Oregon Department of Education head shares more on the state’s struggling test results

New data from the Oregon Department of Education show that students in the state are still struggling with reading, math and science as they still have not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. Test results show that less than half of students tested are proficient in English language arts and less than a third are proficient in math. Charlene Williams is the director of ODE. She joins us to share more on the results and what can be done at the state level.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon students are struggling. That’s the clearest takeaway from the latest statewide test scores put out last week by the Oregon Department of Education. Students are well behind pre-pandemic performance levels and the percentages of students who are proficient in math, English and science remain staggeringly low. Less than half of students tested are proficient in English language arts. Less than a third are proficient in math. And that’s just the students who are choosing to take these tests. A significant percentage are simply opting out.

Charlene Williams is the director of the Oregon Department of Education. She joins us now. Thanks very much for joining us once again.

Charlene Williams: Thank you for having me.

Miller: When so many students in Oregon are not even meeting minimum grade level standards, it seems to me that those students are not failing. It’s that Oregon’s education system is failing them. Do you agree with that statement?

Williams: You know, I agree that we definitely have work to do to meet the needs of our students. We have some systemic work to do. When we look at our scores, we are not satisfied. I hear the comparison to pre-pandemic levels and I think we would agree that even pre-pandemic levels are not satisfactory. And so given where Oregon started, where we are now, we have urgency in front of us in terms of really helping our students meet the outcomes we know that they can meet. But it takes all of us coming together so that we can get our resources aligned, get the practices aligned, so that the students can perform and achieve at high levels.

Miller: Why are so many students significantly below grade level for language arts and math?

Williams: I think “why” is a complicated question, right? Like I said, this has been an issue that has persisted unfortunately for years and it’s really going to take what I’m seeing educators do across the state. They are really beginning to … and they’ve continued to, I shouldn’t say they’ve started … but I’ve been able, over the past year, to sit with educators, and visit schools, and to get an understanding of their context and the different efforts they are doing to address some of the learning needs that are coming before them.

So one of the first things that educators do is really try to understand who the learner is that’s coming into the classroom. And then what are their learning needs compared to what the grade level expectations are? And then what are the tasks and activities our students need to participate in if we’re really going to get them to perform at high levels? So really analyzing what’s in front of us, using the various instructional tools and assessments that help inform instruction, and then using that information in collaborative groups with their peers, and colleagues, and wherever they need.

In some cases, they might need some additional technical assistance around, hey, this is a particularly gnarly and persistent issue over here in this school with these groups of students. What does the research say? Where are some pockets where it’s working well and that we can put our minds together and our resources together in a way that helps move the needle? We started that with our early literacy success initiative to try to outline a framework of what it takes to really promote literacy in our schools.

Miller: Well, just to look at math then, as an example – where there hasn’t been the same policy change that hopefully will bear fruit in the coming years – what stands out most to me is it is not just that in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, that math achievement is well below where it was pre-pandemic. It’s that it has barely budged since testing restarted in 2022. The numbers in 2022, ‘23 and ‘24 are basically flat for each of those grades and flat, well below where they were.

I hear what you’re saying – it’s going to take everybody coming together and work is underway. But I think I’m not alone in wandering, along with many Oregonians as well as many parents, at what point the urgency that you’re talking about translates into observable results?

Williams: Thank you. That’s a great question. I believe the answer is going to be different in different contexts depending on where they started, depending on the resources and framework they’re using. One of the things we’re doing at the department … we have our ambitious math teaching project that really tries to highlight for educators and leaders: “what are the practices you can put into place that help to promote and boost math achievement?” So coming alongside districts and problem solving this math conundrum, because my background is in mathematics so I have a particular affinity and desire for students to see themselves as mathematicians.

I think we unfortunately still live in a culture, in a climate, where, for some, it’s OK to say, “I’m not good at math.” But it’s not OK to say, “oh, I can’t read, I’m not good at reading.” So I think there’s a lot of work that we still need to do when it comes to mathematics from just our culture, around the conversation with math and how we engage our learners, and even our educators who want to see change and are doing what they can in terms of improving their skills to support the math needs of our scholars.

So, you’re right. And we share the same concern with our learners and our educators. We’ve got to move this needle when it comes to math and ELA. Both areas, again, are not at all where they need to be.

Miller: What would it take? How bad would things have to get? I guess, maybe for how many years would things have to stay where they are before something drastic would happen, before the state, ODE, and the governor would essentially touch a kind of third rail of local controlled-schools and push for more statewide control?

Williams: Interesting. So we actually, right now, have an accountability work group and so they’ll wrap up near the end of the year. And they are wrestling with some of these same ideas and conversations. So one idea that has definitely come forward in that conversation is the fact that accountability definitely has to be reciprocal. And by that, meaning, we don’t just leave the outcomes or test scores at the lap of the classroom and the teacher, or even the school and the principal, but we look up and down the system, we look at the whole ecosystem of who contributes to a successful public education. We each play a role up and down the system, and are we each playing our role in a way that supports those practices that get the outcomes?

So sometimes by the time we look at a test score, it’s too late. We need to go backwards and see, did we have the right curriculum resources in place? Do we have our instructors prepared with the strategies they need in order to be successful? Are leaders equipped to support instructors with those particular practices, so that they can assure that students are getting the teaching they deserve? Are leaders able to create the conditions so teachers have time to collaborate and learn from the work that they’re doing to boost student achievement? Are our local resources allocated in such a way, based on best practices, all the way to the state department for us as a department? Are we getting things out in a timely manner? Are we providing the technical assistance that our districts and schools need, and so forth?

So all up and down the educational continuum, are we clear about our goals? Are we clear about the resources and practices that need to be in place to get those outcomes? And then are we consistent and persistent with monitoring and measuring those? Those are some of the ideas and recommendations that this group is wrestling with, that we’re all wrestling with. So that if we have a school that continues to persist in low performance, we have a range of supports that we use to come to intervene, so that we can disrupt this pattern for our schools and for our students.

Miller: I want to turn to opt-out rates. Oregon is one of only a few states that give families the choice to opt out of these tests and a lot of families do so, a lot of students do so. For some tests, participation is below 70%. Does that give you a full enough picture of how Oregon schools are doing?

Williams: Thank you for the question. And I would argue no. The federal threshold is 95%. So when you have 70%, you have quite a way from 95%, because the more pixels you have in a picture, the clearer the picture is …

Miller: Sorry to interrupt, but listeners may not know that the federal government says 95% of students have to take these tests, but Oregon lawmakers have passed a law and basically saying that your department, if I understand correctly, will ask for a waiver from the feds to get out of that requirement. Do you think that’s a good policy?

Williams: I think that is something we need to reconsider and revisit. I think if assessment continues to play a significant role in how we look at holding schools accountable … because you just asked me the question, if schools continue to persistently perform, how can we be certain if we don’t have a complete picture of how our students are doing? So, if we want to increase our certainty, as well as our effectiveness supporting schools, we’re going to have to get really clear about the fact that students are opting out in some of these cases.

Miller: But in fact, one of the governor’s educational priorities is to reduce the time dedicated to standardized testing and focus instead on what are called real time assessments. What are real time assessments?

Williams: Oh, I’m glad you asked the question. I literally just got off a call with an amazing group of educators for this being statewide in service day. And that’s exactly what they’re talking about. They’re talking about real time assessment, because we know that, for the most part, when things go well in the classroom, you’re really teaching a unit and you’re coming to the end of that unit, and you’re ready to assess students, that is not the first time that a teacher is aware of whether or not a student is ready for that assessment. All along the way, that teacher has been making many assessments based on the various types of assignments that they’ve been given, little micro-assessments here and there, just embedded in how they do instruction …

Miller: I imagine just what the faces of kids are, if it looks like they even understand the math concept or, I don’t know, that part of speech description that the teacher is giving … I imagine good teachers are always, not in a bad way, but always assessing where their kids are.

Williams: Yes, absolutely, they are. And the work our team was doing with teachers this morning was really around how we can get even more disciplined and precise about that, so that we have an even deeper sense before we get to these classroom assessments or if we want to do interim assessments. How can we get a little bit more vigilant and disciplined about these assessments as our students are learning, so that it serves as a better predictor of how our students perform? And connected to that are the tasks we assign. This is an extreme example, but there’s an example of a teacher who noticed that his students didn’t perform as well on the math assessment and didn’t understand why graphing was low because he taught them graphing, but he failed to do it in all four quadrants.

So it’s just really making sure that the work that we’re doing is aligned with grade-level standards and we’re assessing it accordingly. We have it embedded throughout the way we do instruction. We take the sting out of the high stakes nature of the conversation around assessments, so that students can begin to self-assess and peer assess. And it’s just part of the learning journey. It’s not this threatening thing with necessarily this punitive outcome if you don’t do well, but it really becomes something that is embedded in how we understand what our kids know and are able to do.

Miller: I can see how the kind of real-time assessments you’re talking about can help give teachers a better sense for where their students are in the moment so they can better teach them, better reach them. But how can that actually do what standardized testing is intended to do, which is give a statewide systemic snapshot of where schools are?

They seem like very different versions of assessing things and they both seem to have a purpose. But the governor’s stated goal is to reduce the time dedicated to standardized testing, and to seemingly take up that time with something which is supposed to give just a different kind of tool?

Williams: Yes and they work in harmony, right? It’s not an either/or. Less time on state assessments doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have poor performance as a result. If this formative assessment network … it’s a comprehensive assessment system, right? It takes all of these kinds of mini doses. It’s kind of like if you’re preparing for a big event, you break it down to the smaller pieces and then by the time the culminating event happens, you know that you’re pretty much ready because you’ve done all of this preliminary work.

I think there’s a way that these items can live in harmony and not in each context. There could be schools that may put more of an emphasis on assessment. And so how they schedule and spend time on assessment might look different than another. We have reduced the length of our assessment to reduce the amount of time students are taking with the assessment. So I think these things can live in harmony and not necessarily in contradiction of one another.

Miller: Finally, I just want to go back to where we started because to me it’s a central point here. There was a recent poll in the Oregonian coverage showing that very few Oregonians see dismal student performance on these tests as a key issue. I just look at these graphs and I feel like I’m afraid we’re going to get so just used to bad performance that we’re just going to say, “this is the way it is,” instead of having our hair on fire, instead of seeing it as an emergency. If year after year, we don’t see improvement, how do we not just get used to it?

Williams: We won’t relent. We are not going to take our foot off the gas when it comes to whether our students deserve better, Dave Miller. So your hair is on fire, my hair is on fire, our hair is on fire to ensure that our students really get the outcomes they deserve.

We know that a test score isn’t the whole story about a child or even about the state. We are expanding our system to include some of the feedback our students are giving us via survey. And it’s super telling. They are telling us things. Like this morning, I shared where when students have the opportunity to write more frequently about what they read … and they answered these questions from “never” to “often” – so “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often.” These students are just filling out the survey without knowing it. The researchers were able to go behind the scenes and correlate the ones who got to write about what they read on a more frequent basis, their performance at state level was at around 63% – which is significantly higher than our state average, which is around 39%.

So there are signals in the system that are saying there are practices, there are key strategies that if we get relentless about every learner deserves high quality learning experiences, our teachers deserve the preparation of resources, our principals deserve the support, we all get clear about the role we have to make it happen, we’re going to make this happen. We will not be satisfied with the scores as they are.

Miller: I appreciate that, but that example just brings up another question. Why are there schools right now where students are not being asked to regularly write about what they’ve read? That seems like a basic aspect of the English language arts curriculum.

Williams: Right. And again, this is student-reported, right? So this is one part of the story. So there needs to be some observation, and interviews, and really understanding the full context. But for the group of students who actually remember, often it made a difference. Again, when we’re talking about ELA and reading, sometimes people have their particular curriculum and strategy. And now that we have this early literacy framework, we’re going to be able to streamline some of these practices so that more students have experiences with what we know to be high leverage practices.

Miller: Charlene Williams, I have a feeling we will talk again. I look forward to it. Thank you.

Williams: Thank you so much. Take care.

Miller: You, too. Charlene Williams is director of the Oregon Department of Education.

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