Auditors with Oregon Secretary of State have released a report detailing five risk factors to student success including performance monitoring, transparency on results and challenges, spending scrutiny, district standards and funding stability.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Oregon Secretary of State auditors released a report detailing five risk areas that could put the success of students at risk. The report is a compilation of past K-12 school audits by the state. Auditors addressed their findings to the Governor, Oregon Department of Education and state legislators and made recommendations for improvements. Joining us is Principal Auditor Krystine McCants to share more on these risk areas and details of the report.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Oregon Secretary of State’s office has done six audits and four follow-ups of Oregon’s K-12 system in just the last six years, all of them were addressed to the state’s Department of Education, the agency that oversees public schools. This week, the Secretary of State’s office did something new. It released a different kind of audit, one directed not to ODE, but to the entities that oversee that agency, the Governor, the Legislature and the State Board of Education. This new report identifies five risks that could jeopardize student success going forward. Krystine McCants is a Principal Auditor for the Secretary of State’s audit division and joins us with the details. Welcome to the show.
Krystine McCants: Thank you so much.
Miller: Why do this so-called risk audit that is the first of its kind for the Secretary of State?
McCants: Yeah, that’s a really great question. In the past, our audits have been directed at ODE as you said. My partner and I on this audit or this report, I should say, have extensive experience on those past audits. And what we’ve seen is some themes emerging about issues that have come up over time over and over again in audits and also issues that come up that ODE can’t address itself because those changes would need to be made at the policy level. So we took our past work and our knowledge of what we’ve seen and tried to draw those out to see the things that might continue to be problems in the future unless they are addressed at a higher level.
Miller: In 2019 lawmakers passed the Student Success Act putting an extra $1 billion a year into the K-12 system. It was talked about by its champions at the time as a transformative moment in public education in Oregon. What are the risks that would get in the way of that actually being the case?
McCants: Absolutely. That’s a huge investment. And so that sort of lent a little urgency to this report. The things that we found that we were able to draw from our own work. The first risk is about performance monitoring and support. It’s so important to school improvement that leaders and policymakers work with ODE to make sure that that monitoring is happening and that ODE is able to work with districts to promote success when those districts are struggling to support their students. A second risk is around transparency on results and also challenges. ODE loves to come in and make reports on what’s going well, but it’s harder for them, I think, to come into a public space and say these are the challenges we’re having supporting districts and these are the challenges districts are having, because it’s not really a great forum. It doesn’t incentivize a drawing out of that really deep discussion. We want to encourage policymakers to ask about that.
Miller: On that note, so what happens if test scores or graduation rates at a particular district are low and stay low? How much authority, what power does the Department of Education have to intervene?
McCants: There’s been some disagreement on that. And in the past ODE has focused on compliance and sort of making sure districts are doing everything they need to do according to statute. But that created a lot of tension and a lot of mistrust. They’ve moved towards a more relational model, which has been very well received, but it means that they’re working more on coaching and collaboration. It means they’re not really bringing a hammer down. And they say that in some areas, they don’t have authority where it’s our opinion as auditors, looking at statute, that they do have more authority than they’re using, when it comes to consequences and accountability for districts that aren’t getting there even with the coaching and collaboration ODE is doing.
Miller: What is, what does the hammer mean, in particular? I mean, what actions could the Department of Education take if they were directed to do so by their leader or that leader’s leader, who is the Governor?
McCants: So we’re talking in some cases about public reporting of specific districts’ results. We’re talking about, in some areas where they may need to reduce future allocations of money or claw back money, in some cases where it’s really clear that a district is mis-spending money, they don’t seem to have any problem taking it back, in those cases where it’s out of line with what the money is allowed to be spent on. When it comes to low performance though, districts have a lot of leeway with ODE and they want, I think they just want to see the best in district leaders and so they keep trying to work with them and trying to work with them. We just haven’t really seen a point where they’ve gotten to it where they say, you know what, it’s not working, this isn’t going to be able to continue the way it has been.
Miller: One of the broad categories you focus on, one of the five risks, is about local spending by districts and you were touching on it there, but I want to just hear more about this. You basically say in the report that the state should provide more analysis and more monitoring of that spending to make sure it’s being done in an effective way. How much oversight can the State Department of Education exert in terms of budgeting decisions made by local boards of education?
McCants: That’s a really great question. As, of course, you know, we try to balance local control really heavily and there’s a reason for that. Local boards are elected from within their communities. They should know the assets and challenges that they have and be able to try different things, but when it comes to things like, I want to take the quality education report. ODE has the ability to put into that report certain methods of spending that districts need to address, that it’s not necessarily directing them to spend this way in particular. But if they don’t then ODE can come in and say, this isn’t actually in line with this report that we put out about what’s going to improve student success. And ultimately what I think we need to come down to is that this is about Oregon students. And if local control is not well serving them, then we need ODE to step in more than they have been, to be able to push for improved student performance overall as well as for the most vulnerable populations.
Miller: But as you note in the report, at least implicitly, maybe explicitly, interventions can only be meaningful if they’re based on good information and good data. And one of the things you focus on is the lack of data in certain respects at the state level. What’s not being tracked right now by the Oregon Department of Education that you argue should be?
McCants: Yeah, I want to really quickly give a little bit of context. When it comes to data, it’s not free to collect data. It requires district time and money and there needs to be staff at ODE to be able to use that data to great effect. Otherwise it’s just meaningless information.
Miller: But a billion dollars a year in new money is not nothing and doesn’t some of that new money include funding specifically for this?
McCants: Absolutely and that was context. I just want to make sure that people understand that data collection isn’t free and it needs to be used, so when we talk about data collection that isn’t being done at ODE’s level, we want to talk about things like how many students are passing Algebra 1 and what effect that has on graduation. And that’s not a piece of information that ODE collects and looks at statewide. They look at whether students in ninth grade are on track to graduate based on the number of credits that they’ve attained in that first year, but it stops in ninth grade. They don’t look at that for 10th and 11th graders to see if they continue to be on track and if there are areas where more intervention may be necessary at the district level. So they’re doing, I think, more work when it comes to different kinds of equity data. With the Measure 98 program, for example, they’re looking at equitable access to college level opportunities, which is great. But unless they have a specific reason to use the data, they’re hesitant to ask districts to collect it. And so we want policymakers to say, we want you looking at this piece that’s relevant to high school graduation rates. We want you to look at Algebra 1 and see where students are having trouble passing that and where that’s a block to graduation.
Miller: The Governor is the only individual who is singled out in terms of the people you are addressing this new report to, the other folks are the 90 members of the Legislature and the seven members of the state’s school board. What specifically is the Governor’s role in everything you’re writing about?
McCants: So the Governor constitutionally in Oregon is the Superintendent of State Schools and she has the ability to delegate to a director of ODE most of the responsibilities for that. But as with every state agency, the Governor is responsible for approving budget proposals that get put forward and policy proposals that could be put forward to the Legislature and has the ultimate responsibility to make sure that the department’s under her care are operating well. And that especially includes ODE, given her unique role as the superintendent.
Miller: Hopefully it doesn’t seem like I’m asking you to do my job in the coming months, but I’m curious. I mean, obviously, one of the contexts for this report is that we’re going to have a new Governor in half a year. What questions would you want candidates for Governor to be asked specifically in the context of what you’ve written about in this report? What do you think Oregonians should hear from gubernatorial candidates about education now?
McCants: I would ask ultimately, what is the priority for the Governor, and not just getting more students to graduate, but you know, where do they see ODE’s priority needing to be? Is that in line with what the Legislature is going to approve and how can we be strategic with a long term view beyond the term of the governor to be able to continue good work that has been happening without undermining it for new efforts every year or two.
Miller: This gets to another one of the points that you include in the report. You faulted state leaders broadly over decades for a lack of stability in education policy, noting that there have been four major overhauls of K-12 education of the system as a whole since the 1990s. How do you explain that kind of churn?
McCants: Honestly, democracy. And this is really hard, but leadership changes in the Legislature, in the Governor’s office and in the State Board of Education and each new group is going to come in with their own set of priorities. There’s not something, really, that we want to do about that because democracy is a good thing in my opinion, but in order for education to have good long term results, they need to have the ability to get programs off the ground and bein successful and that takes time. It can take over a year to start getting money to programs. Districts have to do needs assessments, they need community involvement. They need to make four year plans and that’s before they get any money and then once they have money, it’s going to take time to work. The earlier that you intervene with money, if you do a third grade reading program, it’s gonna take at least nine years to see those results in high school grad rates, but those can be really effective if you give them time. And so what we’re saying, we’re not saying don’t have new programs. We’re not saying don’t have new initiatives, we’re saying know what ODE is doing and how that new initiative would fit or divert ODE’s existing structure and programs because right now, it doesn’t seem like that’s taken into account enough to allow ODE to continue successful programs from the past.
Miller: What do you see as the key lessons in this report for lawmakers in particular?
McCants: That’s a big one, honestly. It could be that they have great new ideas for new initiatives or they want to see changes that are made, but don’t necessarily understand whether ODE is already doing that or if ODE has the resources to do that or if they’d have to pull that from another program. And so doing that sort of cost benefit analysis with a well informed piece of information and we’ve asked ODE to create a program map to be able to share with legislators who are interested in new ideas, to be able to say, this would actually fit really well within this program. Why don’t we tweak that instead of starting something new? And having that dialogue and inviting ODE to that dialogue as well as the Governor, as the Superintendent, to be able to talk about if we’re doing something new, where does it fit? And if it doesn’t fit, what are we losing? And beyond that, we’re talking policy decisions and that’s a little bit out of my realm.
Miller: Sorry to interrupt. And basically all of the performance audits we’ve had conversations about over the years, in the past, the agency in question is given a chance to respond at the end of it and they often agree with a lot of the points and they quibble with some of them, but at least the public, we can see some kind of official response and it’s baked into that kind of an audit. But this one is different. Will there be anything like that for this report?
McCants: I don’t anticipate a formal audit response. If we had one, we would have attached it. We didn’t request one. We have been working with ODE staff and administration in developing this report. We asked a lot of questions. We heard a lot of great feedback and they’ve been supportive of this work because they understand how important it is to get this big picture view of the risks that ODE faces that are in some cases outside their control. And so they’ve been really supportive of this work.
Miller: But they’re not the ones that this work is addressed to. This work is addressed to the Governor and lawmakers and the board. I guess I’m wondering and you didn’t ask them what they think?
McCants: We actually did. Before the report was released, we talked to each individual. We talked to folks from the Governor’s office, including the Governor herself. We talked to chairs of the education committees and we talked to the chair and vice chair of the State Board of Education to get their thoughts to see if we were missing anything important or if we were way off track on any of the ideas that we had and we got feedback from them, so this is not coming out of the blue and I think there’s a lot of agreement from the folks that we spoke with that these are risks that need to be addressed. How we do that, I think again, it’s going to be one of those policy questions, but we wanted to put this out there as independent auditors to say this is what we’re seeing. These are the risks we see for your awareness.
Miller: Krystine McCants, thanks very much for your time.
McCants: Thank you.
Miller: Krystine McCants is a Principal Auditor for Oregon’s Secretary of State’s Audit Division.
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