Policy expert, district superintendent weigh in on Oregon’s push to improve reading scores

In 2023, Oregon lawmakers passed HB 3198, which created the Early Literacy Success Initiative, an effort to address the state’s dismal reading test scores. The bill aimed to more fully adopt a phonics-based teaching approach — often referred to as “the science of reading” — in schools across the state. Education experts broadly agree this approach is the best way to teach kids to read. But the question became: How will the state hold school systems accountable for implementing it? Earlier this year, Oregon passed another bill aimed at just that, but some experts worry it’s toothless.

Christine Pitts is president and CEO of Open School and an Oregon-based policy expert. She joins us to unpack the many reasons Oregon’s ability to implement the “science of reading” has been stalled. Steve Cook, superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools and president-elect of the Oregon Association of School Executives, also joins us for a closer look at how districts are tackling Oregon’s literacy problem.

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

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Two years ago, Oregon lawmakers passed the Early Literacy Success Initiative, an effort to address the state’s dismal reading test scores. The bill was intended to get schools across the state to fully adopt a phonics-based teaching approach, often referred to as “the science of reading.” Education experts broadly agree that this approach is the best way to teach kids to read, but how will the state hold school systems accountable for implementing it? Earlier this year, lawmakers passed another bill aimed at just that. Some experts worry it doesn’t go far enough. Christine Pitts is the president and CEO of Open School. The nonprofit serves students in the Portland area. Steve Cook is a superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools and the president-elect of the Oregon Association of School Executives. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Christine Pitts: Thanks, Dave.

Steve Cook: Thanks, Dave. Appreciate the opportunity.

Miller: Christine, I want to start with your own career as a teacher yourself, as an elementary school teacher starting in North Carolina. How did you approach teaching reading when you started teaching?

Pitts: In North Carolina when I started teaching reading, we were trained on balanced literacy, which is the opposite of the science of reading. We would get our kiddos, take the assessment, then we would typically differentiate instruction by reading level. As such, what would happen is over time, they would kind of get tracked on that one level and never really reach grade level proficiency.

Miller: What did it mean in practice to use that system of reading teaching? What did it look like? What were you teaching in practice?

Pitts: We would spend some time during the day doing that tier one level of reading. That’s that actual grade level reading. Then we would break the kids into separate groups based on their level and teach them at that level. Like I said though, over time, they would never really make grade level proficiency if you weren’t making them challenged in their literacy growth.

Miller: Do you remember at the time thinking this isn’t working, or was that something that came to you later as you learned more about the science of reading and literature about pedagogy?

Pitts: Absolutely. I remember feeling frustrated. I didn’t really know why, because I hadn’t been trained on evidence-based literacy instruction. Over time, as I changed schools, moved to Oregon, had different roles, and took a deep dive into the science of reading, I quickly learned that I was teaching reading the wrong way.

Miller: OK, what is the right way? What does the best evidence tell us now about the best way to teach kids?

Pitts: There are some very important pillars in literacy instruction that we must hit. Phonics is one, that every letter has a sound. Fluency, that our students can read fluently and quickly enough to understand what they are reading. Vocabulary, that they have the words that are content-based and help them access rich literature. All of those parts have to be focused on, but it has to be done through explicit direct instruction. That’s really the piece that we had been missing.

Miller: Two years ago, the legislature passed this Early Literacy Success Initiative and then the State Department of Education released the Early Literacy Framework, both intended to address this because there was a big policy discussion in Oregon. Have they already made a difference?

Pitts: Absolutely. I think in classrooms, what we’re seeing, and at the district level, is a push to train educators as much as we can. I think what these bills have done is stopped the freefall that was happening and really starting to set some standards and systematize literacy instruction so that it’s not left to chance. Some kids are lucky, if they get the right teacher in the right school who’s focused on the science of reading, and some kids might end up in a classroom with balanced literacy still being implemented. The goal of these bills is to stop that freefall, get control, and then make sure that none of this is left to chance.

Miller: Steve Cook, in Bend-La Pine schools, do you track how many teachers in your district were trained to teach using science of reading methods?

Cook: Yeah, Dave, thanks for the question. I think the first thing I would tell you is that we’re in year three of the implementation of the science of reading curriculum. We use a tool called Really Great Reading to deliver that instructional strategy. At this point, every teacher that is in our system has received some level of training on how to best implement that and in some cases, very, very in-depth and detailed training in how to best maneuver instructionally so that you’re maximizing those times with students.

There’s an overall training, there’s a quite specific training, there are trainings about, OK, now what do you do when students struggle with picking this up and when other students are starting to pick that up. The training is its own kind of conversation, but I would say in a district of Bend-La Pine’s size, which is about 16,500 students, we have about 1,000 teachers, roughly 500 elementary teachers, every one of those elementary teachers has received training in how best to support the science of reading in our classrooms.

Miller: Is this something that you consider when you’re hiring teachers to begin with? Because as I’m hearing you describe training, I guess I’m imagining that a lot of this is sort of continuing education. It’s like you got your master’s X number of years ago. It wasn’t with this reading system in mind, and so we’ll train you up now. But what about new teachers?

Cook: Yeah, that can be a little bit problematic for us. We do expect that all teachers that come into our system to receive this training, so we have an instructional coaching system that are going to prepare teachers to understand and know how to attack teaching reading in their classrooms and very, very explicitly in K-3, K-2 classrooms for sure. I do think that we’re still seeing quite a few people come out of what I would say are local, like at universities out of the state of Oregon that perhaps don’t have some of the background that we would desire, that they would. So we take that upon ourselves as to be a part of, if you’re going to come work in one of our 19 elementary schools, we’re going to expect and make sure that you have the skills necessary to deliver the curriculum that we have in place and the training modules are very robust and those expectations are very high because we feel like we have to make it an imperative that our staff know and understand what those expectations are.

Miller: Christine, how do you explain the disconnect between the Oregon Department of Education, the state’s K-12 system’s goals right now, there does seem to be a north star, and what’s actually being taught to student teachers in Oregon’s teaching colleges right now?

Pitts: In Oregon, we have our K-12 system and our higher education system, which are separate, and I think we need to do some work to connect the goals between these two different governance agencies. Anytime I talk about governance, I really want us to focus on authority. So who has the authority to direct or guide the schools, whether it’s higher education districts or actual schools.

Miller: Isn’t it ultimately in Oregon the governor who does have a huge amount of control over both of those?

Pitts: Absolutely, Dave.

Miller: OK, so that authority does exist in one person at the very top?

Pitts: Yes. But then there is the next level, which is the Oregon Department of Education and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, and they really are there to set policy, set the agenda, and then guide the local education agencies or the universities to do the work and move this forward.

Miller: What would it take for the governor to say to hack the higher education recording commission, hey, this is the best way to teach reading, and this is what we’re requiring to be the way reading should be taught in schools, so when you’re turning out new teachers in Oregon, they have to be taught to teach this way. What would that take?

Pitts: I think it takes focus. In Oregon, we typically find other things to pay attention to instead of teaching and learning. In order to do that work, it’s about change management. So really making sure we’re setting this as a priority, and that we are keeping everyone focused on that same goal over time.

Miller: Steve Cook, I wanna turn to the bigger picture here, of the accountability measures. As I mentioned, the state’s Department of Education released some new accountability measures recently that are supposed to take effect, if my math is right, over the next four years, so they’re not immediate. Broadly, what do you think of them?

Cook: I’m actually embracing this conversation. I can’t speak for 197 superintendents across the state of Oregon, but I can tell you that we all live in a world of accountability and a couple of things, even what to kind of tack on to what Christine just mentioned, the fact that this is going to create a better focus and intent of what people are going to be held accountable to immediately elevates attention in that area and we’re aware of that.

And so, the accountability conversation is one that we’re highly engaged in. It’s one that we want to be a partner with and we’re interested in. I think one of the things we’re excited about is this focus on learning outcomes that potentially will happen. I think it was last week the state board approved that we have started to migrate through this, rather than a once in the spring state assessment that students would be participating in, and if families want to choose to opt out of that assessment, they have that right to, that we’ll be focusing on interim assessments that are delivered perhaps three times a year that are going to demonstrate what students are learning and growing throughout the year on.

Just that intentional focus on student learning and what they’re working through instead of an optional test that happens in the spring for many families, I think is a really smart move, and I think it’s gonna focus us back on what teaching and learning impacts are happening and how are those outcomes being delivered to the students that we are then being measured by.

Miller: Christine, are you as hopeful?

Pitts: Yes.

Miller: OK, that was a long cautious pause before you said that.

Pitts: Because there are leaders like Steve out there. What you’re hearing from Steve is someone who is willing to kind of roll up their sleeves and shift culture within the school district. Oregon for many years has not centered standardized data. Like I was discussing earlier, we have focused on many things other than teaching and learning. We’re trying to solve poverty within our K-12 public education system. We’re trying to solve mental health crises. We’re trying to solve political polarization. But what must be done is teaching and learning at grade level.

Miller: I feel like a lot of administrators we’ve talked to, and we have one on so I don’t need to speak for him, but just to respond to what you’re saying is, I feel like they would say, no, we’re not trying to solve poverty. We’re acknowledging that it exists and it affects learning, and we can’t do what we need to do in terms of teaching and educating if we ignore it. I imagine that’s what a lot of administrators would say. What do you mean when you say that we’re trying to solve all these things as opposed to teaching? In practice, what do you mean?

Pitts: What I mean is when we look at the amount of time that our children spend in our school building, how much of that is focused on teaching and learning? Are those teachers supported in the ways that they need to be for this to be a cohesive public education system where our core indicators are academic outcomes and a place of belonging and affirming in their environments. And I think Steve would agree that those are the key things that our school districts and schools should be focused on, and this accountability bill provides us an opportunity to start all rowing in that same direction.

Miller: Steve, do you agree?

Cook: I do. I want to add to that as well. It lives in our strategic goals. Academic achievement is our first one. Helping students find their purpose and their passion is our second goal. And our third goal is to create a sense of community and belonging where every student sees themselves in their own school community and feels safety in that.

I would tell you that when you get those kinds of initiatives dialed and get very specific on what are the things that we want to account for, you can move the needle on those and I will argue and, I think I’m probably piling on top of what Christine’s saying even more, is the fact that our students in the state of Oregon go to school about a year and a half less than students in Texas, for example.

Miller: Over the course of 12 years.

Cook: Over the course of their entire career, yeah, and so that makes a difference, and I think that’s the kind of conversations that we’re having, like let’s make sure that our kids are given every opportunity to go into this world that we’ve got and be a successful pathway for them.

Miller: I want to drill down into what we mean by accountability and what the repercussions should be when the numbers aren’t good. Christine first, what do you think should happen at a classroom level, at a school level, at a district level, those are all different things. Let’s say if a district’s 3rd grade reading scores or 8th grade math scores year after year are both bad and not improving, consistently bad, what should happen and who should be doing it?

Pitts: This is such a great question, and it’s changed over time. I actually want to bring us up a level to federal accountability around education, because when No Child Left Behind was in place, which was Bush’s accountability bill, it was focused on school districts, which are the most proximal governance level to a state education agency. When we passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which just turned 10 this year, we started focusing on schools as the level of measure. And I think with statewide accountability, we really need to move away from personalizing what these measures mean. This is about diagnosing and evaluating how our system is doing. So that’s a really critical paradigm shift that we have to make.

I think by doing so, we can allow teachers to kind of release the burden of these summative assessment scores, which are more about the system. Now, like Steve said, the interim assessments that are part of this accountability bill will be incredibly helpful in understanding how we are making progress at the classroom, at the school level. And I think our districts are in a great position to work with Oregon Department of Education on coaching around some of the pedagogical decisions, high-quality curriculum that is included in the schools.

Miller: Steve, I guess I’m still wondering whether the accountability is focused at the school building level or the district level. What do you think should happen if 3rd grade reading scores just don’t show improvement in, say, at the district level? What should the state do if anything? What should the district be forced to do, if anything?

Cook: Well, Dave, you’re not gonna put me in charge of statewide school accountability with that question, but I’m glad to say how we would manage it. What I would suggest is, it’s no different than when people aren’t meeting expectations, you don’t double down on them. You actually go provide more support. You provide direction, you provide coaching, you provide intervention, and you take known strategies that are known to make impact and you make sure that those are intervened upon with supports and additional resources and you hold that work accountable.

Whether that’s done through the Oregon Department of Education or if the governor puts some kind of task force together, whatever, we’re gonna be living that in the near future, and there will be people who are going to say, OK, we’ve made it clear, here are the expectations. What now when people don’t meet those? I think the premise is that there’s got to be something to diagnose so that we can then go solve that problem in each school level. I want to add one very important key factor on this, and Christine said it, and I want to say it again so that you hear it from a superintendent who’s boots on the ground doing this work and watching our teachers make huge impact with students.

While we’re looking at student achievement, accountability needs to be at the system level because the system is the responsible entity and so building a system that measures and reports upon student achievement and student growth and then being held accountable on what’s the system creating and developing and growing toward, is the way that that interaction of accountability needs to take place. I was an administrator through No Child Left Behind, and there are different ways in which this could be helpful, and there are ways that this could be harmful if we keep this accountability level at the level of a system working towards goals, I think we could actually really make a good impact.

Miller: Christine, we’ve talked about 3rd grade reading, 8th grade math tests. Is there some other data point that you’ll be looking at in the coming years to say, yes, Oregon is doing better or Oregon is doing worse?

Pitts: I could list so many. Chronic absenteeism, of course, dropout rates, graduation, but I actually would really love to see Oregon Department of Education kind of turn the mirrors in on themselves as an agency and start to set some strategic priorities for their own accountability internally. I think that’s not unusual. Most state education agencies have some kind of strategic plan, and I do think that this is in the works. It’s been presented at the state board meeting, but that’s something that I will absolutely be looking to.

Miller: Christine and Steve, thanks very much.

Pitts: Thank you.

Cook: Thanks, Dave.

Miller: Christine Pitts is the president and CEO of the Portland area nonprofit Open School. Steve Cook is superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools. He’s also the president-elect of the Oregon Association of School Executives.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every weekday and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.