With spring break just around the corner, Oregon lawmakers are still wrestling over requirements for summer learning programs that will kick off in just over three months.
The Democratic co-chairs of the budget subcommittee that focuses on education drafted a bill that in its current form limits funding to programs with a heavy emphasis on literacy development geared to measurable outcomes.
That would be a significant departure from previous iterations of summer learning grants in Oregon, which have tended to be far less prescriptive.
In order to be eligible for grant funding, school districts would need to show that they were “incorporating evidence-based literacy instruction and interventions designed to support students who are reading below grade level,” according to the current version of House Bill 2007, which is sponsored by House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, and the education subcommittee co-chairs, Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham, and Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro.
This seems like a really good idea. Can’t believe we haven’t done it before. (In fact what have we funded if not something like this for the summer?)
Enrichment activities — from robotics to arts projects — are not verboten under the current draft of the bill, but such activities would need to be closely tied to academic goals. And school districts would have to inform the state Department of Education about how they plan to measure student growth in reading and writing. School districts with the lowest rates of reading proficiency would get priority for the grants.
Again, this seems perfectly reasonable.
But that version of the bill met quick opposition from some education advocates, Community groups that provide summer learning programs argued that such an all-encompassing focus on literacy risks disengaging children who struggle in traditional classroom settings. And school districts say that they rely on partnering with nonprofits to run enrichment and extracurriculars for part of the day at summer school to keep costs down, to ensure that districts can still offer a full day’s worth of programming to working families.
So the educational non-profits taxpayers are funding want to keep being unaccountable?
In response, Ruiz and Sollman indicated that they plan an updated version of the bill.
And the Democrats in Oregon cave-in once again.
Education researchers say summer programs are one of the best strategies to help struggling students, provided the programs are well-designed.
In 2021 and 2022, during the pandemic’s aftermath, Oregon lawmakers earmarked a total of $350 million for summer programming statewide. But they zeroed out that investment in 2023 amid concerns that the big spending on summer programs hadn’t helped students make concrete academic gains.
Oregon’s most recent fourth grade reading performance was significantly below the national average and only outranked two other states’, New Mexico and Alaska.
God forbid we actually try to fund something that might work.