Message from Senator David Brock Smith:

In today’s Oregonlive/The Oregonian there is an article regarding a study on post pandemic student success done by Harvard and Stanford. Having been a longtime school board member, I have serious concerns with the direction SB 1583 would take our schools across the state. The comments in today’s article below from the Director of the Oregon Department of Education Charlene Williams are clear to me that she wants the bill to move forward. The article however is also clear, that she and her colleagues failed to design guidelines above those that were federal to direct those dollars to increase student success. I am very concerned by this pivot from their failure and encourage your engagement as this legislation moves forward.

Please read the article below or in the link HERE.

Although the Oregon Department of Education and the State Board of Education has not supplied written testimony to date, bringing your respectful voice of opposition to their attention could be meaningful. You can get to the State Board of Education website HERE.

Thank you for all of your continued incredible advocacy on this and other critical issues.

Students nationwide have rebounded after pandemic. But not in Oregon. Consequences could be severe.

• Updated: Feb. 18, 2024, 2:30 p.m.|
• Published: Feb. 18, 2024, 4:00 a.m.

By Julia Silverman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Students around the country have shown promising signs of rebounding from the COVID era’s massive disruptions to learning, according to a first-of-its-kind multi-state analysis by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities.

But not in Oregon.

Unlike in the 29 other states studied, Oregon students as a whole have failed to regain either reading or math skills, researchers found.

The state’s elementary and middle school students remain an average of about two-thirds of a year behind in reading compared to pre-pandemic levels and three-fourths of a year behind in math, the study found. That’s roughly two to three times the deficit faced by students nationwide, the study found.

Those dispiriting results come despite a $1.6 billion infusion of federal pandemic aid to the state’s 197 school districts. That money will run out in eight months, and most Oregon school districts have already spent most of it with little to show for it.

The learning deficits are worst in the poorest pockets of the state, but many comparatively wealthy Portland-area suburban districts have yet to show much bounce-back. |

Districts had almost complete leeway to decide how to spend their federal funds. Without parameters from the state or federal government, Oregon districts often chose to pay for online academies, to preserve staff despite enrollment drops and other initiatives that have yet to translate into measurable learning rebounds.

That matters, not just for students and their success in school, but more broadly for Oregon’s economy, crime levels and broader measures of well-being, researchers say.

“The initial [academic] losses in Oregon were among the largest in our study,” said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and a co-author of the study, which used state test scores from 2019, 2022 and 2023 and triangulated them against scores on a national exam given in all states in 2019 and 2022. In Oregon, Kane said, “We saw very little evidence of improvement between 2022 and 2023, whereas most states did.”

What went wrong?

Oregon’s poor performance cannot be fully explained by the fact that the state had some of the nation’s longest school closures. Students in California and Washington, where schools were closed for around the same length of time, have shown academic rebounds in math and slimmer continued losses in reading than Oregon.

State education officials could not pinpoint why Oregon students haven’t shown gains, even as students in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi are back to performing at 2019 levels in reading and students in Alabama have hit pre-pandemic levels in math. But state schools chief Charlene Williams said Oregon needs to strengthen instruction systemwide.

“What we’ve been doing has not been working,” Williams said. “There are spaces for us to be more consistent across the board. We cannot have 197 school districts doing 197 different things.”

Williams said Oregon’s unusually short school year sets it apart from other states, as does its long tradition of local school district control. Strategies like high-dosage tutoring and summer school are critical, she said, and Oregon “absolutely needs to be doing that,” she said.

But “if 50% to 60% of our students are not performing well, that means our core instruction needs to change,” she said. “We aren’t in a position to provide 60% of our students with one-on-one tutoring or summer programming. So what can we do to reduce the number of students that need those concentrated doses of important supports?”

She pointed to the state’s new early literacy initiative as a promising model: Every district in the state is participating and receiving funding that can only be spent on a tailored band of options, including curricula that stress phonics and phonemic awareness, professional development in foundational literacy and tutoring for struggling readers.

Since the pandemic, it can feel like few students display mid-range skills anymore, said Bryan Sager, a veteran fifth grade teacher at Cherry Park Elementary School in the David Douglas School District at Portland’s eastern edge. Some of his students are academic high-flyers, he said, while many others have significant knowledge gaps.

He has students who still struggle to grasp concepts like basic division, he said, so he needs to reteach that lesson, sometimes repeatedly. That’s despite the fact the curriculum schedule calls for him to be teaching students how to divide fractions and reduce the answer using lowest common denominators at this point in the year.

Sager said he lingers on must-know topics, sometimes at the expense of others, in hopes of making sure his students have the basics down by year’s end. He wants to give them at least a fighting chance in middle school.

He and other grade-level teachers meet weekly to compare notes and help each other maximize progress. They share quiz results and other student work to see where persistent mistakes crop up, so they can precisely target how to help different groups of students.

“There are just holes that need to be filled,” he said. “We have to fill those holes, not push them along, or the kids that have holes will get even more behind.”

Where did the money go?

An analysis of pandemic relief spending in Oregon’s 10 largest school districts by nonprofit education advocacy group Stand for Children Oregon suggests those districts directed relatively little of the money to the handful of strategies that research has found most helpful to catch students back up. Those include frequent small-group tutoring, academically rigorous summer school, extending the school year and expanded training opportunities for educators.

The infusion of federal money was intended to mitigate impacts of the pandemic on students’ learning and well-being, not to shore up day-to-day operations or fund capital projects.

Kane said a few states did offer districts concrete directions about how they should spend the federal money. In Tennessee, the state offered matching funds to districts that spent their funds on high-impact tutoring – help for no more than three students at a time, with the same tutor, at least three times a week for half an hour or more. The state’s effort has reached 150,000 students and the benefits to their achievement have been profound, particularly among poorer students, the researchers found.

In Oregon, as in most states, there was only one requirement for spending the huge dose of federal aid: 20% had to go towards academic recovery. And that was essentially meaningless, as each district was left to decide what academic recovery meant.

As a result, there was little consensus about which interventions should be classified as helping students catch up, which proved detrimental, said Sarah Pope, the executive director of Stand for Children Oregon.

“Oregon’s results are unacceptable. Our educators and children are just as talented as the educators and children in every other state,” Pope said. She decried the lack of “a statewide, focused, research-based strategy. The research is clear on what accelerates student learning, and our state didn’t insist we do that with these funds.”

Among the 10 largest districts in the state, Salem-Keizer and Gresham spent millions of the federal dollars to keep class sizes low, preserving some teaching jobs that otherwise would have been pruned due to declining enrollment.

Of the $19 million it received, the Gresham-Barlow district allocated nearly $9 million to preserve jobs, primarily for teachers. The district saw gains in third graders reading proficiency in 2023. But overall, students in grades three through eight lost nearly a full year’s worth of learning in reading and math during the pandemic – then lost further ground during 2022-23, particularly in reading, the national study found.

Salem-Keizer, Oregon’s second-largest district, serves a high proportion of low-income students – and it received the most federal funding statewide: $97 million.

It spent the largest chunk of that, around $18 million, to keep class sizes small in early elementary school grades. That strategy was popular with both teachers and families in a district where declining enrollment would otherwise have translated to immediate job losses.

“We were working on the theory that our youngest students were the most impacted, between missing preschool and disrupted kindergarten,” said Suzanne West, Salem-Keizer’s director of strategic initiatives. “So we made the intentional decision at K-2 to employ more licensed teachers than our enrollment would dictate.

But the investment has yet to yield measurable academic gains. Only a dismal 20% of the district’s third graders scored as proficient in reading in 2023, a 1% decrease from the previous year, though the young students who got the most concentrated help have yet to age into standardized testing, which begins at grade three. Overall, Salem-Keizer students in tested grades remain a year behind pre-pandemic learning levels in both reading and math.

And now that the funding is running out, Salem-Keizer is preparing to make deep cuts in its workforce for the upcoming school year, reductions that Superintendent Andrea Castañeda has said will touch virtually every corner of every school.

Several other districts put large sums towards virtual learning programs and charter schools.

Tigard-Tualatin also spent $5.1 million, or 40% of its allocation, on virtual learning. It also spent $4.3 million to pay teachers for five extra non-student facing days of planning and collaboration. The district ended up posting the steepest learning loss of any of the 10 largest Oregon districts, with students landing a year behind in reading and a year and a quarter behind in math in spring 2023.

Hillsboro directed $3.2 million of its $25 million to its Online Academy, which now serves 325 students. Hillsboro’s chief financial officer, Michelle Morrison, said districts were able to make “subjective” judgments about what would best address unfinished learning.

Amy Zuckerman, who has a senior and a sophomore at Tualatin High School, said the district has sent empathetic messages about the supports available to help students process upheavals, particularly during the height of the pandemic and the racial justice reckonings of 2020.

But, she said, “What there has not been is messaging that says, ‘We are really worried about our kids falling behind academically and here is what we are going to do about it. There’s not the same sense of urgency, that this is a crisis we are trying to address.”

Her son, now a senior, used to get A’s in middle school. But he struggled with online school in ninth grade and lost the sense that it mattered whether he turned in his work on time or what his final grade was, she said.

“It’s been a long hill, trying to reframe that and get him reengaged to see the value of his education,” Zuckerman said. In his final two years of high school, with support from teachers, coaches and family, her son is back to passing his classes and hoping to play basketball in college. But there is still some residual sadness, she said, that “no one has lit a fire under him, to make him excited about learning again.”

Beyond unfinished learning

Plenty of the federal money went for non-academic priorities.

In part, that’s because officials at several school districts said they were reluctant to spend the federal funds on any program they’d have to backfill or personnel that they’d have to lay off once the grant expired. That sometimes translated to big spending on capital projects.

Medford put $12.5 million of its $33 million federal allotment into seismically retrofitting and upgrading a former high school that opened as a middle school in fall of 2023. Its students remained a full year behind in both reading and math in 2023. Beaverton spent $7 million of its $46 million on heating, ventilation and air conditioning upgrades. The district’s reading and math performance dropped about 80% to 90% of an academic year during the pandemic and held flat during 2022-23, the study found.

A few districts did dedicate federal funding to the strategies favored by researchers and saw payoffs. Portland Public Schools, for example, boosted the numbers of students working at grade level in both English and math in 2023, though Black and Indigenous students did not share in those gains.

The district spent $56 million of its federal aid on teacher training, with an emphasis on early literacy, another $9 million on summer school and $1 million on a high-dose tutoring program that’s set to begin again at the end of this month after a hiatus.

Summer school was a worthwhile investment, said Darcy Soto, the district’s director of accelerated learning. Portland students who attended summer school at least 75% of the time made “statistically significant gains” in a number of “mico-indicators and foundational skills,” she said, much stronger than peers who attended less often. Those gains were particularly evident in literacy, she said, with the youngest students stronger at key skills like identifying whole words and the ability to accurately decode letter sounds.

The Stanford-Harvard researchers said too few of Portland’s elementary and middle school students – just 94.3% – took the state reading test in 2023 to accurately judge the district’s learning gains in that subject. But it determined Portland students rebounded a quarter of a year in math, making it the only Top 10 sized district in Oregon to show gains rather than losses or stagnation last school year.

This school year is over halfway done, and Kane, the Harvard researcher, said it seems unlikely that the next few months will bring so much progress that Oregon students will be back to 2019 achievement levels by June.

Districts know where elementary and middle school pupils stand relative to grade level expectations and should start telling parents of those who are seriously behind now to plan to send their children to summer school, he said. Education leaders should make it clear that vast swaths of their students have serious learning lags, given research suggesting that many parents are unaware of just how far their children have fallen from what used to be typical achievement levels.

State policymakers face a rude awakening if they don’t act, Kane said. Past research shows that when a state achieves sharply higher K-12 student achievement, that soon translates to broadly higher per-capita income, lower crime rates and less teen pregnancy. If Oregon sticks with sharply lower student achievement, it must expect the opposite, he said.

“They are about to discover the hazards of not coordinating these efforts, because kids will not have caught up and the federal money will have run out,” he said. “If the states don’t step in, we’ll be imposing this cost on the next generation of children.”

Education editor Betsy Hammond contributed to this story.

— Julia Silverman covers schools and education policy for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Follow her on X at @jrlsilverman and reach out via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com

End of Article