By State Representative Rob Nosse
By the time you read this the dust will have settled on the May primary election though we know for sure that Christine Drazan will be the Republican candidate for governor taking on Governor Kotek. We will also know a lot more about the results of various primaries around the state, particularly some in Washington County that I watched closely.
Instead of debriefing those with you I am going to talk about K-12 education, which is increasingly becoming a topic I am learning and hearing more and more about. If you read this column regularly you know I am expecting the new Medicaid challenges brought on by HR 1 will dominate next year’s legislative session, but education has emerged as a major concern in a way I have not seen since 2019.
Foundations for a Better Future, which used to be called the Chalkboard Project, is helping legislators from across the state, Democrats and Republicans, better understand the issues our state has by running seminars on education, and I agreed to participate. I am glad I did. I am learning a lot. It turns out that we have been trying to make schools “better” for a long time. Some of the things we have tried I had forgotten that we even tried. Maybe the next time I have to give a speech on education I can title it “Why Fixing Education is so Hard.”
Consider this column part one as there is more history around education reform in this state than I can fit into one column. I will pick up where I left off in July’s column.
For starters, I learned that the Oregon Constitution called for the creation of a public school system when it was drafted back in 1859. That is pretty cool to know that education for all was foundational to Oregon becoming a state. But now let’s speed up to 1965. Included in President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” the federal government got involved in education via the Elementary Secondary Education Act, providing federal funding for all kinds of education programs in the states for the first time.
Jumping to the 1980s. There was a report that was called “A Nation at Risk.” Put out by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, it warned that our schools were not as good as they needed to be. I was barely a teenager when this report was released, but I was told it had a big impact.
No conversation about schools in Oregon can occur without talking about Ballot Measure (BM) 5 from 1990. The measure capped local property tax rates and began the process of making the State of Oregon the main funder of schools. This was a huge deal. I could probably write a whole column on the impact of BM 5. It is probably indirectly the thing that got me to move to Oregon back in 1992 (off topic but I cannot help mentioning it).
In the 1991 session, the state legislature created a Funding Equalization State School Fund that attempted to account for the variance among local property taxes, state income tax and lottery funds. This fund would “equal” them out among all the students in all the school districts across our state. This is pretty important to understand with regard to the overall system. Prior to BM 5, schools were mostly operated by property tax funds. Districts that had voters that were willing to pay higher property taxes to support their schools had better funded schools than districts where voters were less willing to vote for school operating levies. In theory this approach should mean that every district is getting an approximately similar amount per student. I suspect, given what I know about the formula, it does not always work that way. There is likely to be debate and discussion about changing it
In 1991, we also passed the Oregon Education Act for the 21st Century. Its passage was led by State Representative Vera Katz, who served as the Speaker of the Oregon House and eventually became Portland’s mayor. There was a whole thing about Certificate of Initial Mastery and a Certificate of Advanced Mastery. That did not stick and was eventually modified and abandoned in the late 1990s.
In reaction to the passage of BM 5, and later Measures 47 and 50, the legislature used the 1997 and 1999 sessions to establish the Quality Education Model (QEM).
In 2000, Oregon passed a ballot measure that said the legislature will fund schools appropriately and sufficiently using the QEM as a guide. The legislature would “explain” if they funded schools to the level called for in the QEM, or if not then “explain why not.” There was also a more fully established State School Fund Formula that the legislature created. We have been arguing about the pros and cons of the QEM ever since.
