Copyright The Oregonian
Every two years since the turn of the century, a report from Oregon’s seven -member Quality Education Commission lands with a thud or a bang, depending on your perspective. The conclusion is always the same: However much money the state’s lawmakers have allocated for public schools, it’s not enough, almost always by a huge gulf. (Case in point: In the 2025-2027 biennium, lawmakers approved a 11% boost in public school funding, for a total of $11.3 billion. The model that underpins the Quality Education Commission’s annual report said they should have ponied up $2 billion more to achieve the high graduation rate that all key constituencies, from parents to teachers to the governor, want for the state’s 545,000 students.) Beginning in 1999, the commission has been assigned to come up with an expert-informed estimate of how much the state would need to pump into its public schools to ensure they generate excellent outcomes, shorthanded as 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 results, however, are invariably political, brandished as exhibit No. 1 of how Oregon, and those who write its budget, are failing students, school employees and the public education system. Now, a bipartisan group of lawmakers charged with shaping public education funding say the current model may well have outlived its usefulness. “I don’t think we need aspirational goals,” said Sen. Janeen Sollman, a Washington County Democrat, during a recent meeting of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Public Education Appropriation. “I think we need measurable goals. I continue to have my doubts that the Quality Education Commission is where we need to be putting our energy in for students.” It sounds academic, but the debate has real-life implications for the high-stakes every-other-year tussle over school funding in Oregon, post-1990’s Measure 5. That voter-approved measure tightly capped the amount of local property taxes for schools and shifted the bulk of responsibility for funding public education onto the state’s shoulders. Even members of the Quality Education Commission agree that their model could use significant updates. That would take approval by the Oregon House and Senate, and so far, there are no specific plans for when such a proposal might come before them or what it might look like. The current methodology is based on a 360-student elementary school with class sizes of 20, dedicated PE 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 similarly small class sizes, plus supports for families and career/college preparation. Such class sizes are much smaller than the reality in many high-performing city and suburban middle and high schools, both in Oregon and nationally. Meanwhile, demand for social-emotional support for students is considerably higher than when Oregon created a two-counselor model decades ago. Number-crunchers at the Oregon Department of Education help generate cost estimates for staffing all the state’s school districts at that level, which accounts for the model’s bottom line: the target lawmakers are never quite able to hit. That’s true despite investments in schools over the last decade that go beyond inflation, including the $1 billion-plus per year corporate tax for education lawmakers approved in 2019. Meanwhile, during the last decade, schools have produced a persistent decline in math and reading skills amid the pandemic, the increased use of mobile devices and the sunsetting of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which set consequential accountability goals for schools nationwide. A legislatively-commissioned report by nonpartisan thinktank American Institute of Research that was released last winter commended the Quality Education Commission for using real-time data drawn from school finance databases to come up with its cost estimates. But AIR researchers “did find several areas where the model does not follow best practices, which they say could really impact the usefulness of connecting the (model’s) cost estimates to policy,” said Monica Cox, an analyst for the Legislative Policy and Research Office, who spoke to education appropriation committee members last week. For example, she said, AIR researchers highlighted that the current model does not account for the vast differences among Oregon’s many school buildings, some of which are sprawling urban campuses that educate students speaking dozens of languages and some of which are rural outposts with fewer than a dozen graduates per year. It is also geared towards a single metric — achieving a graduation rate of 90% — but does not incorporate how much it might cost to curb chronic absenteeism, to increase reading levels among elementary schoolers and to ensure that all eighth graders are prepared for high school math, for example. Additionally, the current model does not include the equivalent of a second opinion in medicine: Ideally, the AIR analysts found, a larger group of Oregonians with a direct stake in the public school system would join the commission’s ranks to cross-check the model’s assumptions about what constitutes a “quality” school environment. And the researchers found that Oregon’s current system makes no attempt to tackle “the evidence between linking the resources identified for an adequate education and the outcome they are expected to achieve,” said Cox. “A lot of it is hypothetical, based on professional judgment. The empirical, research-based evidence might not be there.” All of these are potential flaws that the Quality Education Commission itself has raised, said Dana Hepper, the director of policy and advocacy with Portland-based Children’s Institute, which lobbies for young children, and a commission member. But updating the model would require an infusion of funding that thus far, lawmakers have not found a way to approve. “We all want the same or very similar things: a credible, reliable way to estimate how much money our school system needs,” Hepper said. “So we need to spend more time digging into the details —if we can’t do (the Quality Education Model), what should we do? Are there decisions we can make with the funding allocated now that would sharpen outcomes?” Sollman’s critique — which was echoed by other lawmakers at last week’s meeting — was more existential. She’s in search, she said, of a system that will tie research-backed investments to clearly defined outcomes. And, echoing a conclusion by the American Institutes of Research analysts, she suggested that the state’s current funding formula was also in need of an overhaul. “Should we not have Oregon implement a phased or tiered approach where districts with the highest needs receive any new investments or more investments first?” she asked. Rep. Ricki Ruiz, a Democrat from Gresham who co-chairs the joint committee, said he was weighing a similar question: “How can we prioritize [funds] to the districts or the schools that need it the most? I think we have a distribution formula problem in Oregon.” The Oregonian/OregonLive reported last spring that the state’s school funding formula systemically undercounts poverty by relying solely on census data. The state has access to more accurate data that matches individual students with the food stamp benefits or other need-based government services they receive. But it does not use the latter figure when it calculates how many students in any given district are entitled to the extra funding allocated for pupils from low-income families. Officials at the Department of Education say they would need authorization from the Legislature to make that change.
