Copyright The Oregonian
For the first time in 25 years, Oregon lawmakers say they have provided enough funding to public schools to fully meet the goals set out by a high-profile committee charged with pinpointing the price tag for a “quality education.” Their conclusion isn’t landing well with the scores of school advocates who have repeatedly maintained that the state has failed to fund education at the levels mapped out by Oregon’s Quality Education Commission. In its 2024 report, members of that commission said the state needed to provide $13.5 billion to fully fund schools. Lawmakers approved only $11.36 billion in general fund dollars for the state school fund, which school advocates argue isn’t enough. But in a recent report, the Legislature’s financial analysts said schools are ultimately receiving the full $13.5 billion because they get another $2.2 billion from the corporate activities tax set up in 2019 to support public education. That money is targeted for initiatives aimed at improving both student academic outcomes and emotional health. The Legislature’s analysis says the Quality Education Commission, with technical advice from researchers at the Oregon Department of Education, did not fully account for the corporate activities tax in its report. A spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education the agency was still working to understand the discrepancies as of Wednesday morning. But school advocates are suspicious of the Legislature’s analysis. “School funding in Oregon is complicated enough that any political narrative can be built from the numbers,” said Christy Splitt, a member of the Portland Public Schools board. “But if you ask anyone who spends time in our classrooms, they will tell you that the state is not adequately funding our public schools, no matter how you move those numbers around.” The Quality Education Commission, launched in 1999, is charged with coming up with an expert-informed estimate of how much the state would need to pump into its public schools to ensure an on-time graduation rate of 90% or higher. The idea was to make the Legislature’s funding decision more scientific and less political. The impact, though, has been the opposite. School advocates from PTA leaders to school board members have historically used the commission’s report as a way to hold lawmakers’ feet to the fire on education funding. But legislators have increasingly pushed back on its methodology and pushed for more oversight in how schools are spending state dollars. Constitutionally, Oregon is supposed to fund schools according to the commission’s recommendations. But a 2009 decision by the Oregon Supreme Court gave lawmakers some wiggle room — and school advocates a perennially powerful cudgel — by allowing the Legislature to continue to publish an biennial report explaining why and how they had failed to meet the model’s funding goals. Every one of the previous iterations of those reports had concluded that the amount of money provided by the state is “insufficient” to meet the commission’s Quality Education Model, though recent versions had noted that the gap was closing. That’s because, in the last decade, lawmakers have funneled significantly more money into schools, including from the landmark $1 billion a year corporate tax called the Student Success Act. Student academic outcomes, meanwhile, have plummeted during the same period, while labor-driven costs have risen, setting up frustration on all sides. Advocates acknowledge the investments of the past decade, but say the state has still failed to fully make up for years of systemic underfunding in the 1990s and 2000s. ‘An extremely misleading omission’ The new report was authored by analysts from the Legislative Fiscal Office and the Legislative Policy and Research Office and scheduled to be presented to the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Education Appropriations on Nov. 19. It calls the failure of the Quality Education Commission’s model to fully account for the Student Success Act funds an “extremely misleading” omission that “artificially increased” the perception of a funding gap between what the model recommended and what lawmakers provided. The goals set out by the commission’s Quality Education Model “lack specificity” and “have no ties to the [state’s] concrete expectations of schools,” the report contends. It recommends that the responsibility for putting together the model should lie with “neutral, professional experts,” instead of the current commission members, who include the superintendent of the Hermiston School District, a school board member from Jefferson County, and advocates for groups representing early childhood education, community colleges and the Oregon Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. The decision over whether and how to change the model rests with the Legislature. Lawmakers Rep. Ricki Ruiz of Gresham and Sen. Janeen Sollman of Hillsboro, both Democrats who co-chair the Joint Committee on Public Education Appropriation, have made no secret of their disenchantment with the Quality Education Commission’s methodologies. “What we have seen are disparities between what the Quality Education Model is reporting and how we believe things should be calculated and inputted,” Ruiz told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I don’t think the Quality Education Commission is giving us any feasible and realistic solutions on how we move forward. For me, that is a red flag.” If money for schools is perceived to be lacking, Ruiz said, taxpayers, parents and school employees should look to their local school districts to better understand how they’ve chosen to allocate their state funding. “The Legislature is accountable for how many dollars are going to the school system,” he said. “But how they use it is on them.” The Quality Education Commission’s methodology is based on a 360-student elementary school, with class sizes of 20, dedicated physical education and music teachers and computers for all students; 500-student middle schools with class sizes between 20 and 21 and at least two counselors; and 1,000 person high schools, with similar class sizes, plus supports for families and career and college preparation. In reality, the state has both tiny rural high schools and mega-elementary schools, and everything in between. The median class size in Oregon middle and high schools is 24. The model also has not been updated to reflect the full costs of aging school buildings, the rise in virtual schooling, the higher costs of educating students who are living below the poverty line and rising student behavior challenges, among other factors. Beyond ‘current service level’ The conflict over whether the state was adequately funding its schools spilled out into public view during the three-week-long teacher strike in Portland in 2023, when school board members took the state to task for disinvestment in the public school system, saying it failed to consider ever-rising costs when it budgeted for schools. Lawmakers countered that the district was at fault and needed to realign its spending priorities. After the strike, Gov. Tina Kotek’s office crafted a series of technical fixes to the state education spending formula that added half-a-billion dollars to the calculation of “current service level” funding — that is, how much money schools would need to operate without any cuts to their current programming. But still, with enrollment declining, labor costs rising and school districts statewide bracing for both budget cuts in the 2026-2027 school year and the possibility of midyear reductions, school boards, parents and educators have continued to press lawmakers over not meeting the Quality Education Model’s goals. Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Association of Teachers, said she was struggling to square the conclusions with a previous state-commissioned report from a national nonpartisan thinktank that Oregon needed to spend far more per pupil to raise outcomes for students with the legislative analysis showing schools had been fully funded. “The Legislature can pat themselves on the back about providing more funding than ever before for our schools this biennium, but it doesn’t hide the fact that school districts across the state are facing millions in cuts for next year,” Bonilla said. “We may have more funding than before, but we also have more costs, more needs, and buildings that are aging and falling apart. We need a new school funding formula and we need legislators that will have the courage to fix our broken revenue system.”
