Kitzhaber plans to radically restructure Oregon education

Governor John Kitzhaber, making good on his gubernatorial proposal to radically reform Oregon’s schools, held a press conference at Portland State on Feb. 11 at which he called for the creation of an Oregon Education Investment Board, a high-level policy group over which Kitzhaber would preside that would coordinate the state’s education system from preschool through post-secondary education.

That same day, the Office of the Governor released an executive order that calls for a 12-member interim body called the Oregon Education Investment Team, tasked with designing a framework for the forthcoming Investment Board by May 31.

Nancy Golden, education adviser to the governor, said that Khitzaber’s staff has drafted the bills necessary to make the executive order a legislative reality.

According to Susan Smith, spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education, the permanent Investment Board would change Oregon’s education system so that its four main levels—pre-school, K–12, community colleges and higher education—are treated as an integrated whole rather than as a cluster of independent interests competing for state funding.

By changing this institutional perspective, Kitzhaber aims to break down the budgeting silos for each level and thereby create a seamless funding stream for the state’s “cradle to career” education pipeline.

“We are very happy to see [Kitzhaber’s] investment in early childhood because that will pay dividends down the road,” Smith said. “The more you invest early in kids, the less the system will need to supply resources for remediation, social services, etc.”

Pat Burk, an associate professor of education leadership and policy at PSU, said that the governor’sproposed overhaul could reduce the redundancy in the Oregon’s educational bureaucracy.

Oregon’s K–12 schools, community colleges and public universities all receive state revenue. But right now, the distribution of this revenue requires three different bureaucracies to account for the money: the Oregon Department of Education, the Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development, and the Oregon University System.

By streamlining these systems into a single continuum, the entire Oregon education system could become a far more efficient operation, one that makes the most of the state’s limited tax dollars.

A recurring criticism, however, is the lack of clarity on what the governor’s proposal will look like in practice, according to Portland State President Wim Wiewel.

“The real story is that nobody seems to know very much about [the proposal],” Wiewel said.

Golden confirmed that the Investment Board, if passed, would eventually replace the Oregon Board of Education and the State Board of Higher Education by 2012, a transition that the governor expects would take roughly three years.

She also commented on another controversial feature of the proposal: The Investment Board would strategically invest in Oregon’s schools based on the quality of the schools’ performance.

Currently, state revenue derived from local property taxes, the state income tax and the federal government is distributed to its K–12 public schools based on enrollment levels.

Under Kitzhaber’s proposal, however, the distribution of this money would depend, at least in part, on whether these schools are successfully meeting certain target outcomes set by the governor’s board. These outcomes would include making sure students are reading at grade level and can actually apply the knowledge they’ve learned—otherwise known as “proficiency-based learning.”

As a result of this “budgeting for outcome,” public schools would maintain their funding if they meet these outcomes and lose their funding if they don’t, Golden said.

According to Burk, this performance-based distribution of funds could present a constitutional conflict.

Because many of the poorly performing schools are likely to have a high percentage of low-income and minority students, there is a danger that these “protected categories” would be underfunded simply because they failed to achieve the same results as schools in affluent neighborhoods with a mostly Caucasian student population.

“If you take the governor on a strict interpretation of what he said, wealthier institutions that have higher rates of success would get more money, and lower-income institutions that are really struggling and aren’t reaching the same level of success would end up getting less money,” Burk said.

To distribute state revenue in such a discriminatory manner is prohibited under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, according to Burk.  

Burk said that one could make the argument that low-performing schools are in more need of financial help than their high-performing counterparts, and that it doesn’t improve their situation to cut their funding.

On the other hand, it seems sensible that the governor wishes to reduce the funding of schools that consistently fail to adequately educate their students, according to Burk. No school should simply assume that it ought to receive state money regardless of its performance. Oregon’s education system has an obligation to incentivize schools’ behavior by establishing some measurable targets and holding the schools accountable for them.

Kitzhaber’s proposal also entails that the state superintendant of public instruction—currently an elected office—would become a governor-appointed office called the chief education investment officer. According to Burk, this change would increase the likelihood that the person filling the position will be a professional educator rather than a mere political figure.

Since Oregon’s constitution specifies that the superintendant must be elected, this change would require a constitutional amendment, which the state’s electorate will be obliged to vote on. ?