Angela Uherbelau vividly remembers a meeting nearly a decade ago when she and a dedicated group of parents and staff members met to discuss the poor state test scores at her daughters’ elementary school.
“There was a tangible feeling of real grief, honestly, in the room, and confusion, and teachers saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I know I want to do better, especially around reading and math,’” said Uherbelau, who had two children at the Portland school.
That meeting in 2018 was the moment Uherbelau realized that teachers needed more: more guidance, more training, and stronger expectations from the state. Instead, teachers and families felt like failing was personal.
Eight years later, Oregon’s student outcomes have barely budged, and the state remains near the bottom nationally for math, reading and graduation rates.
This fall, Oregon’s 197 school districts must start tracking their progress towards goals in attendance, third grade reading skills, and four-year graduation rates. It’s been a hallmark of Gov. Tina Kotek’s tenure as she fights for reelection next month. The plan includes escalating levels of “coaching” for failing districts and — potentially — state control of up to 25% of state funding for those that don’t meet expectations.
Gov. Kotek’s office says the new accountability system will connect student outcomes, expectations for districts, responsibility at the state level, and support for struggling districts.
But many worry that despite the fanfare, nothing will change. OPB spoke to more than 20 education leaders, parents and advocates who said those efforts are futile because Oregon still has a fundamental problem: the state’s leadership lacks a clear, unified and top-down vision for how to improve education and instead passes policies that shift focus constantly.
As a result, school districts face unclear guidelines, a state policy that undermines accurate reporting, mandates with no teeth and state funding that still results in cuts to programs and staff. An overall system that favors the autonomy of local school districts — rather than sweeping state oversight — is baked into the bones of Oregon’s approach, making real change slow and inconsistent.
For example, Oregon’s accountability law intends to measure academic improvement using standardized tests, yet students can easily opt out of those tests. Schools will be judged on their attendance, but the state doesn’t enforce laws that could help more students to get to school regularly.
“If we just create accountability consequences, but forget to do the part of how we actually improve, then we just have a recipe for failure,” said Pooja Bhatt, who worked on education policy for Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and former Gov. Kate Brown.
The new policy is “setting people up for anger and frustration because we’ve sold them a story” that Oregon’s outcomes will improve, she added.
Though Kotek proposed the new accountability system and the legislature approved it, the system only works with the support of two layers of bureaucracy: the Oregon State Board of Education which creates the rules for districts to follow, and the Oregon Department of Education which enforces the rules.
That includes ODE director Charlene Williams, whom Kotek appointed in 2023, after she spent years as an administrator in Portland and Southwest Washington school districts.
Williams said the state’s new accountability system is about more than data and logistics.
“This is really about getting those supports in place so that we deliver on kids,” she said.
It’s not the first time ODE has taken on such an effort.
Cycle of ineffective changes without sufficient ‘urgency’
Over the last 25 years, Oregon has tried a variety of accountability systems. Some, like No Child Left Behind in 2001 and the more recent Every Student Succeeds Act, came from the federal level. Others, like the Certificate of Initial Mastery programor IndiStar, a tool districts used to monitor progress in meeting state goals, were touted at the state level before falling by the wayside.
The state also initiated a goal in 2012 that 100% of high school students would graduate by the year 2025. The changes intended to help schools meet that graduation goal were dismantled before students in the Class of 2025 had even completed elementary school. OPB followed the evolution of that goal in a 13-year project, the Class of 2025.
“It’s all the same stuff with a different name on it,” said Mark Redmond, the superintendent of three education entities: the Malheur Education Service District and the tiny Eastern Oregon school districts of Juntura and Arock. “It cycles about every seven to eight years.”
Redmond has seen several stops and starts over his 29 years in Oregon education, often dictated by who’s in charge politically.
He compares it to moving to a new house every four years.
“How is that new house going to interpret the rules? How are they going to enforce the rules?” he said.
Over the years, these ever-changing systems have not improved outcomes for Oregon students. The state remains near the bottom of national rankings for student achievement, especially when adjusted for poverty. The pandemic made things worse for everyone, but as some states start to recover, Oregon hasn’t.
Officials at ODE and the Governor’s office acknowledge the state’s checkered past on accountability.
“Oregon has tried accountability systems before, but too often accountability stopped at measuring and reporting,” Kotek’s office said in an emailed statement in response to OPB’s questions. “We are not interested in producing another report that tells us what we already know. We want a system that helps us act on what the data tell us and ultimately produces better outcomes for students.”
Bhatt, the former education policy staffer under Brown and Kotek, said the state’s education system suffers from a “structural and systemic” problem that precedes any of its current leadership.
“What’s happening right now is a toppling-over of our system because we didn’t have a good foundation to start,” Bhatt said.
Some outside of the state see promise in Kotek’s leadership.
Given Oregon’s outcomes, “you would expect there to be urgency in Oregon like nowhere else,” said Charles Barone, senior director of the Center for Innovation for the National Parents Union, a nationwide parent advocacy network.
“I think it really stands out that they’re a low achieving state and they don’t have the economic hardship that most other low achieving states have,” he said. “And they have lower achievement than their neighboring states.”
Barone calls Gov. Kotek one of the few “outspoken” Democratic governors taking an approach similar to past national efforts, like the Every Student Succeeds Act. “What Oregon has done is to make the metrics matter again,” Barone said, acknowledging that any accountability system will take time to collect data and show results.
But Oregon’s reactive approach to problems, and its emphasis on local autonomy over strong state leadership, have historically slowed widespread improvement. Those headwinds continue to challenge efforts to pull schools out of mediocrity.
Tough policy, vague rules hinder literacy efforts
Across the state, Oregon’s latest focus is making sure Oregon students can read by the end of elementary school. In 2023, the legislature passed an early literacy bill that created a funding stream for Oregon school districts to implement the “science of reading,” a research-backed method for teaching literacy.
Even before that, the state’s focus — and its funding — has shifted often over the years, Bhatt said.
“Since 2016, I would say we’ve just had a revolving door of single-issue priorities,” she said, citing summer learning and high school graduation as other examples.
OPB’s conversations with advocates, educators, and others involved with education policy revealed a widespread concern: of a state education system that is foundering without direction, cycling from issue-to-issue without making sustained changes to the system overseeing public education.
“We can go through a long list over the last handful of years where the state, either through legislation or executive order has said, ‘we’re gonna do this thing and that’s gonna fix education,’” said Forest Grove superintendent Suzanne West. “Improvement science doesn’t work that way.”
The state’s focus on early literacy provides an example of how a worthwhile priority can fall short in practice.
After that 2018 meeting on test scores at her children’s school, Uherbelau started a coalition to push for a transformation in how Oregon teaches literacy. At a public hearing this past June, she told legislators that the schools struggling the most to get students to read were not getting the help they needed, despite the new literacy funding.
Uherbelau’s concerns are shared by both Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, who serves on the Oregon State Board of Education. At that hearing, lawmakers grilled ODE officials about the broad latitude school districts have to allocate the funds with little accountability.
Uherbelau says that’s “unconscionable.” Instead of prioritizing schools with the most need, Uherbelau said districts are dividing the money equally among their schools.
“They are spreading it so thinly to make almost no difference,” she said, referencing her group’s list of “most neglected” schools.
West, the Forest Grove superintendent, is grateful for the early literacy grant funds that have helped her hire specialists. But the money isn’t enough to support every school, and her district doesn’t have other funds to make up the difference.
“How do we equitably assign the individuals that we can hire?” West said.
In Eastern Oregon, Redmond is working preemptively to protect his schools should the state’s focus ping-pong between literacy and math. That’s why he’s using other funds for math instruction.
“We can act as a balance,” Redmond said.
Hands-off approach at state level leads school districts to pursue local solutions
Implementation is one challenge. Enforcement is another. Exhibit A: chronic absenteeism.
Oregon has one of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the country: over a third of students here missed 10 percent or more of the 2024-25 school year. Research shows that regularly attending school increases chances of graduation. Schools have asked state leaders for more support. In return, the state has offered little more than virtual flyers, online tools, and $25,000 to each education service district through the state’s Every Day Matters program.
Oregon schools are “working harder than they’ve ever worked before … and when you look at the trends, you’ll notice there’s very little change in regular attender rates as a state,” said Alisha McBride, the superintendent of the Vale School District near the Idaho border.
So McBride and her colleagues in Eastern Oregon took things into their own hands, standing up a new attendance accountability system. The program included several steps intended to help families improve students’ attendance, but as a last resort, they could face $500 fines for missing too much school.
Last year, McBride said less than 1% of students were cited, with only one family receiving a fine. Malheur County’s attendance rate last school year was almost 20 percentage points higher than Oregon’s as a whole, according to Oregon Department of Education data first published by the Oregon Journalism Project.
McBride compared missing school to speeding on the highway. There are laws for both speeding and school attendance. Yet if a person speeds, they might get a ticket. That’s not the case with attendance.
“We have a law in Oregon that children must attend school regularly,” McBride said. “But from a state perspective, there is no enforcement.”
Legacy of compliance
The Oregon Department of Education has mainly operated as an agency that makes sure school districts cross their T’s and dot their I’s in reporting to the state and federal government.
That leaves ODE as an enforcer of policies, not a visionary.
For example, the department monitors district compliance through self-reported Division 22 standards, which ODE says “ensures every student in Oregon public schools is provided with a standard, or baseline, level of service.”
While Division 22 requires strict, minute-per-week standards for physical education, there are no such standards for reading or math instruction. The standard for total instructional time in Oregon is a minimum number of hours, which allows extreme variation between districts.
Oregon’s current system of school district accountability is mostly complaint-driven. But what’s meant to be a way for families to seek help has become a yearslong wait for any kind of redress. Over a third of the open discrimination and civil rights complaints to ODE have been open for over 200 days. A few have been open even longer.
“In our attempts to improve the system that we have, we have made it utterly incoherent,” said Whitney Grubbs, executive director of Foundations for a Better Oregon and former education policy advisor for Gov. John Kitzhaber.
Grubbs sees a disconnect: Oregon has numerous initiatives and efforts underway to improve education, but lacks a singular vision.
In Corvallis, the district adopted its own plan for this school year called the “Corvallis Promise.” A district presentation about the changes includes a slide indicating the district’s move toward something more aligned and focused, away from what it called “from random acts of improvement.” It’s another example of a district owning something that the state has not provided.
According to ODE’s strategic plan, the state’s vision is that “every student will have access to and benefit from a world-class, well-rounded, and equitable educational system.”
With the new accountability bill, state education officials say they’re moving away from a complaint-driven model toward one with real-time accountability. Last year, ODE brought in Lindsay Baker as a new administrator in charge of “Strategic Initiatives.” Baker, who moved to ODE from the Oregon Department of Transportation, said Oregon’s new model is more “coherent,” creating more of a connection between the department and districts as both work to improve education outcomes.
“We now have, or are building toward a system where we can see at any given time … what are all the districts doing, and how are we helping to create the conditions where there is a level of focus on what we know works and then doing those things to fidelity and with integrity?” Baker said.
“I think that was maybe inconsistent previously,” she said. “And I’ll even offer that’s a little bit inconsistent today.”
Building new expectations on a shaky foundation
Like Baker, several of the administrators leading the charge at ODE are new to the agency. With the accountability bill, they say they’re standing up teams of state staffers who will work with districts to coordinate resources and streamline grant applications for state and federal funds.
They piloted the program with 34 districts last year. But those supports aren’t yet in place, says West, the Forest Grove superintendent.
“Until the department is restructured to provide meaningful support to school districts, we’re not going to achieve the outcomes that I think the state wants us to achieve,” West said.
In addition to inadequate capacity and structure at the state agency, Oregon school leaders are finding state policies standing in their way.
Two of the seven metrics school districts must track are third grade reading and eighth grade math, which are measured using statewide standardized tests.
But Oregon law allows students and families to opt out of the standardized tests the state intends to use to measure improvement. According to state data, between 11% and 14% of students didn’t participate in last year’s state tests, with even higher opt-out rates at high school.
Northwest Regional Education Service District Superintendent Dan Goldman said Oregon’s policy has “tied Oregon schools’ hands and tied our results into knots.”
The state has “facilitated and reinforced an opt-out culture around assessment in the state of Oregon and that trickles down into classroom behaviors, school-level leadership behaviors,” he said.
The new accountability system itself has also created confusion among district leaders with its layered, three-tiered system goals.
There are statewide goals. There are goals for 18 different “clusters” of school districts, grouped based on size and demographics. And local school districts also set their own goals, for which they are accountable.
But the state’s cluster goals appear to be holding districts to different standards of improvement.
It’s something Vale Superintendent Alisha McBride noticed when she analyzed them. For example, two clusters of districts start in nearly the same spot in third grade reading. Yet one group of districts only needs to improve by 10 percentage points while another is expected to jump by over 60 percentage points in the same four-year time period.
ODE administrators push back on that characterization, saying the clusters are merely “reference points” for districts.
Districts will start tracking improvement on the state’s seven key priorities this year. But local school leaders say they’re not really getting any direct guidance from ODE on how to reach those goals.
ODE officials say all districts will have access to an “ODE Support Suite,” a “centralized collection” of already existing resources and tools. It will be available in early 2027.
If districts don’t meet their goals within two years, they’ll be required to receive coaching. If they fail to reach their goals in three years, districts face “intensive coaching.” If they’re still not meeting goals in four years, the state can take control of up to 25% of the district’s funds.
The end goal for all of this is an education system that supports students and prepares them for adulthood. But right now, Oregon students like Madysen Robinson are not feeling supported.
Last year, Robinson was a junior at Clackamas Academy of Industrial Sciences, a small charter school in Oregon City where she earned college credits and explored a career in nursing.
But this past April, several of Robinson’s favorite adults got laid off as the district closed a $12 million budget deficit. CAIS will also stop serving middle school students, cutting off hands-on learning opportunities for younger students.
Students responded with a walkout, directing their ire at the district office.
“I watched a lot of kids try to fight, try to do what they could, and at the end of the day, it just felt really defeating because we were all so lost and it happened so fast,” she recalled.
Then Robinson took it to the state, writing a letter to the Oregon State Board of Education.
“At the end of the day, we are the ones who lose our people,” she wrote. “We are the ones who are losing our resources. We are the ones who are living through what you have caused. We are done.“
She didn’t get a response.