Warner, Barbara Smith, and Arnie Roblan
Smith Warner is a state legislator from Northeast Portland and a former majority leader in the Oregon House. Roblan is a former state senator from the southern Oregon coast and a former co-speaker of the House.
The Student Success Act of 2019 was passed in Oregon five years ago, marking a significant milestone for all children. Our state budget now includes a much-needed $2 billion each biennium for K–12 education and early learning thanks to the historic legislation. However, in contrast to the majority of Oregon’s K–12 financing, the law also mandates that school districts work with their communities to solve problems, establish specific objectives to improve results, and finance initiatives that are most likely to have the greatest impact.
The Student Success Act could serve as a model for Oregon lawmakers as they get ready to revisit the issue of K–12 financing. It demonstrates how the state might allocate taxpayer funds for public education in a way that puts accountability, cooperation, and school development first.
We co-chaired the committee that drafted the Student Success Act as state lawmakers. We visited 77 schools in 29 communities on our nearly 3,000-mile journey across the state with a bipartisan team of colleagues. We heard the needs and experiences of families, teachers, and kids. Their suggestions enabled us to develop a system-wide strategy to improve K–12 education and ultimately solve the long-standing underfunding of public education that began when Measure 5 capped municipal property taxes.
The main goals of the Student Success Act are to close opportunity and achievement gaps that affect historically underserved students, such as students of color, those who live in rural areas, have disabilities, or are dealing with housing or economic insecurity; to speed up improvements in student academic outcomes; and to increase support for students’ mental health. The Legislature established a new corporate activity tax to assist school districts in carrying out the promise of the Student Success Act because they understood how important student success is to the economic future of our state.
What has been achieved thus far by the Student Success Act?School districts used the law’s funding to hire hundreds of school counselors, nurses, and other vital mental health support staff during the pandemic, according to new research from Foundations for a Better Oregon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan education advocacy group. These expenditures acknowledge the importance of promoting students’ social, emotional, and behavioral well-being in addition to their academic achievement and attendance.
Additionally, districts are expanding career and technical education, providing tutoring and summer programming, improving access to accelerated courses, and investing more time in K–12 education. According to the data, these academic initiatives are steadily raising Oregon’s graduation rates and assisting more students in staying on pace to graduate from high school.
Equally important, the Student Success Act is fostering the collaborative, rigorous, and accountable culture that is necessary to promote school reform. For instance, in order to determine which investments will have the greatest impact on children, the law mandates that school districts analyze data to better understand the needs and strengths of various student groups, consult research on best practices in education, and involve their communities, including students, families, and educators.
Districts must also establish new growth targets to enhance important student data measures, including as third-grade reading, high school graduation, and regular attendance, in order to monitor the effectiveness of Student Success Act spending. The Oregon Department of Education is prepared to intervene and offer assistance if districts are having difficulty reaching their goals.
There is still more to be done, but this development is important. The key to improving systems is to choose a plan, stick with it for a long time—typically ten years or more—and adjust it as you go, as experts advised us in 2018 and Oregon’s state auditors reminded us in 2022. According to recent public opinion surveys, Oregonians continue to find the Student Success Act’s objectives and school reform techniques to be incredibly appealing.
Going forward, we commend Governor Tina Kotek and state lawmakers for their bravery in examining public education funding and responsibility from a new angle. Deep-seated disparities still exist, and student performance are lagging while our public school system recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, many school districts are currently experiencing budget cuts and labor issues. We feel, like many Oregonians, that more needs to be done by state officials for students and schools.
Rather than starting from scratch, we encourage them and all 197 school districts in Oregon to take note of what the Student Success Act has already achieved and ensure that its objectives and plans are directing the allocation of our whole K–12 budget. Both the $2 billion Student Success Act and the more than $10 billion State School Fund, which supplies the great majority of state funding for K–12 schools, should be centered on school reform.
Increasing school money is crucial, but it is insufficient to significantly enhance student results on its own. All too frequently, school districts create well-meaning but vague budgets, losing the chance to track which expenditures result in quantifiable benefits for kids and to explicitly link local spending to their intended results. We need to be transparent about how state funds are spent and have clear guidelines on how they can be used for education.
More than ever, Oregon children require a solid public education that enables them to envision a brighter future for themselves and one another in these tumultuous and divisive times. We must provide our children the education they require in order to pursue their most aspirational goals. For this reason, the Student Success Act maintains high standards for each and every student and school. Every dollar we spend on public education should be held to the same high standards.
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