In Oregon, a push for school accountability comes with emphasis on local control

Each of Oregon’s 197 school districts will be given the latitude to set their own goals for what constitutes progress on student academic outcomes under Gov. Tina Kotek’s signature education reform bill, according to plans outlined Monday by the state Department of Education.

Under the plan, which is up for discussion in front of the state Board of Education later this week, all districts will need to track and report student outcomes in the same seven key areas, with an eye toward broad improvement. But it will be up to the districts to set their own performance targets in those categories.

The chosen metrics include early elementary school attendance, K-12 attendance, third grade reading proficiency, eighth grade math achievement, how many ninth graders are on track to graduate in four years, how many students graduate from high school within four years and how many earn their diploma or GED after five years.

It’s a shift from the state’s previous laserlike focus on graduation rates, which have steadily risen even as other student well-being measurements, including reading and math skills, as measured by standardized testing, have cratered.

Districts that fail to help students make significant progress toward their chosen goals will face a series of escalating interventions after the next two school years, including the potential for coaching from state-backed experts to help them improve instruction. If student outcomes haven’t improved enough by the 2030-2031 school year, the state could step in and dictate how a district spends up to a quarter of its budget.

What Oregon will not do is set a broad, statewide goal that all districts must meet, Charlene Williams, director of the Oregon Department of Education, told reporters Monday.

“Districts will be setting their own long-term performance goals based on their starting points and community context,” Williams said. The Oregon Department of Education will group districts with other demographically-similar districts to provide a baseline and suggest yearly performance targets for districts in that group. Districts won’t have to strictly adhere to those suggestions, but the education department will have a say in how low or high a district sets its targets.

There are statewide goals that will signal the direction in which the state hopes to move, said Cassie Medina, an assistant superintendent at the education agency. Those include getting 53% of the state’s fourth graders reading at a level roughly equivalent to earning an A or a B in literacy skills on their report card by spring of 2030; the current rate, based on the most recently available data from standardized testing, is 40%.

The statewide goals are more ambitious in eighth grade math. Currently only 29% of students are scoring at A or B level on state tests; by the end of 2030, the statewide target is that 52% of eighth graders will be at that level.

Districts and charter schools will not be held “directly accountable” to those statewide goals, but every district will be “working towards the same statewide direction,” Medina said.

The approach is in keeping with Oregon’s longstanding tradition of local control over school decision-making and is somewhat in contrast with an approach popularized in states including Missiissippi, Louisiana and Maryland, where there is more topdown direction from the state.

School districts will also need to choose one additional metric on which to evaluate themselves, in areas including fifth grade science outcomes, participation in advanced courses or career-technical education and multilingual proficiency.

The overall effort, which Kotek has signaled will be a key plank of her reelection campaign, is designed to tie increased state spending on public education with better academic outcomes for students, after a decade-long slide that was exacerbated by the pandemic.

This article was originally published by The Oregonian/OregonLive and is reprinted with permission.

Contact reporter Julia Silverman: [email protected].

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