Controversy in Oregon’s schools

One important way of investing in Oregon’s long-term future is to work on improving schools. Good schools provide important, quality education to young minds in order to prepare them for success as adults, but that is not the only benefit. It’s no secret that Oregon’s economy is not looking extremely promising-good schools can ultimately help lure businesses and workers too.

Oregon stands a fairly good chance of getting a federal grant to work on improving our schools thanks to a federal school challenge dubbed ‘Race to the Top.’ The Obama Administration has requested that $1.35 billion be set aside for the program. The idea is that states come up with plans for improving education, and the more controversial and cutting edge, the better. According to the U.S. Department of Education Web site, awards will go to states that plan to lead the way with ambitious yet achievable plans. Oregon is shooting for $200 million of that budget, with a fairly controversial plan.

According to The Oregonian, everyone in the Oregon education field-union leaders, administrators, teachers, other school staff and education advocates-all worked together to come up with the plan, which includes 93 school districts educating 77 percent of the state’s students. Of the 41 states that applied, only 28 have the backing of teachers’ unions, Oregon being one of them.
So what is controversial about it? In short, performance pay. Teachers would be held at least somewhat accountable for student’s test scores.

At first glance this doesn’t seem controversial, but according to The Oregonian, voters have rejected two separate ballot measures that would have linked students’ achievement to teacher salaries. For someone not overly familiar with education, this seems like an obvious answer to improving schools-after all, most people are held accountable for success and achievement in their careers. Why haven’t teachers been accountable up until now?

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. Speaking with a retired public school teacher who did not wish to be named, I found that many factors influence a child’s success and achievement in school, including (but not limited to) parental involvement and encouragement, overall health, economic status, personal motivation, learning style, peer influence, access to books and computers-as well as the teachers themselves.

In fact, this teacher said that in their experience, parental involvement is the most influential factor upon the child’s academic success. So it might not be reasonable or fair to teachers to hold them completely accountable for a student’s achievement considering all of these factors.

Yet 65 percent of the school districts that signed up for the challenge were willing to use teacher evaluations to help set pay. This seems to really say something about Oregon’s teachers. They know that American students are falling behind and they are willing to put themselves and their reputations on the line to try and help. They are going way above and beyond with this proposal.

Taking it one step further, even if Oregon doesn’t receive funds from the Race to the Top grant, they still plan to link student achievement to individual teachers anyway. Doug Kosty, of the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators, told The Oregonian that the emphasis would be on overall annual improvement, not the highest scores. Practices used by the most successful teachers would then be used throughout the system.

The idea isn’t to fire or punish bad teachers, but to encourage more successful practices. This all sounds good on paper, but will it be possible to execute? Improvement of academic achievement through test scores may prove hardly noticeable enough to recognize. Thinking back to elementary and junior high school, many students stayed mostly consistent in their test scores, with an overall achievement standard for any and every teacher.

If an increase or decline is recognizable, how easy will it be to pinpoint what exactly caused it? With so many factors at work influencing students’ academic success or failure, it could be quite a challenge.

Innovation in the field of education is always a good idea. We should be constantly coming up with new ways to try and improve upon the system. It’s also a good idea to remember that teachers aren’t completely responsible for a student’s success or failure. It is admirable that Oregon educators are going to attempt to use their influence to beat out the other factors and raise our school’s achievement levels, but then again, teachers are very admirable people.
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