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February 8th, 2012 |
Michelle Morico
Poll Results: Within Oregon’s limited resources, where might you focus the state’s investment in public education, to improve better outcomes for students?
For the past few months, in the right hand sidebar we have asked our readers to answer a very important, but challenging, question: If you had to focus Oregon’s investment in public education on one effort, what would it be?
33 readers gave us their answers:
- Closing the achievement gap (30%, 10 Votes)
- Broader school choices (charters, magnets, focus schools) (18%, 6 Votes)
- Professional development (15%, 5 Votes)
- Early childhood programs (15%, 5 Votes)
- Parental support programs in struggling communities (15%, 5 Votes)
- Mentoring new teachers (6%, 2 Votes)
- Higher education (1%, 0 Votes)
According to the poll, focusing on closing the achievement gap in Oregon is what many of you think is most important. The recent release of the data surrounding Oregon high school graduation rates showed only 67 percent of students graduate in 4 years. These results also showed that the achievement gap is narrowing. The 4-year graduation rates for Native American, African American and Hispanic students all increased this year. This is a step in the right direction. Read more.
Let’s now take a look at what Oregon is doing to narrow the achievement gap:
Last Thursday, Stand for Children and Chalkboard hosted an education equity rally to help raise awareness for students of color on the capitol steps in Salem, OR. Read more.
A new youth development program out of Forest Grove, OR, called Adelante Chicas, has created an initiative called “Journey to College” that is working to engage principals and teachers to create a more pro-college culture. The program is geared to begin with elementary school-aged students and works directly with principals to increase college exposure for students. Learn more.
What other initiatives or projects do you know of that are working to close the achievement gap in Oregon?
The question, “Poll Results: Within Oregon’s limited resources, where might you focus the state’s investment in public education, to improve better outcomes for students?”
The question begs the inspection of how Oregon has chosen to allocate revenue. No one seems to question the manner in which Oregon has allocated revenue. In the middle of this era of perplexity in Year 2002 there were only 5 states with higher K-12 teacher compensation than Oregon (ECONorthwest January 2005). At that time teacher compensation could have been frozen for five consecutive years and still would have been higher than the median state. This meant in dollar values, the avoidance hiring 5,000 fewer teachers. There has been a calculated choice in Oregon to compensate K-12 teachers and a considerably higher level than most other states in exchange for large class sizes (fewer teachers), short school years, deferred maintenance and lower graduation rates.
Now everybody throws up there hands and wonder how we got here? It is amazing to me that so many intelligent people have no clue how this condition happened in the relatively poor state of Oregon. And then we try to solve this problem after all of the contracts (PERS and employment) have been carefully locked into place while everyone was sleeping. We now have nowhere to turn except educational tangents that cause back biting from every direction with little being solved. Oregon education is now locked into a financial vice with little future flexibility.
Sure wish there were an edit function with these posts. Proof reading is so important, I apologize (“there”,”their”,”fewer”).
I have been wanting for 15 years for someone to shoot holes in my opinion/conclusion about allocation of K-12 education revenue. I have left myself open for constructive criticism. I would appreciate a different well thought opinion. Or, does everyone agree? I think it is significantly worthy of discussion, perhaps not.