graduation
Oregon currently has a goal to get all its young people to finish high school and 80 percent to earn college degrees by 2025. But many lawmakers say Oregon should ditch that goal, in large part because the state is far from accomplishing them.
(The Associated Press)
In 2011, Oregon lawmakers agreed on an ambitious goal: By 2025, the state should get all its young people to graduate from high school and 80 percent to earn a two- or four-year college degree.
Now, largely at the urging of the state's teachers union, a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers want the state to drop those goals, largely as an admission the state's schools and colleges won't come close to accomplishing them.
"It is not realistic," Rep. Paul Evans, D-Salem, a community college instructor and the primary sponsor of the bill to end the numeric goals, said Wednesday as he unveiled his plan. Unless the state were to spend $1 billion more a year on education, a drive to get all young people to complete high schools and 80 percent to earn a college credential is just "a fantasy we tell ourselves," he said.
Other lawmakers, community colleges, the state's higher education commission and Oregon businesses are pushing back, however. They say it's essential that the state set measurable education goals and doing so has had a big impact on students.
"Clear goals make a drastic difference," said Rep. Jeff Reardon, D-Happy Valley.
To "pull the rug out" from under the goals, said Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Hood River, "would reinforce that the state can't get serious" about improving its education system and work force.
The goal is widely shorthanded as "40-40-20," signifying the percentage of young Oregonians it says should hold, by 2025, four year degrees, two-year degree and high school diplomas respectively.
Supporters of publicly announcing the goal and measuring progress toward it say the impact has been seen most clearly in community colleges. They were called out by the goal as needing to propel 40 percent of young adults to earn two-year degrees or industry certification.
As a result, the importance of getting more students to enroll in community college got new-found attention in Oregon, and community colleges switched their emphasis from getting students in the door to getting them to earn a credential, said Andrea Henderson, executive director of the Oregon Community College Association.
Most of the supporters of dismantling the 40-40-20 goal, as would happen under House Bill 2587, focused their criticisms on K-12 education. They said the system is so underfunded and lacking in resources it can't be expected to graduate every student.
The most recent graduation statistics, for the class of 2015, show that 78 percent of Oregon high school students earned a diploma within five years of starting high school. Another 4 percent earned a GED, which lawmakers also count toward the goal. Oregon's graduation rates rank among the very lowest in the nation.
The most recent school funding statistics available from the U.S. Census Bureau, for 2014, showed Oregon's per-student spending was about $10,000, which was 10 percent below the national average.
Evans, leaders of the Oregon Education Association and others say Oregon schools should be funded at a level estimated by the state's Quality Education Commission to cover all the costs needed to ensure near-universal student success. That would mean spending $10 billion on K-12 schools in the state's next two-year budget, compared to around $8 billion as Gov. Kate Brown proposed.
Adding the extra $1 billion a year would put Oregon's per-student funding about 20 percent above the national average.
Evans told fellow lawmakers that Oregon voters and business leaders aren't willing to pay for schools and colleges that can deliver a 40-40-20-caliber performance. He compared the mismatch between those aspirational goals and education funding to aiming to put humans on the moon and only paying their way to Texas.
But Sen. Mark Hass and other supporters of the goals said they prompted college and K-12 schools to spend money differently to better serve students. Community colleges started checking students' transcripts and notifying them if they were just a course or two from qualifying for a two-year degree, he said. Schools in his Beaverton district did more to help students earn college credits while still in high school so it would be easier and less expensive for them to earn a college credential, he said.
The goals made a difference "after 10 years of inertia" in Oregon, he said.
-- Betsy Hammond
betsyhammond@oregonian.com
@chalkup