not learn to read or write naturally, but relies on instruction in specific skills. Everyone needs these skills to read, but they learn them at different speeds.

Some suggested year-round school would be a positive development. The common challenge teachers expressed at the conference, and one that has also gotten worse since the pandemic, is a lack of time. At 165 days, Oregon has one of the shortest school years in the country. Teachers expressed a growing desire for year-round school.

“I feel like we have kids, especially because we have these summers, these long summers, if they don’t have the automaticity of their letters by the end of kindergarten, they come back in the fall and they’ve forgotten all of their letters,” Alice Williamson, a reading specialist in the Eugene School District, said.

Williamson and others expressed enthusiasm about the work groups they participated in, and especially about statewide investments in teacher reading instruction and literacy. Many are training in how to teach reading with the $90 million from the Early Literacy Success Initiative that was passed by the state Legislature in 2023. The money was meant to fund teacher training, tutors and curriculum rooted in the science of reading.

Several teachers described graduating from their teacher degree programs in Oregon and Washington without having received any training in teaching literacy.

“I did not know how to teach kids how to read when I went into my first teaching job teaching first grade,” said Beth Brex, who has been teaching for 18 years and currently teaches kindergarten in Eugene. This year she’s been taking specialized reading training paid for by the district with state literacy funds, and is trying to get other teachers at her school to take it as well.

Closing gaps

Even before the pandemic, many Oregon students and students across the U.S. were struggling with proficiency in core subjects. The pandemic made this worse.

In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card,” showed that proficiency in math of American students in fourth, eighth and 12th grade fell for the first time since results were published in 1973. Those results also showed the largest decline in reading proficiency nationwide since 1990.

Oregon’s results reflected the nationwide trend.

Over the last 25 years, nearly two in five Oregon fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words.

The most recent annual state assessment data, from 2023, shows that the average proficiency in math and reading among most Oregon students remained about 10% below prepandemic levels in 2019, though the gap between 2022 and 2023 outcomes shows declines are beginning to level off.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

With Oregon’s public schools staring down a fiscal cliff this school year as the historic federal investment from the last few years expires, Gov. Tina Kotek is proposing changes.

She’d like to help schools keep up with rising costs in the years ahead by updating the way schools are funded. She estimates that those changes would bring a $515 million boost to the State School Fund during the 2025-27 school years.

The state’s 197 school districts have spent nearly all of their portions of the $1.6 billion in federal COVID relief money awarded to the state since 2020. The money expires in September and with it, some of the services, programs and staff that it has paid for.

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“Across the country, school districts are facing budget shortages caused by the expiration of federal pandemic relief dollars, declining enrollment, increasing costs due to inflation and many other factors,” Kotek said in a news release Wednesday announcing the changes.

They come amid growing calls for funding help from districts. After teachers in the state’s largest district, Portland Public Schools, went on strike for more than a month last fall – in part because of low pay and poor working conditions – Kotek vowed she would review school funding and compensation issues in Oregon.

Leaders in other big districts also issued warnings about their dire budget predicaments following the strike, and in May, several superintendents released a video calling school funding in the state a “crisis” as they explained their decisions to cut hundreds of jobs to keep schools solvent.

They implored the Legislature to increase education spending.

“This is a terrible and devastating, heartbreaking moment for us,” Salem-Keizer Public Schools’ Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said in the video, “and it is not one we’re using to levy blame. It’s one that we’re using to ask for help.”

Officials from various education groups in Oregon expressed relief and gratitude over Kotek’s announcement.

Morgan Allen, deputy executive director of the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators, said it was “hugely positive.” Emielle Nischik, interim executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, called it a good start.

“The essential work we do for students has to be tied to adequate and reliable funding,” Nischik said in an email. “This doesn’t fix our funding challenge, but it will facilitate a more honest State School Fund debate in the Legislature.”

Years of underfunding

During the long legislative session in 2023, lawmakers passed a $10.2 billion school funding package, the allocated in Oregon. Of that, more than $8.8 billion went to the State School Fund, which pays for the bulk of district budgets.

But school leaders afterwards said that was still not enough following years of underfunding and rising costs due to inflation. Legislators have historically the amount recommended by the state’s Education Quality Commission, which is tasked with ensuring Oregon operates “a system of highly-effective schools” and presents a proposed budget to the governor and the Legislature every two-years.

Oregon school funding has further been stymied by two voter-approved ballot measures passed in the 1990s that have capped the state’s ability to tax property to fund schools. School funding from property taxes dropped by two-thirds in the following years, with the Legislature drawing a greater share of funding from the state’s general fund, which is needed for myriad services in the state.

Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, chair of the Senate Education Committee and the Statewide Educator Salary Task Force formed by the Legislature in 2023, said improvements to the State School Fund are desperately needed. But he said he’s concerned about where the additional money will come from with no new tax increases or revenue streams proposed alongside them.

“It’s an open question as to what else in the budget might have to be cut in order to bring in this extra half a billion dollars,” he said. “Personally, I worry that it could come from higher education, which is already very much underfunded.”

Proposed changes

The first change Kotek proposes to the State School Fund is to give schools 49% of their allocated budget in the first year of the two-year budget cycle, and then the remaining 51% in the second year, rather than splitting them evenly each year. She said this would help boost funding in subsequent two-year budgets since they are based on the amount allocated for the second year of the previous education budget. This would also help schools cover expenses that might be higher by the second year of a two-year budget. This change would give districts at least $217 million more in their 2025-27 budgets, Kotek’s advisers estimate.

The second proposed change would involve data the state uses to project future compensation. By narrowing the data the state uses for its projections – using the last 10 years of salary data instead of 20 – about $500 million would be added to the money available to schools to hire teachers and classified and administrative staff in the 2025-27 budget.

Lastly, Kotek proposes that the Legislature incorporate annual changes in local property tax revenues. Historically, the Legislature has only taken into account revenue from the first year of a biennial budget when considering what to allocate in the next budget. This limits the state’s ability to send schools more money if property tax revenues rise during a year that’s not counted.

By accounting for local revenue changes every year, state officials could bring in an additional $55 million to the State School Fund for the 2025-27 school year, Kotek’s office estimated.

“The governor said she was committed to this, and she is showing that she is,” Dembrow said of the latest changes. “Looking at how this gets funded in her budget, which will come out in December, will be really interesting to see, because obviously that’s where the proof in the pudding will be.”

Oregon teacher colleges and future and current teachers hoping to get hired at public elementary schools in the state could soon be required to demonstrate a much more robust understanding of how to teach reading and writing than is currently required.

Gov. Tina Kotek’s Early Literacy Educator Preparation Council – made up of K-12 and staff from Oregon teacher colleges, as well as literacy experts, an indigenous language expert and bipartisan state legislators – shared its last week  for overhauling literacy training for elementary teachers in the state.

Nationwide, the reading ability of kids in the U.S. has not improved in decades, due in part to the teaching of flawed reading methods. About 40% of Oregon fourth graders and one-third of Oregon eighth graders scored “below basic” on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the “nation’s report card.” That means they struggle to read and understand simple words.

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The council recommends that officials at the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission – which licenses teachers in Oregon – adopt a much more comprehensive set of literacy standards than currently exists. The council also recommended the agency ensure the new standards are met in the process of approving literacy curriculum at Oregon’s 15 teacher colleges, which happens every seven years, and in the process of licensing new teachers or doing license renewals. If adopted, the changes could go into effect by the fall of 2026.

Kotek called the recommendations “a significant step forward” in a news release. She is reviewing the standards, and to be adopted, they need approval by the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

Raising the bar

The new standards would require that college educator preparation programs ensure their curriculum and instruction are based on the large body of cognitive and neuroscience research on how the brain learns to read and how childrens’ brains make connections among sounds, language symbols and content, often called the “science of reading.” Colleges would need to help future elementary school teachers develop a mastery of written and oral language rules, foundational reading skills such as phonics and word decoding and teach them reading instructional skills that align with standards for teaching kids with Dyslexia.

Up to 60% of kids struggle with some of the same reading challenges that kids with dyslexia struggle with, such as learning to decode written words by mapping sounds to letters and letter combinations, or phonics. Many kids benefit from instruction in the earliest grades that is similar to the more direct and systematic phonics instruction that kids with dyslexia often need.

In 2017, the state Legislature passed to ensure teacher colleges and Oregon schools teach educators about dyslexia and methods for teaching kids according to international dyslexia standards of instruction. According to Anca Matica, a Kotek spokesperson, that bill was mostly designed to teach school staff to screen for dyslexia. The council’s recommendations carry that forward by calling for incorporating dyslexia instructional reading standards into general literacy standards, she said.

Ronda Fritz, co-chair of the council and an associate professor at Eastern Oregon University’s teacher colleges, said in a news release that the new standards, if adopted, will improve student outcomes and produce better teachers.

“I believe these standards will give educator preparation programs a clear roadmap for designing courses and programs that will produce teachers with the essential knowledge and skills to create proficient readers and writers,” she said.

A reading movement

Most Oregon teacher preparation programs have received failing grades for reading instruction from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which has convened panels of experts to review programs since 2013. Until September of 2021, the exam to get certified as a reading specialist in Oregon included testing teachers on a skill broadly criticized today: “Cueing” involves getting students to guess at words and use pictures. By including it in the exam, it essentially ensured Oregon teachers were taught the flawed method.

To correct these longstanding instructional gaps, Kotek established the Early Literacy Educator Preparation Council via executive order in May 2023 as part of a larger , involving a $120 million investment to improve reading instruction among Oregon teachers and reading ability among Oregon students. In May, as part of the initiative, state education officials distributed to more than 250 schools to hire more teachers, literacy experts and coaches and pay for new curriculum aligned with the science of reading.

The educator preparation council is focused on improving how teachers are trained. The recommendations would apply to people teaching kindergarten through fifth grade and to those pursuing a degree in elementary education and special education. They also would apply to teachers who earn state endorsements as a reading interventionist, to teach English to speakers of other languages and to anyone seeking an administrative license.

To help colleges make major changes in how reading instruction is taught, Kotek’s council recommended the state offer grants to help defer new or increased costs, and provide state literacy experts to go to Oregon colleges to assess and aid in updating curriculum and class instruction.

“Some or all Oregon educator preparation programs are likely to undergo significant change in order to meet the new standards,” the council members wrote in the report to Kotek.

Oregon school finances have not been in greater jeopardy for decades.

Large Oregon school districts are cutting millions of dollars from their budgets, which translates into significant cuts in personnel and larger class sizes, as state funding has failed to keep pace with inflation and expanding expectations.

The problem isn’t limited to large school districts. Medium and small districts face the same financial stress. More school districts will face the dual threat of teacher strikes and deep personnel cuts as they enter collective bargaining this year.

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The challenge faced by public education runs deeper than budgets. Schools have inherited a new generation of students and, along with them, a new paradigm for education.

Students in K-12 school classrooms today are demonstrably different than their counterparts just 20 years ago (Facebook was founded in 2004). Educating these students requires different teaching methods, updated classrooms and a wider array of support. It also requires a different approach to school funding that recognizes new demands on students, teachers and support staff.

Today’s students are internet natives, have experience with online learning, depend on school-prepared meals and fear college student debt. Classrooms are impacted by aging infrastructure, overflowing classrooms, lack of connectivity, increasing student diversity, chronic absenteeism and the threat of school shootings. More students face mental health issues, increasing demand for school nurses, counselors and social-emotional teaching techniques.

Teachers, many of whom are parents of school-age children, share the trauma. They are on the front lines of teaching students who need individual instruction. They manage in classrooms that lack adequate heating and cooling. They struggle to keep up to date on digital trends and educational innovation. Burnout is an occupational hazard. Good teachers leave because they earn more in other occupations.

Funding schools based on enrollment doesn’t capture the complexity of educating and preparing today’s K-12 students in the face of rapidly changing job markets. Head counts don’t capture the dimensions of pandemic learning loss, unequal digital resources, special education needs and emotional stress that are the everyday stuff of today’s K-12 classrooms.

Declining public school enrollments, resulting from low birth rates and flight to private schools by those who can afford it have resulted in funding reductions and will force closure of neighborhood schools, as parents in Seattle Public Schools are discovering.

We must find the right school funding formula. The one we have doesn’t work anymore because it doesn’t reflect demands schools are expected to meet every day and the individualized education students deserve.

Oregon lawmakers have tried to reconcile funding with emerging educational needs. But the result has been a hodgepodge of grants and directed spending that has been tacked on to a school funding formula designed to ensure equity among school districts after passage of major property tax limitations in the 1990s.

Finger-pointing is unproductive. We need an informed effort to rethink how schools are funded in light of current-day expectations. Just as important, we need to see school funding reform as critical to restoring public and parental trust in our schools.

There is no time to waste. The 2025 Oregon Legislature reconvenes in six months.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

The proportion of Oregon’s community college enrollment made up of high schoolers has grown in recent years, and many aren’t taking classes on a campus. 

Overall, community college enrollment has plummeted in the past decade, but in 2021-2022 enrollment rose 3% and then grew another 4% in 2022-2023. High school students enrolled in community college classes made up nearly one-third of that growth. 

At five of the state’s 17 community colleges, high schoolers enrolled in college credit classes made up 20% or more of the colleges’ headcount during the 2022-23 school year, the most recent year of Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission data.

Many of the high schoolers enrolled in community college classes are taking a college-level class in their high school, taught by a high school teacher. Nevertheless, the colleges still collect tens of thousands of dollars from the state by counting these students in their enrollment. High school teachers instructing the classes often do not receive extra pay, or are paid a stipend by the school districts, according to interviews with community colleges, districts and a representative of the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Oregon Education Association. 

State data shows that more than 26,000 high schoolers accounted for 14% of the more than 193,000 students enrolled in classes at the state’s community colleges in 2022-23. That proportion is double what it was in 2010. Though both high school and adult enrollment have fluctuated over the years, high school enrollment in community college has remained far more stable than adult enrollment and, in recent years, was slightly higher than it was a decade ago. The number of adults enrolled in recent years was about half of what it was a decade ago.

And it’s not just in community colleges. Between 2011 and 2021, high schoolers taking dual-credit classes through a state four-year public university increased from more than 3,500 to more than 8,900. The number grew during the pandemic while most Oregon universities saw their overall enrollment drop.

Pathway to College

Jim Pinkard, the higher education commission’s director of postsecondary finance and capital, said dual enrollment for college credit on campus or in high school is positive for students, high schools and community colleges. Once graduated from high school, students are on track to finish college sooner and are spared from paying full price for general education courses at post-secondary institutions.

“We’re trying to encourage students who know from a young age that they want to go to college to get a four year degree,” Pinkard said. “If you know from a young age you want to be a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer – if we tell you how you can start as a junior or senior in high school and get the basics out of the way – that’s one or two or three classes you don’t have to pay for later, and hopefully it lowers the cost of your degree.”

Pinkard acknowledged that disparities exist in who is dual enrolled in college coursework. A 2023 from the commission found those enrolled are disproportionately white and female. Latino students are especially underrepresented among those dual enrolled.

And the share of high schoolers taking college-credit courses through five of Oregon’s community colleges was much higher than at others. At Blue Mountain Community College, Klamath Community College, Clackamas Community College, Columbia Gorge Community College and Lane Community College, high schoolers made up about 20% or more of the total enrollment. Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton had one of the largest shares, with dual-enrolled high schoolers accounting for nearly 30% of its enrollment.

Financial arrangements

Oregon is unusual in how it calculates per-pupil funding to community colleges, according to Pinkard of the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. Other states provide funding based on the cost to deliver a program. In some states, cost weights are used to reimburse colleges for students taking a welding course at a higher rate since that program costs more to deliver. In Oregon, community college funding per-pupil is based on the number of what's considered a "full-time equivalent" student.

When it comes to high schoolers dual enrolled, the state takes the number of hours each student spends in college-credit bearing classes, adds it up, then divides by 510 – the length of instructional hours over three terms for a student considered enrolled "full-time."

Ultimately, the state sends about $6,300 per full-time equivalent student to the colleges. 

The school districts and colleges also have financial agreements over how much a student should pay in fees per credit, how and when college instructors should mentor and collaborate with the high school teachers and how credits should transfer. Some high schoolers aren’t charged additional fees, while some pay $30 to $50 per credit. 

But each college-credit class that an Oregon high schooler enrolls in contributes to the college’s funding. Put it this way: If 20 students are taking a college-level, dual-credit biology course for one hour every day for one term at their high school, a class that's instructed by a high school teacher, the state calculus equates it to a bit more than 1,100 hours of instruction. The state divides that by 510 to reach the determination that it should fund the community college to the tune of about two full-time equivalent students. So that one dual-credit high school class brings about $13,600 to the college.

Because students are attending the class at the high school, the district also gets to count the student toward its enrollment, so districts don't lose any of the per-pupil funding they receive annually from the state school funding formula: about $13,800 per student, on average. Some community colleges work out revenue sharing agreements with the schools to give the public school teachers some of the higher education funding from the state, but some don't. 

"Their cost in instructing that student is de minimis if they’re not paying that high school instructor," Pinkard said. 

The bulk of students from Pendleton High School in east Oregon who receive dual credit through Blue Mountain Community College take their classes at the high school, with a high school teacher. The high school does not get any extra money for that, and teachers do not get any additional compensation, according to Matt Yoshioka, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment at Pendleton High School. 

Blue Mountain does pay for the high school to employ Mandy Oyama, a college and career counselor, and it pays for faculty to mentor high school instructors and help administer courses and grading. The rest of the extra money Blue Mountain gets from the high school enrollment goes into its general fund, according to the college’s president, Mark Browning. 

Browning said the college is spending money to make to dual enrollment work, not raking it in. Between paying for college faculty to mentor high school teachers and develop courses, providing transcripts and accreditation, the costs add up, he said.

“Whatever the HECC sends us does not cover the cost of instruction for our students. Take the total number of credits we teach, divided by $17.4 million – what our total budget is – that's what the cost of instruction is,” he said. This year, according to Browning, HECC appropriated $4 million in per-pupil funding to Blue Mountain.

Browning said Oregon is far behind other states like Washington and Idaho, where the state government pays for dedicated post-secondary education options in high schools. In both Washington and Idaho, the state pays for the instructors who teach these college-credit courses in the high schools, and it pays for the staff who train teachers, develop courses and coordinate everything on the college’s side.

“In Oregon, we're just doing it all out of hide,” Browning said. “There are ways to do it better.”

Pinkard agreed that overall the deals between colleges and high schools for dual credit aren’t wildly lucrative for the colleges, but he said, they help subsidize the college's other programs, such as adult basic education classes in math and reading that cost as little as $25 per credit at most community colleges. 

“Most of them are not making a helluva lot of money on it,” Pinkard said. “But, there must be some that are making enough, because otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Oregon Health & Science University is expanding its program that prepares students for nursing careers on an accelerated schedule to Bend.

Central Oregon will be the third spot for OHSU’s in nursing, which already is available in Portland and Ashland. The program graduated 128 students in the last academic year and is on track to graduate even more this year. The Bend location will start with eight students in July.

Through OHSU’s School of Nursing, the intensive 15-month program allows students who already have a bachelor’s degree in another field to prepare for a career as a registered nurse. Health care and higher education officials hope the program will provide a pathway for central Oregonians to enter the field in the region, which has a shortage of nurses. St. Charles Health System is the largest provider in central Oregon, and its Bend hospital is the only level two trauma center east of the Cascades equipped to serve adults and children with complex and severe injuries.

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In recent years, nurses faced burnout and exhaustion during the pandemic, which accelerated retirements and exits from the field. A 2021 Oregon Employment Department survey found three-fourths of registered nurse positions among nearly 2,100 openings are difficult to fill. As the health care industry continues to rebuild, it faces increased demands for services as the population grows, including in central Oregon, and the aging baby boomer generation needs more advanced care.

To launch the program in Bend, OHSU worked with Central Oregon Community College and St. Charles Health System, which operates four hospitals and dozens of clinics throughout central Oregon. Those talks started in June 2023.

“We talked about, ‘How do we solve a problem of Central Oregon not having enough nurses and not preparing enough nurses?’” St. Charles Chief Nursing Executive Joan Ching said in an interview.  “Coming out of the pandemic, I think there was a reawakening of a lot of people that wanted to contribute to the health and wellness community. So we’re just meeting a demand that’s already there in central Oregon.”

The program will be based out of Central Oregon Community College’s campus. Students will take classes and simulated training on campus and get hands-on experience through St. Charles Health System’s hospitals and clinics.

Susan Bakewell Sachs, dean of the OHSU School of Nursing, said the program’s arrival in central Oregon is a partnership that complements what’s already in place.

“It was a real opportunity to offer something that was needed – that was not already available in central Oregon,” Bakewell Sachs said in an interview.

With its requirement for applicants to have a prior bachelor’s degree, the program offers a way for students to change careers quickly. In the past, OHSU has attracted students to the program from broad walks of life, such as lawyers or people with doctoral degrees.

“One of the wonderful things about this program is it does draw on these prior life experiences and discipline-based experiences,” Bakewell Sachs said. “It tends to be a very enriching experience for the individual. And it’s also enriching to our profession.”

St. Charles Health System’s hospitals and clinics offer a variety of settings for nursing students. The program exposes students to different medical settings and works to try to match them to their areas of interest, Bakewell Sachs said.

Nurses who graduate and receive a license can apply to work at St. Charles Health System’s residency program, which offers more hands-on training and mentorship as new nurses start their careers. After a year or two, nurses often go into specialties, like working in an emergency department or operating room.

The community college’s already trains students with an associate’s degree and is developing a bachelor’s degree in nursing that could start as early as 2025. That program will be for students without a previous bachelor’s degree and be separate from OHSU’s accelerated program.

Julie Downing, an instructional dean at COCC, said in a statement that the collaboration is a good fit and allows both schools to reach different groups of students.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

A bill that resulted from a student coming within seconds of being struck by an aggressive driver is one step closer to becoming law in Oregon.

A high school student, Sean Sype, saw and reported the incident, prompting Rep. Courtney Neron, D-Wilsonville, to introduce , which would allow school districts to add cameras to school buses to catch and ticket drivers who break state law by blowing past the stop signs and flashing red lights on buses, endangering students’ lives. The measure passed the House on a bipartisan 49-5 vote on Monday and is headed to the Senate.

Sype, a junior at Wilsonville High School, described his experience in submitted to the House Education Committee.

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“I am passionate about this bill passing because on October 15, 2021, I witnessed an aggressive driver speed past the bus stop-arm while one of my peers was exiting the bus,” he said. “If that student had been crossing the road, he would have possibly been killed. It is important that drivers who ignore the law are held accountable.”

At least 24 states, including Idaho and Washington, have laws allowing such cameras, according to the . The National Transportation Safety Board every state allow the cameras after a pickup truck driver struck four children, killing three of them, in Indiana in 2018.

Neron cited a from the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, a school bus driver organization, that surveys drivers throughout the country each year. Oregon bus drivers documented 1,427 incidents of drivers illegally passing them on just one day, and throughout the country bus drivers reported more than 62,000 violations in a single day.

Failing to stop for a stopped bus with flashing red lights is already the highest level of traffic violation, punishable by a fine up to $2,000. The bill would allow districts to partner with local law enforcement to send tickets to drivers caught on camera breaking the law.

The bill doesn’t include funding for school districts to add cameras or for local police to review footage and send tickets. Rep. Boomer Wright, R-Coos Bay, supported the measure but said the lack of funding bothered him.

“When we propose a bill that costs school districts and police departments money, maybe we ought to fund it,” Wright said.

Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, was one of only five lawmakers to vote against the measure, and he said he voted “no” for consistency. He has long opposed photo radar programs because he doesn’t trust that data gathered by the cameras when they’re not actively taking pictures of lawbreakers will remain secure.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Three years ago, Valeria Atanacio urged state lawmakers to pass a bill aiming to increase Indigenous families’ access to early learning and child care programs.

When the Oregon Legislature embraced the proposal — called the Tribal Early Learning Hub — she considered it a victory.

“That was really impactful because it was delivering on a promise,” said Atanacio, who was the tribal affairs manager for Oregon’s Early Learning Division in 2021. The promise, she said, was to empower tribes to shape how those state resources and services would be delivered.

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The Legislature tasked a tribal advisory committee, composed of representatives from all nine of the state’s federally recognized tribes, with designing the hub. Oregon already has 10 such hubs, which are regional subagencies of the early learning department that shape early learning strategies in their local communities. The tribal hub would focus solely on tribal communities instead. Lawmakers allocated $601,000 to , with another $626,000 in 2023. Atanacio was promoted to tribal affairs director in 2022, ran the meetings and served as a key liaison between state officials and the tribal committee members.

But in October — after 14 months of meetings and nearly $2 million in state and federal funds allocated — the committee scrapped plans for the early learning hub entirely, saying it had found no way to structure it in a way that would honor each tribe’s sovereignty. The committee put its funding toward grants distributed among the tribes, but those decisions were made in meetings that were not open to the public, possibly in violation of Oregon’s open-meetings laws, InvestigateWest found. And Atanacio, who said she received little support in her role leading the early learning division’s work with tribes, was demoted suddenly in July 2023 and then resigned. For six months after, all three of the early learning department’s tribal affairs positions remained vacant.

“It was getting to that point where it felt my values no longer aligned with this system,” Atanacio said. “I felt like I was being put in the position to pacify the Native community.”

However, the Tribal Early Learning Hub remains required under the law passed in 2021, and Alyssa Chatterjee, director of the Department of Early Learning and Care, said the statute must be amended to allow the committee to permanently stop working on it. But the department is bringing no proposed fix forward during the 2024 Legislative session, saying tribes need more time to work out an alternate plan.

“We have to remember we’re talking about nine individual nations, and so it takes time to coalesce around a shared idea,” Chatterjee said. “As the work evolved over time and over the last six months, there was a lot more clarity about which direction to go.”

The lawmakers who created the early learning hub haven’t publicly expressed much interest in the committee’s progress or how the money was spent. When InvestigateWest reached out to the 10 members of the legislative committee overseeing the early learning department, only one, Rep. Anna Scharf, responded, saying that she was “basically unaware” that the tribal committee even existed.

Meanwhile, tribal representatives on the committee said their rejection of the hub doesn’t mean they’re not fulfilling their mission — they’re just approaching the same goals a different way.

“I think that’s OK if there has to be a change in direction,” said Sandy Henry, education director for the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians and co-chair of the tribal advisory committee. “We just keep our eye on the prize and keep walking forward.”

Others, however, have some lingering doubt that tribes will be able to get what they need from the early learning department without the hub that tribal leaders fought for for years.

“We’ve got to wait and find out if that’s true or not, and if not, hold people’s feet to the fire,” said Julie Siestreem, who represents the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw on the committee. “I’m in a constant state of prayer, a constant state of alertness. The primary concern is that our children are served, and that’s the bottom line.”

Addressing entrenched struggles

Education leaders from several Oregon tribes have argued for years that the state’s rules sometimes prevented Indigenous providers from caring for children according to their own cultural knowledge. For example, Oregon required an exemption with a physician’s signoff for a licensed child care provider to use a cradleboard as an infant sleep setting, as is common in some tribal cultures.

And though the state increased its investments in child care and early learning, tribes haven’t had clear pathways to access those funds while honoring their government sovereignty, Atanacio said.

The Tribal Early Learning Hub was supposed to be the entity to bring all the tribes and the state together to solve those obstacles.

The brain develops most rapidly during the first few years of life, research has shown. The ethos of early learning is to set children up to thrive as they enter the K-12 system.

Although Oregon has little data on Indigenous families’ access to early learning and child care, as children grow up, data lays bare the educational inequities they face.

About 21% of all American Indian and Alaska Native third graders were proficient in English language arts in 2023, compared with 39% of third graders statewide, according to state assessment data. In 2023, 68% of American Indian and Alaska Native seniors graduated from high school, compared with 81% of all Oregon students.

“We continue to see trends with Native American youth that they’re just not as successful in those Eurocentric environments as they could be,” said Henry. “That starts in early childhood education. That starts with our babies.”

Boosting support for tribes’ early learning programs is about more than academic achievement, however, Henry said.

“The other thing that’s important is that culture and language are incorporated into the early learning environment for our kids,” she said. “That’s an important piece for their identity, and it’s important that we recognize that and honor that.”

Tribes nationwide don’t receive much federal money to support their early learning and child care programs — less than $600 per child on average each year through the federal child care subsidy, according to by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Some also receive Head Start funding and run home visiting programs for at-risk families. In Oregon, only a handful of the nine federally recognized tribes participate in state-subsidized programs, such as Preschool Promise.

As part of a broader goal to make early learning more accessible statewide, lawmakers created regional early learning hubs in 2013. They bring together local educators, physical and mental health providers, and other professionals to form strategies to serve families with children under 5 in their own community. The hubs also manage enrollment in early learning and child care programs.

However, not all tribes have a good relationship with their respective regional early learning hubs, Henry said. That’s what prompted some to push for a hub that would serve tribes exclusively.

“My particular tribe has enjoyed a really solid relationship with our early learning hub,” she said. “My understanding is that has not been the case throughout the state.”

During the tribal advisory committee’s first two years, it tackled some of the barriers that interfered with their cultural practices, such as the cradleboard issue. At the advisory committee’s recommendation, the Early Learning Council, which sets early learning system rules, removed the exemption requirement. State-licensed child care providers can now use cradleboards if a parent prefers without having to seek an exemption.

Yet, despite being a public body subject to public meetings law, the tribal advisory committee didn’t often operate as one, including when it decided in 2022 how to allocate the funding it received. As with most of the tribal advisory committee meetings, the department did not make the agenda, minutes and recording public until more than a year later.

The Early Learning Division combined the state funding with another $650,000 in federal funds, bringing the total that the committee allocated to $1.2 million.

The committee agreed to split the money evenly between the tribes in $190,000 grants, with broad allowable uses. Tribes spent the money in various ways, including training for early childhood educators, a youth needs assessment, and cultural items and Indigenous literature for preschool classes, according to the early learning department.

It’s not clear how much of the funds, if any, has gone back into the committee’s work to structure the hub.

Bumps on the road

Personnel conflicts and prolonged vacancies also factored into the committee’s struggle to make the early learning hub work.

Atanacio was not renewed in her position as tribal affairs director in July, a decision she said was conveyed to her without warning or explanation. Because she had been in a probationary period as the director, she was returned to her previous position of liaison to the committee members.

A member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde with an educational and professional background in early childhood education, Atanacio had first joined the Early Learning Division in 2020, when it was still part of the Oregon Department of Education. She was its first tribal affairs manager. After she was made director in 2022, she helped oversee the distribution of the early learning grants to tribes, serving as a point of communication and coordination for the committee’s work.

It’s not clear what led to Atancio’s removal as director in July. Chatterjee declined to discuss the action, citing personnel confidentiality. While Chatterjee did say that the committee’s failure to comply with public meetings law happened on Atanacio’s watch, Atanacio said she was never notified about it. Her personnel record, which InvestigateWest reviewed, contained no indication that she was disciplined or put on an improvement plan before her supervisors determined she was “unwilling or unable” to perform the necessary functions of the tribal affairs director role.

Atanacio said she received little feedback from Chatterjee while in the role. Without clear answers, she has speculated that her demotion was related to her defense of tribes’ rights to self-govern, which put her at odds with the state’s priorities at times.

“As one of the only Native American people employed by the agency, there wasn’t any support. There wasn’t a safe space for me as a person,” she said. What disappointed her was “just the disposability piece of it.”

Atanacio left the department in August, resigning from the liaison position. She continues to work on early learning issues through other channels.

“I feel very much validated in my decision to leave when I did,” she said. “I still am in this work, and I want to keep moving progress toward more tribally inclusive services and programming.”

After her departure, all three positions within the early learning department’s newly created Tribal Affairs Office remained vacant for the next five months. In January, Paulina Whitehat, a Navajo educator and researcher with expertise in special education, started as the new tribal affairs director. She declined to comment on this story.

Success plan

The tribal advisory committee is now crafting an Indigenous student success plan, similar to one created by the Oregon Department of Education in 2020. The Education Department’s plan lays out goals such as increasing accurate data on Indigenous youth, improving graduation rates and reducing overrepresentation in school discipline.

The committee has not specified how long it will take to create its own student success plan or to approach the Legislature about changing its role in statute.

“I think a really common theme is (tribes) don’t want to be pressured into a timeline,” Chatterjee said.

The months since the committee set aside its work on the Tribal Early Learning Hub is “not enough time to have a legislative concept that each tribe could have vetted through their government structure,” she said.

In the Legislature, the House Early Childhood and Human Services committee is new to dealing with the early learning department, said Scharf, the Republican lawmaker from Amity who serves as one of the committee’s vice chairs.

In the 2023 session, legislators were concerned with bigger changes as the Early Learning Division became the Department of Early Learning and Care. Primarily, they focused on the state’s employment-related child care subsidy, which moved from the Oregon Department of Human Services to the new early learning department last July.

“I can’t think of any reports or information we have received, and was basically unaware of there even being a Tribal Advisory Committee,” Scharf said.

Scharf said she believes that the early learning department should be assigned its own House committee separate from human services so that both can get enough attention from legislators.

Tribal committee members, meanwhile, said they are keeping their focus where it belongs as they make new plans.

“I feel like a lot of really good work has been done,” said Henry. “Would we have liked to be further down the road than we are now? Yeah, we would. But it’s also important that we stay true to our goal and true to the tribal citizens that we serve.”

InvestigateWest () is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reach reporter Kaylee Tornay at kaylee@invw.org. This story was produced with support from the Investigative Reporters & Editors’ .

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

It’s encouraging to see states take action to combat sweeping declines on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Congress established NAEP, the only nationally representative benchmark, to understand what students know and can do in subjects such as reading, math and civics. “Decisionmakers need to see the facts clearly. They must make sense of a storm of confusing data and help lead the way to better schools. The Nation’s Report Card — if it is well-designed, clear and usable — can be a rudder against the storm,” read a . 

State leaders have responded to this call to use NAEP in varying ways.

Mississippi is among those most recognized for using NAEP as a lever for improvements; beginning in 2013, leaders there revamped state standards to meet the rigor of NAEP and overhauled literacy instruction. That led to . What set Mississippi apart was its stance that NAEP wasn’t something to brush aside or hide from. Despite low scores and poor rankings, the state used NAEP as a tool to galvanize and empower leaders to make improvements for students.

As executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, I frequently talk with state and district leaders about their educational progress and recently conducted an informal review of how they’re using the NAEP data. There’s much to .

Several states, like Mississippi, are using NAEP, to raise expectations. In addition to putting coaches in schools to spur math achievement, Alabama leaders are leveraging the Mississippi model, publicly citing low scores and setting bold new goals, to overhaul standards and improve policies. These changes have led to . Virginia’s leaders are also citing NAEP as they implement reforms designed to better inform the public and improve schools. As Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera recently wrote in ����Ӱ��, “We are using data as a flashlight, not a hammer, to inform better decisions at kitchen tables, classrooms, school boards and the State Capitol.”

Some states also are using the Nation’s Report Card as a resource for improving and developing their own assessments. For example, my home state of New Jersey is creating statewide history and civics assessments based on items from NAEP. Oregon is doing the same for science, and South Carolina leaders have been using NAEP frameworks, which guide content development on the Nation’s Report Card assessments, to inform their state reading and math tests. 

Leaders in districts that participate in the also are using NAEP data in pivotal ways. In Philadelphia, Superintendent Tony Watlington has spotlighted the district’s NAEP data to describe challenges students face and set goals for improving achievement. In Baltimore, Superintendent Sonja Santelises cited NAEP data when establishing plans to create more out-of-school learning opportunities for students. 

The NAEP assessments also include rich student and teacher survey data. It’s an underutilized resource that can provide context around achievement results. 

Recent findings that struck a chord with me identified disturbing declines in independent reading. Just 14% of 13-year-olds say they read for fun almost daily, down 13 points from a decade ago. As a mother of three school-aged children, and someone who spent much of my childhood with a dog-eared book in hand, I hope state and district leaders consider ways to tackle this problem and foster a love of reading in all students.

I also hope policymakers take note of recent NAEP teacher survey data showing educators lack confidence when it comes to closing students’ knowledge and skill gaps. This breaks my heart. Teachers work so hard every day and are hands-down my kids’ favorite superheroes — with Spider-Man and Wonder Woman as close seconds. Every time my daughter, now in kindergarten, sees her pre-K teacher in the hallway, she runs over and gives her a bear hug. It’s hard to remember not to run in the hall when Mrs. Dillon is there to greet you with a giant smile and warm embrace. She’s the same teacher who taught my daughter how to read by the end of pre-K, while coaching her on strategies for managing her feelings when things in class were upsetting or overwhelming. 

Although so many teachers, like Mrs. Dillon, exhibit extraordinary heroics to help their students, the magnitude of the learning gaps requires system-level changes and supports. Given the across-the-board achievement declines U.S. students are facing, more must be done.

By studying the data, openly discussing it and using it to drive much-needed progress, state education leaders and district administrators can go a long way toward ensuring all students get the world-class education they need to reach their goals and fulfill their ambitions — in school and in their lives.

When Debbie Fery started hearing this year from substitute teachers who had not been paid for time spent taking mandatory trainings, it felt personal.

Fery, treasurer and chair of government affairs for the Oregon Substitute Teachers Association, and a substitute teacher herself, took her own fight to get paid for a required safety training to the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industry back in 2020.

“It’s like no one respects us enough to pay for it,” she said.

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All teachers are required to take certain training courses, some each year, and most full-time teachers take the classes during the week before school starts when they’re technically back on the clock. But substitute teachers often have to complete the training when they’re not on the clock.

Many of the courses that districts require substitute teachers to take – on things like cybersecurity, federal academic and health privacy laws and what to do in the event of a school shooting – take no more than a few hours online, and by law, districts must pay substitute teachers for their time. But Fery said many aren’t doing so and that state money set aside for this since 2022 has gone unused.

District officials told the Capital Chronicle that’s because they didn’t need the money.

Fery settled her claim of wage theft with the Willamette Education Service District, 16 of the 21 districts it encompasses and the substitute teacher staffing company Edustaff, all of which had told her they didn’t owe her money for the time she spent taking the online courses in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Following the settlement, the labor bureau wrote a guidance letter to districts and posted it to its website, explaining that by law they needed to pay substitutes for mandatory training. Still, Fery said, district officials have told her and members of the substitute teachers association that they do not need to pay them.

Teacher associations like hers played a critical role in securing state funding in 2022 for districts so they could pay substitute teachers for more than 20 different training classes, many of which are mandatory depending on the district. Less than one-third of Oregon’s 197 school districts and 19 education service districts have used the state money, leading Fery and legislators to wonder how widespread wage theft is for substitutes taking these trainings.

The Capital Chronicle emailed 17 districts that either requested money and did not use it, or did not request any money at all. The few administrators who responded said they tapped into other pots of money to pay substitutes to train, that they did not need the money or that a company that provides them with substitute teachers is responsible for paying them to take required courses.

New task force

State Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, convened in early November the first meeting of a new Joint Task force on Substitute Teachers, of which Fery is a member. It’s looking at a number of issues that’s led to a shortage of substitute teachers statewide and the growing reliance on two private companies – ESS and Edustaff – to provide substitutes to districts.

Dembrow said the task force will consider concerns about wage theft in the coming year. It is slated to provide recommendations to the state Legislature by December of 2025.

Dembrow said he still needs to learn more about why districts have not used the money the state set aside in 2022.

“To be fair to them, if there were problems with the process, we should know that,” he said. “But we need to get to a place where subs are getting paid for the training that they need.”

Fery said she’s heard from more than 30 substitutes in at least 10 districts who have not been paid to take SafeSchools Training, a series of courses intended to show that all teachers are following state and federal safety mandates. She asked several if they would talk with a Capital Chronicle reporter but said they declined out of fear of retribution.

$16 million unspent

Due to a critical shortage of both substitute teachers and fully licensed classroom teachers, the Oregon Legislature in early 2022 passed on teacher licensing and other requirements. It included $100 million in incentives and bonuses to attract and retain teachers, classroom assistants and substitute teachers and $19 million for districts to reimburse classroom assistants and substitute teachers for mandatory training through January of 2024. But districts have spent just $3 million – 15% – of that money, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education. Districts had until the end of July to submit invoices for reimbursement. The remaining $16 million can no longer be spent and will be returned to the Legislature in January, according to the Oregon Department of Education.

Of Oregon’s 197 school districts and 19 education service districts, 93 districts applied to the education department for money and just 53 actually used it.

Administrators in districts that applied but didn’t spend the money, or used far less money than they were allocated told the Capital Chronicle they didn’t need it or as much as they thought. They had substitutes take the training while they were on the clock, they said, or used money from the Student Success Act – meant to boost equity, mental health care and help recover learning time lost during COVID for the state’s highest needs students – to pay them.

Many districts that applied for funding did not submit invoices for reimbursement by July, according to the data from the education department. Some districts ultimately invoiced for just a fraction of the money the state was prepared to give them.

As one example, the West Linn-Wilsonville School District didn’t spend any of the $263,000 it applied for and the state allotted. The Multnomah Education Service District, serving about 100,000 students in eight school districts – including Portland Public, the state’s largest district – didn’t spend any of the more than $194,000 that officials applied for in 2022.

An unnamed media relations official wrote via email that most substitutes took mandatory trainings during work hours and that it used Student Success Act money to pay for any training outside of those hours.

Superintendent Mike Johnson of the Creswell School District near Eugene said the Lane Education Service District provides most of the substitute teachers at Creswell schools and pays for their training. He did apply for $56,250 to pay for SafeSchools Training for classroom teachers and classified staff from the state’s $19 million fund, but in the end, the district only owed $1,300 for training hours, he said. He expensed it to the school’s general fund instead.

In all, the state’s money paid for 11,000 substitutes and classroom assistants to take mandatory training. The average per hour of training across employees was $50.

Of the 11,000, 30% were contracted by a third party service. The two largest in Oregon are ESS and Edustaff. Those companies aren’t allowed to bill the state for training, but they can bill the district for the training hours, and the district can bill the state for reimbursement, according to Fery. She has worked under contract for Edustaff as a substitute and said it is not uniformly paying substitutes to take the training.

The Greater Albany School District was allocated $300,000 from the state, but it never invoiced for reimbursement. Michelle Steinhebel, communications director for the district, said it entered into a contract with Edustaff last year and that officials were under the impression that the company is ensuring the teachers take the SafeSchools courses and paying them for their time.

Attempts by the Capital Chronicle to reach representatives of Edustaff and ESS by phone and email went unanswered.

For Fery, withholding payment for mandatory training is a form of wage theft that is leading to a lack of dignity and respect that perpetuates the state’s teacher shortages.

Dembrow agrees that it is not helping.

“All the steps that we can take to get this workforce the professional recognition that they deserve – that’s what we need to do,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Public funding to boost early child care options in Oregon has grown by millions during the past few years, but options are still limited for many parents who are forced to choose – and lose – jobs, according to a survey from Portland State University.

More than 40% of parents said they or their partner had quit a job, not taken a job or “greatly changed” a job because of difficulty finding child care the previous year. The percentage was slightly higher for parents of color.

The , undertaken by more than 3,000 Oregon parents between December 2022 and January 2023, revealed that major challenges still exist when it comes to finding child care for kids 5 and younger. The survey was conducted by Portland State’s Early Childhood program and recently submitted to the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care and the Early Learning Council. The findings will help the agency with legislative and budget priorities in the next year, it said in a release.

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Among the problems the survey found are limited spots, few options with hours that fit parents’ work schedules and high prices. Finding child care was particularly difficult for parents of kids with learning disabilities, for children of color and for families that primarily speak a language other than English at home.

Kids of color and those with disabilities were the most likely to have been asked to take a break from facilities or asked to leave a child care center in 2022. That year 10% of all children were asked to take a break or leave. That rate increased to 16% for Black children, a fourfold increase compared to 2020.

“Parents of color are among those most likely to experience those negative impacts on employment, too,” said Katherine Pears, research scientist at the nonprofit Oregon Social Learning Center, which partnered with Portland State on the study. “So, you’re really talking then about the most vulnerable families getting kind of a double whammy there.”

Pears said improving child care access and affordability will require expanding the workforce through professional training and development and paying child care staff statewide livable wages.

“The 0 to 5 brain is doing these amazing things, and we don’t confer dignity on the people that are helping that brain develop,” she said.

Through the 2019 Student Success Act, the state has spent more than $35 million increasing slots for infants and toddlers statewide, but she said more than funding is needed to improve access to child care.

“If employers want staff, and they want folks who can do jobs well, and drive the economy, then employers need to get involved in helping folks have good child care,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

But nearly a year after most of us came face-to-face with the first of these tools, a that few states are offering educators substantial guidance on how to best use AI, let alone fairly and with appropriate privacy protections.

As of mid-October, just two states, California and , offered official guidance to schools on using AI, according to the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. 

CRPE said 11 more states are developing guidance, but that another 21 states don’t plan to give schools guidelines on AI “in the foreseeable future.”

Seventeen states didn’t respond to CRPE’s survey and haven’t made official guidance publicly available.

As more schools experiment with AI, good policies and advice — or a lack thereof — will “drive the ways adults make decisions in school,” said Bree Dusseault, CRPE’s managing director. That will ripple out, dictating whether these new tools will be used properly and equitably.

“We’re not seeing a lot of movement in states getting ahead of this,” she said. 

The reality in schools is that AI is here. Edtech companies are pitching products and schools are buying them, even if state officials are still trying to figure it all out. 

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Satya Nitta, CEO of , a generative AI company developing voice-activated assistants for teachers. “Normally the technology is well ahead of regulators and lawmakers. So they’re probably scrambling to figure out what their standard should be.”

Nitta said a lot of educators and officials this week are likely looking “very carefully” at Monday’s on AI “to figure out what next steps are.” 

The order requires, among other things, that AI developers share safety test results with the U.S. government and develop standards that ensure AI systems are “safe, secure, and trustworthy.” 

It follows five months after the U.S. Department of Education released a detailed, with recommendations on using AI in education.

Deferring to districts

The fact that 13 states are at least in the process of helping schools figure out AI is significant. Last summer, no states offered such help, CRPE found. Officials in New York, , Rhode Island and Wyoming said decisions about many issues related to AI, such as academic integrity and blocking websites or tools, are made on the local level.

Still, researchers said, it’s significant that the majority of states still don’t plan AI-specific strategies or guidance in the 2023-24 school year.

There are a few promising developments: North Carolina will soon require high school graduates to pass a computer science course. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin in September on AI careers. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in September to create a state governing board to guide use of generative AI, including developing training programs for state employees.

But educators need help understanding artificial intelligence, “while also trying to navigate its impact,” said Tara Nattrass, managing director of innovation strategy at the International Society for Technology in Education. “States can ensure educators have accurate and relevant guidance related to the opportunities and risks of AI so that they are able to spend less time filtering information and more time focused on their primary mission: teaching and learning.”

Beth Blumenstein, Oregon’s interim director of digital learning & well-rounded access, said AI is already being used in Oregon schools. And the state Department of Education has received requests from educators asking for support, guidance and professional development.

Generative AI is “a powerful tool that can support education practices and provide services to students that can greatly benefit their learning,” she said. “However, it is a highly complex tool that requires new learning, safety considerations, and human oversight.”

Three big issues she hears about are cheating, plagiarism and data privacy, including how not to run afoul of Oregon’s Student Information Protection Act or the federal Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act. 

‘Now I have to do AI?’

In August, CRPE conducted focus groups with 18 superintendents, principals and senior administrators in five states who said they were cautiously optimistic about AI’s potential, but many complained about navigating yet another new disruption.

“We just got through this COVID hybrid remote learning,” one leader told researchers. “Now I have to do AI?”

Nitta, Merlyn Mind’s CEO, said that syncs with his experience.

“Broadly, school districts are looking for some help, some guidance: ‘Should we use ChatGPT? Should we not use it? Should we use AI? Is it private? Are they in violation of regulations?’ It’s a complex topic. It’s full of all kinds of mines and landmines.” 

And the stakes are high, he said. No educator wants to appear in a newspaper story about her school using an AI chatbot that feeds inappropriate information to students. 

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a deer-caught-in-headlights moment here,” Nitta said, “but there’s certainly a lot of concern. And I do believe it’s the responsibility of authorities, of responsible regulators, to step in and say, ‘Here’s how to use AI safely and appropriately.’ ”