Portland-based child advocacy group says state must address chronic absenteeism

Education research shows a strong connection between spending time in school and academic achievement.

Oregon has the third highest rate of chronic absenteeism in the nation, and it has fewer days of instruction than most other states. Student achievement in reading and math have dropped dramatically in the last decade.

We talk with Sarah Pope, the executive director of Stand for Children, which commissioned a new report that points to paths for improvement.

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

Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon students spend a lot less time in school than the national average. In fact, they receive fewer instructional hours than students in all but four other states. What’s more, Oregon has one of the highest chronic absentee rates in the country, meaning Oregon kids are more likely than their national peers to miss class when it is in session. All of this is from a new report by the firm ECOnorthwest. It was commissioned by the advocacy group Stand for Children. Sarah Pope is the executive director of Stanford Children. She joins us now to talk about where Oregon K-12 education is right now and how it could improve. It’s great to have you on the show.

Sarah Pope: Oh, thank you so much, Dave.

Miller: Why did your organization commission a report focused on instructional time and absenteeism?

Pope: Yeah, a really important question. We have been focused on early literacy for the last couple of years, and it’s been really head scratching to us. Why do we keep appearing in the bottom as it relates to the rest of the country on our early literacy outcomes, specifically that important outcome by 3rd grade?

Miller: And there’s been a lot of talk about how literacy is taught. That’s what we’ve on this show and legislature in Salem, there’s been a lot of talk about that.

Pope: Right. So Stand championed a piece of legislation in 2023 to get at teaching kids more aligned to the research in a way that’s much more aligned to what we now know about how children’s brains work when it comes to learning how to read. We’ve had about one full year of implementing that legislation. It’s in classrooms now. Last year was the first full year, and kids are starting to rebound. We saw a slight uptick in our state’s early literacy outcomes when the data came out this fall. But we still appear in the bottom. So when we work with schools in implementing the early literacy work, we’re getting a lot of questions like, how are we supposed to implement this curriculum because there’s not enough days in the school year? Or how are we supposed to implement this model schedule because our day is so short?

Miller: Who are you hearing that from?

Pope: These were school leaders that we’re working with around the state.

Miller: So, administrators, not teachers, or are you hearing that from teachers as well?

Pope: Administrator, teachers, coaches. Feeling challenged by the compressed schedule. So we started wondering what is the impact of Oregon’s school year length and then coupled with our high rates of chronic absenteeism on our ability to rebound and sort of accelerate out of the bottom. So that’s where the study came from. We worked with ECOnorthwest to analyze if we, well, we can go on and on. I’ll stop there, but that’s where it came from.

Miller: Well, so let’s go on. Can you give us a sense for the disparities between Oregon at the low end of total instructional time and states at the upper end.

Pope: Yeah. One of the things I think the study does in a really important way is that we got an accurate snapshot of how much instructional time are kids getting in Oregon. And when you look at how much time kids are getting in Oregon, on average, these are averages, compared to on average, how much kids get around the country, kids in Oregon are over a year less on their total academic career. So when you start in kinder and end by 12th grade, kids in Oregon will get one less year, a little bit more than that, than kids around the rest of the country, which is really significant. It’s like ending school, you know, as an 11th grader and not getting your 12th grade year, for instance.

Miller: It’s a shocking difference. In fact, it’s 1.4 years, right?

Pope: When we start to look at the disparities within Oregon, so now this is comparing elementary schools within our state, it’s even bigger than the national average. So we saw sort of shockingly – we weren’t expecting to see this, we sort of knew Oregon was short relative to the national average – but when we looked at the school calendars around the state, so this is all within Oregon, we saw kids by elementary school, one elementary school student might get 1.4 years less than another elementary school student in the same state. And by the time they finished high school, that disparity could actually equate to three full years. So this is nothing about the national average. These then are just the disparities within our own state.

Miller: To me, that was one of the more helpful pieces of the study to not just lump all of Oregon together, but to look within Oregon, the nearly 200 districts. When you look at mandated instructional time district by district, for example, you can find that in the high school range it was from 925 hours to 1300 hours, a gigantic difference. Why is that range so huge?

Pope: In Oregon, we have a really low minimum, and when a state sets a really low minimum, you most likely are going to see a lot of variability, and that’s no exception here. Our state has been pretty silent about what their expectations are when it comes to delivering instructional time, and then has let a lot of it be up to the choice of individual districts. So, kind of at every turn, I mean, there’s some policies even under the minimum, they’re slightly more detailed but still important, that also contribute to this variation. It’s like somebody sat at the Department of Ed one year. It was like, how do we give as much flexibility as possible to individual districts? And then they wrote this policy to do just that.

Miller: And some districts –

Pope: Are taking advantage of that.

Miller: Say fine, if we don’t have to give that much instruction, we won’t.

Pope: Right. Now many are doing more than the minimum, but we do have districts in Oregon that are doing the minimum, and our minimum requirement in elementary school is 900 hours, which means you could reach that with about 137 school days. 137. You have kids, don’t you?

Miller: I do. And you know, we’ll get to your solutions. No, I have to take a lot of deep breaths in this conversation. On a basic level, I don’t feel like we need research to tell us that if kids spend more time in classrooms they’re likely to learn more, but I guess it’s helpful to actually put some meat on the bones even if it seems obvious. So what does that research say about the connection between instructional time, instructional hours, and outcomes?

Pope: It is sort of like this part is a little bit no duh, right? I mean, if kids are in school more often and they attend more regularly, Oregon would have significantly higher outcomes. I think the interesting thing is sort of how significant the shift would be. So we’re in the bottom nationally in literacy and math, and I just have to say, the reason we did this study is that it was head scratching to us. Why are we in the bottom so often in so many of these academic indicators? What is the cause of it?

And when you look at how much we would move if we aligned our school year length to the national average and cut our absenteeism back to where it was before the pandemic, which was still high, but back to where it was before the pandemic, we would go from bottom of the country in literacy to top. And in math, we would go from bottom to mid. That’s a lot of movement with something as simple and sort of foundational as how often is a kid in school?

Miller: Are we talking more, do you think, about the number of days that there is school or the number of minutes in a given day that the kids are in school?

Pope: Oregon is low in both, so our school day is shorter than on average the school day around the country, and our year is shorter on average than the year around the country.

Miller: Let’s turn to the why here, and we’ll get to chronic absenteeism in just a bit, but earlier you were talking about the low minimum we have. Is that the only answer as to why it is that we have so few, relative to most of the rest of the country, so few instructional hours?

Pope: That’s a big contributor. If our minimum was more like 180 days with an hour requirement, we wouldn’t see this massive fluctuation from school to school.

Miller: Something that other states have?

Pope: Right. And so most states, we’re sort of unique, right? Remember I said it’s like somebody concocted the most flexible way to do this. Well, ours is unique in that we only have a set number of hours. Most places have a set number of hours and a set number of days. So they say, OK, we’re going to give you some flexibility on how you might schedule your day and how you schedule your year, but you have to hit a certain number of days and a certain number of hours. Well in Oregon, we’re silent on the number of days. So schools have to reach a certain number of hours. And that’s where we start to see this fluctuation from some offering 137 days to kids and some offering, you know, closer to 170 days, which even at 170, we’re below what the rest of the country’s usually doing. But, think about the 137. I mean, we’re not just three weeks short at that point. We’re months short.

Miller: When you’ve been talking about this, are you getting – and with the explicit message that we need to add more instructional hours and more instructional days – are you getting pushback from any quarters?

Pope: Well, we just released the study yesterday, and I’d say general support, like you said, it’s a bit no duh, right? Well, yeah, that makes sense. If kids were in school more, we’d probably do better.

Miller: That I said was no duh. But I’m not sure it’s no duh that everybody’s on board for or adding more time. In particular, I’m wondering about teachers’ unions.

Pope: Well, the immediate next question is what was this going to cost? What we did in this first study is a part one. What we’ll do in a part two after we convene stakeholders is cost out different scenarios. At this point, I think what’s before the legislature and before school districts, I mean, they’re going to be setting their budgets now for next year, is we need to hold the line. We know we already have a short number of days and if we’re heading into what appears to be an economic downturn, we absolutely can’t further reduce our already short school year with our budget cuts that are coming. And historically, for those who’ve been in Oregon for a while, historically that’s what we’ve done.

Oregon was lampooned nationally in the early 2000s, 2003, for slashing school, like 24 more school days. Kids were out in May and we were sort of made fun of around the country for this. So we just don’t want history to repeat itself at this point. I don’t know if we yet have broad agreement to hold the line on the days. That’s the first piece we’re asking people to consider.

Miller: This is an important point. You’re saying before you can even get to what it would take to add days, the first thing is let’s not have even fewer days. That’s where we are right now.

Pope: Let’s not go back to 2003, yeah.

Miller: So just to stick with this, OK. The immediate question going into a very tough budget year with, with tough ones to come, is don’t lose more days. But what is your sort of more medium term vision for how to actually add days.

Pope: I think the easiest way, actually probably the most cost effective way to add days, would be to get more kids who are chronically absent back in school. We have over a third of our kids missing 10% or more of school every year. That’s the third highest in the country. And so these two are really compounded.

Miller: Let me make sure I understand that though, because the numbers we were talking about before, do those actually take into account absenteeism, or those are the ideal, right? So when you say the best way to add instructional days is to deal with absenteeism, that doesn’t help if someone’s already going to school.

Pope: That’s correct.

Miller: OK, so they’re related but separate issues.

Pope: That’s correct.

Miller: But you’re saying for the people who are suffering the most, who are for a variety of reasons not going to school, those are the kids who are doing the worst right now.

Pope: We need to get them back in school, but it also has an impact on all kids in the classroom. The research is clear that teachers are hesitant to move on to the next subject area, move on to the next unit, move on to the next chapter when a lot of kids are gone. And in Oregon, that could be a third of the classroom could be gone, right? So it does have an impact on the whole class. We have a piece of legislation we’re working with some legislators on in the short session to start to lay the foundation to better attend to Oregon’s high rates of chronic absenteeism. That’s like step number one right along with we’ve got to preserve the really short school year that we have.

Miller: This is House Bill 4154. What are the pieces of this bill that you’re supporting?

Pope: It’s a really simple piece of legislation. It should sail through, but we can’t take anything for granted in these fast, short sessions. It will more accurately count the data around chronic absenteeism. So we’re switching gears now to the attendance issue. It more accurately counts the data and we can talk about sort of how it does that. And it also will report the data out four times throughout the year. Right now in Oregon, the data set around chronic absenteeism doesn’t come out until the school year has completed and so it’s the next school year we get the data. Well, it’s really not actionable if you get it after the school year has already ended.

Miller: But don’t districts already know right now who’s not going to school? I mean, can’t they already be acting on that right now? I’m wondering what practical difference this will make for a district or somebody who’s essentially acting as a truancy officer or trying to do that work to bring Johnny back.

Pope: Yeah, we don’t have truancy officers anymore.

Miller: Exactly, right. But there are people, and we’ve talked to them over the years, who are trying to reach out to families and say, what’s going on? Why aren’t you coming? What can we do to bring you back? That work still is happening, right?

Pope: Yeah, some schools are doing outreach and they’re using – some schools, this isn’t happening across the state – but some schools are using early warning systems. So before, let’s say you become chronically absent, they’re doing a proactive reach out in a really positive way, like, oh, we’ve missed Dave. What can we do to get Dave back in school? What help does Dave need to come to school more regularly? It’s going to impact Dave’s ability to become a strong reader. So some schools are doing that, but we’re not seeing that at scale around the state. So understanding the data is step one. And when you say what change does it make? I mean, it’s the old adage, right? Like we do what we measure.

So individual schools have the data, but the public doesn’t have access to it. So if it’s released to the public more often, like this is of a crisis situation. I mean, if you were, well, the employer at OPB and a third of your workforce wasn’t coming regularly, it’d be like an all hands on deck situation, right? Like what’s going on? And are states not acting with that kind of urgency, even though we’re seeing that level of a problem? So in other states that have done this, getting the data out more often tends to have sparked the fire to get some issues addressed around it.

Miller: When you say our state isn’t acting with urgency, it does make me wonder. You chose those words carefully, I think, but to what extent are we talking about the state and to what extent are we talking about nearly 200 school districts that have a ton of power?

Pope: Yeah, well, I did choose the state directly in that example because when we look at other states that have made bigger gains, so Rhode Island is a good example for this.

Miller: Bigger gains in reducing truancy?

Pope: Yeah, and getting more kids to attend regularly. And different states have made gains in different ways. Ohio, I think, is on the list for some of the biggest gains. Nevada is on the list for some of the biggest gains. Rhode Island has done some, a lot of campaign work, a lot of early warning data system work, kind of an all hands on deck situation around attendance. It started with state leaders.

What I think is just really unfair to school districts, we have a lot of them in this state relative to our size, is that we did, as a state, banned truancy officers to what you had just mentioned in 2021. So right when this attendance issue was really spiking during the pandemic, the legislature banned truancy officers, and we didn’t replace it statewide with anything. So we’ve left 197 districts up to their own to try to figure out what’s the best researched, informed, proactive, positive way to get kids to come to school. Well, that’s not fair, I don’t think, especially in districts of 1000 kids, which is on average the size of our districts in this state, like who are often also the bus drivers and the school principals and help out in the kitchen when somebody’s sick. We need much stronger state guidance and focus to see these problems attended to in Oregon, and I think that’s really what’s missing in our state compared to Rhode Island, for instance.

Miller: More broadly, how much urgency do you see at the state level for all kinds of changes that you think would improve K-12 education?

Pope: At the state level? So when you say state level, are you thinking the legislature?

Miller: I’m actually thinking more the executive. I’m thinking from the governor down.

Pope: Yeah. I think the governor, and I can’t speak for the governor obviously, and I won’t speak for the entire 90 members in the legislature, but I generally get the sense that there is a lot of concern over Oregon’s low academic outcomes relative to the rest of the country. I think it is becoming a more commonly held concern in the legislature all the way into the governor’s office. I think what we now need to do is decide what we’re going to tackle and then use the political courage to tackle it. I think the thing that gets in our way in this state often is this deeply entrenched sense that giving local control to individual districts is a better proposition for kids than having some statewide guidance. And I think that gets us in trouble in this state. I mean, I think we see it with the data, the amount of disparities. Now, I’m transitioning to the length of the school year. We wouldn’t see that if we had higher expectations and some more regulations around how low could your school year get. So we sort of have often, I think, deferred to individual local districts at the expense of kids.

Miller: Sarah Pope, thanks very much.

Pope: Thank you.

Miller: Sarah Pope is the executive director of Stand for Children.

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