In November 2016, Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 98, also known as the High School Success fund. It provides targeted state funds in three core areas: dropout prevention, career and technical education and college readiness. High schools across the state can apply to access Measure 98 funds by developing individual plans on how those dollars will get used to boost graduation rates among students at risk for dropping out, for example, or provide CTE courses. Stand for Children, a nonprofit that helped write Measure 98 and campaigned for its passage, credits it with helping raise graduation rates, especially for students of color and from low-income households. OPB’s education reporters Liz Miller and Natalie Pate join us to share their recent reporting on Measure 98′s impact and its future.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Eight years ago, Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved Measure 98, also known as the High School Success Fund. They provided money for dropout prevention, career and technical education, and college readiness. Stand for Children, the nonprofit that helped write Measure 98 and campaigned for its passage, recently put out a report saying that it is working. OPB’s K-12 education reporters Elizabeth Miller and Natalie Pate have been digging into the details. They join us now to share what they have found. Natalie and Liz, welcome.
Elizabeth Miller: Thanks for having us.
Natalie Pate: Hi.
D. Miller: So, Natalie first. I gave the short version in my intro. But can you give us the fuller story here? What was Measure 98?
Pate: So like you said, Oregon voters passed Measure 98 in 2016, establishing the High School Success Fund. And the goal behind this was to ensure more students are finishing high school and close that achievement gap ‒ those achievement gaps that we see between students who’ve been historically underserved and their peers. The state gives $800 per high school student. So we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars each biennium. The money comes largely from the state’s general fund, but also from the Student Success Act money.
One big thing about this funding structure is that districts have a lot of local control over how to spend their portion. But like you said, it has to go to career education, college prep and dropout prevention.
D. Miller: This passed by voters in 2016. Why wasn’t it fully funded for three years until 2019?
Pate: So, remember back to the spring 2017 legislative session. Oregon lawmakers were facing a $1.6 billion budget shortfall, and Measure 98 was definitely part of that. So funding the initiative fully in that first year would have meant investing $300 million that biennium. There was a lot of back and forth between lawmakers and advocates on how to do this or different variations of it. But in the end, they decided to partially fund Measure 98. And it wasn’t until the Student Success Act passed in 2019 that Measure 98 was fully funded.
D. Miller: Wait, Liz, I’m probably not the only person getting slightly confused here. So the High School Success Fund is different from the Student Success Act?
E. Miller: Yes, it’s all so complicated. But I’m going to try to break it down. So the High School Success Fund, as Natalie said, was something different ‒ Measure 98 [passed in] 2016. The Student Success Act [passed in] 2019, and that was passed by legislators, not by voters. So the Student Success Act sets up this corporate activity tax. It’s a different kind of source of money too, where you have the Student Success Act that’s more focused on K-12 ‒ the whole educational experience, not just high school.
D. Miller: A different tax on businesses? A new tax on businesses?
E. Miller: Exactly. And then the High School Success Fund is that focus on high school ‒ that’s targeted. And then the Student Success Act is K-12 ‒ [for] everybody. There’s some early childhood money in there too.
But when it gets kind of confusing is that some of that funding for the High School Success Fund comes from the Student Success Act. And then there’s a whole other fund within the Student Success Act called the Student Initiatives Account (SIA). And that money is also a brand new bucket of money that school districts can also tap into.
D. Miller: Natalie, what happened starting in 2019 once Measure 98 was fully funded?
Pate: Well, graduation rates across the state were up and dropout rates were down leading into this funding. We really saw those trends continue between the partial funding and full funding. The most significant single year improvement, the best ever recorded high school graduation rate in Oregon ‒ which was 82.6%, somewhere around there, just under 83% ‒ that occurred in the 2019-2020 year, the first year of full funding for the High School Success Fund. But also happening at that time was COVID. So the state actually hasn’t reached that 2020 peak since. And things have largely gotten worse since COVID in spite of full funding.
So, one of the big questions advocates are asking now is whether the amount of money ‒ that $800 per student rate that they came up with before the pandemic ‒ is it still enough to support Measure 98′s priorities in the aftermath, especially as we’re seeing all these new heightened student needs today.
D. Miller: This new report that I mentioned briefly from Stand for Children, it says that Measure 98 is having a positive impact on Oregon schools. What evidence are they pointing to for that conclusion?
Pate: They had several highlights that they really wanted to bring up. So, during the first three years of Measure 98 funding, the graduation rate for Hispanic or Latino students grew at a faster pace than the all-students rate. And the graduation rate for students in low income households has also grown substantially ‒ more than 10% points ‒ since prior to Measure 98. So really closing that achievement gap has been a big selling point.
And not only have more students graduated since Measure 98 was implemented, but fewer students have dropped out too. Over the first four years of Measure 98 funding, the rate decreased from about 4% down to 2.75%. It has popped back up since COVID though. I will put that note in there.
And also there’s a lot more students now participating in those Career Technical Education (CTE) programs now as well. And this is a really big deal. Research shows students who participate in CTE classes tend to have higher graduation rates and higher annual earnings after school than students who don’t.
D. Miller: As I noted, Stand for Children is the nonprofit that wrote and championed this measure. And they could be seen as having a kind of vested interest in the measure being seen as successful. Are there any aspects of their analysis that seem questionable to you?
Pate: Sure. Yeah, I mean, I don’t think they’ve been shy about that connection. One of the main questions we wanted to get at in our research was that correlation versus causation. Can we say without question or doubt that the Measure 98 funding resulted in the increases that we did see? And there isn’t that definitive proof in the data. But folks from Stand for Children do believe that the successes came from Measure 98, that it wasn’t just a coincidence, that all of the exact spots Measure 98 aims to target just happened to increase once Measure 98 got funding. So there’s some questions about how directly was it caused by just Measure 98 funding, but they seem to feel very confident, claiming that it was connected to that.
There’s also those dips since COVID, right? Those dropout rates are up. Graduation rates are lagging. The rate of ninth graders on track has dropped. And I think that’s important to keep in mind, that even with full funding, schools, despite their best efforts, are really struggling with that stuff. So yes, Stand for Children does have a horse in the race. But in this report, they’re using ODE data. This is data that is reported to and by the state. They’re paying attention to state audits. A 2022 state audit found that ODE is effectively implementing Measure 98 and increasing collaboration across agencies for this work.
D. Miller: Liz, I want to turn a little bit more to high school dropout rates in a bit. But first, you spent some time looking into what Measure 98 has meant for one district, in particular ‒ David Douglas School District in East Portland. How have they chosen to spend their money?
E. Miller: So, to get this money, districts have to submit a plan ‒ like, here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to spend this money. Here are the goals we’re trying to reach. I read up on David Douglas’s plan, talked to one assistant principal there. Of course, one big focus for them is raising graduation rates. And kind of through that, one example is expanding those careers technical education programs. David Douglas has 11 programs – which is a lot for a school – where students can learn about working with metals, or the health sciences field, or working in a restaurant, things like that.
One thing they were able to do with Measure 98 is revamp their construction program. So before, the assistant principal there told me that program was more focused on woodworking, but they were able to align it more to what the construction industry is looking for and meet those demands. They were able to offer three different levels so students can build skills. With a lot of those career technical education programs, students can also get college credit once they get far enough in their programs.
And one of the other efforts is bringing in social workers to work with students, as well as a library media specialist. But at the end of the day, this David Douglas assistant principal I talked to, Valoree Hill, said the goal here is to get students to stay in school.
Valoree Hill [recorded]: We want to keep them here. And so dropout prevention is a huge piece of that and a huge piece of Measure 98. So we’re helping kids feel valued and supported and loved and like they can be successful at school, they’re more likely to come.
D. Miller: So what kinds of results have they seen?
E. Miller: One thing specific to that CTE piece ‒ that career technical education piece ‒ is increasing the diversity of students involved in those programs. Also getting more female students involved in male-dominated fields, or getting more male students involved in female-dominated field programs. But one thing that they’re still working on, of course, is that graduation rate goal. In the David Douglas plan for the last couple of years, the goal was to increase the graduation rate by 5%. That hasn’t happened, but it’s still a goal.
D. Miller: It seems like there’s a big emphasis on career and technical education with Measure 98 money. David Douglas is one example, but your reporting has shown that this is a popular use of the money. But what about college prep?
E. Miller: Yeah, that’s a big piece of it, and it can look like a lot of different things. Collaborating with universities to offer some credit for student’s advanced placement which I also talked to Valoree Hill about.
Hill [recorded]: We’re providing them with support, like our media specialist as well, so that they know how to access information, how to be good consumers of information – those things are going to be critical to their success in those advanced classes as well as in post-secondary education, whatever that looks like for them.
E. Miller: And something specific to David Douglas that they’re trying to bring in for next year is this platform online where students can look into different colleges, look into different careers, take aptitude tests. So there’s still a lot of interest in bringing in more of that college prep, career prep part of it.
D. Miller: So let’s turn back to this question of graduation rates. Oregon is now among just a handful of states where graduation rates have not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. That includes Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Utah. By comparison, states like Washington, Colorado and California have surpassed their previous rates. Is this a knock on Measure 98? Can we see it as a knock on Measure 98?
E. Miller: Yeah, I think just like Natalie said though, we can’t see Measure 98 as having that complete correlation causation to raising graduation rates. I don’t think we can say the same thing about the decline or the lack of back to pre-pandemic levels. But I think what we’ll see is school districts adapting their plans for how they’ll spend this money on what students need now in this post-COVID world, and things like absenteeism, stuff like that.
D. Miller: Natalie, finally, are there lessons from the way Measure 98 has been rolled out, has been working, that could inform other initiatives? I’m thinking in particular about the Early Literary Success Initiative which lawmakers passed last year, specifically to improve reading instruction.
Pate: Yeah, definitely. We saw with Measure 98, the Student Success Act, and now the Early Literacy Success Initiative that these efforts have very similar structures. They establish state funding and then that goes hand-in-hand with very specific, targeted goals. And then the districts have a lot of local control and discretion on how to use that money. Supporters of Measure 98 really argue that this has worked. Local schools know what their students and staff need [and] what they can accomplish. They’re partnering with community programs. The needs of a small, rural district are going to be different than a school community in an urban setting, for example. So proponents see it as a way for them to really tailor the money to their needs while still pursuing those statewide goals.
I think we’re seeing similar trends between the two already. Measure 98 was partially funded when it first started. So is the Early Literacy Initiative. Critics worry about how much teeth there will be from the state if schools don’t use the money the way that they’re supposed to. And some of those other key accountability measures, we’re seeing that replicated in both. And I think we’ll learn a lot of lessons there looking back at Measure 98. So, I think those big questions are going to be asked time and time again. Are we spending enough money, are we using the money well, and what happens if we aren’t?
D. Miller: Natalie and Liz, thanks very much.
E. Miller: Thanks for having us.
Pate: Thanks for having us.
D. Miller: Natalie Pate and Elizabeth Miller are OPB’s K-12 education reporters.
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