Oregon’s school funding formula hurts kids in poverty the most, according to Oregonian reporting

Oregon school districts rely on the state for funds they need to educate students in their schools, but some educators and advocates say the formula they use to allocate those funds is outdated and inequitable. In-depth reporting by The Oregonian/OregonLive describes the way that students in poverty are undercounted, their schools underfunded and details how the resulting cuts are affecting some of the most vulnerable children in the state.

Education reporter Julia Silverman spent time with a student, a teacher, a principal and an attendance specialist in the Reynold’s school district in east Multnomah county. The district serves the highest percentage of low-income students in the Portland area. Silverman joins us to share more about her reporting and the possibility of state lawmakers reforming or overhauling the funding formula.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI 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. Oregon’s K-12 school funding system is outdated and inequitable – that’s according to some educators and advocates. They say that while the state tries to direct more resources to high poverty districts, it relies on calculations that undercount the number of kids and families that are struggling to get by. As a result, they say, the state is underfunding districts with many of Oregon’s most vulnerable children.

This is a story that The Oregonian Education Reporter Julia Silverman told in a recent five-part series. She focused on the Reynolds School District in East Multnomah County, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.

Julia Silverman: It’s awesome to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Dave.

Miller: Why’d you set out to do this series?

Silverman: The genesis of this series really started about 14 months ago when I got, what many reporters dream of, a leak from an internal government source. Somebody who worked for the legislature’s Office of Policy Analysis reached out to us and was like, “Hey, I have been trying and trying to get people to pay attention to the fact that the metric that Oregon uses to calculate how many students from families experiencing poverty is wildly outdated and extremely imprecise, and no one’s listening to me. All of this information is publicly available. I’ll point you to it.”

So I wrote a story about it. It came pretty late in the session, so it really wasn’t enough to make a difference. But the reason that the story stuck with me is that the guy who spoke with me lost his job two days later. That had never happened to me before in 25 years as a reporter, and it made me think, well, we need to stick with this. And he’s since gone public. He’s filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the state. His name’s Jesse Helligso. And that started on a sort of odyssey of reporting to try to understand a little bit more about how Oregon calculates poverty.

Miller: We’re going to talk about that and how it’s different, what Oregon does, from every other state and the repercussions of that. But as the prism to tell this story, you chose a particular school district, the Reynolds School District?

Silverman: That’s right.

Miller: Why?

Silverman: I picked Reynolds because, in part, it goes back to why I decided to or why I wanted to work at The Oregonian in the first place. I started at The Oregonian in 2022. And it was in that period, postpandemic, when things were just such a mess. Anybody who has kids, who’s listening, is going to know what I’m talking about. And it was right after state testing results had been released. I was looking at them. There was a school in the Reynolds District, one of the elementary schools, where 0% of the third graders were listed as being at or above proficiency levels, grade levels, in math. And I was like, what are we doing here? How are we allowing this to happen? So, in a funny way, it’s because of Reynolds that I took this job.

The other reason that I chose Reynolds was that last fall, they had a mid-year budget gap, which is very unusual, though of course it did happen in Portland Public Schools this year. But their original plan was to cut 10 days off the school year this year, in order to save $5.5 million. Ten days is two weeks’ time. That is a lot of time to lose in school. We know instructional time is important. And I couldn’t believe the inequity of that, for some of the state’s highest-need kids to lose an additional two weeks … plus it’s hard on their parents, who are working and who will then have to cover childcare, especially for younger kids.

So I did a lot of reporting about the mid-year gap at Reynolds. They eventually took six days off the calendar – still not great [but] better than 10. And the relationships that I built, in telling that story, led me to choose them for this.

Miller: Those cuts, in terms of dollar amounts, pale in comparison to what they’ve had to do for the coming year: $20 million for the upcoming school year. What kinds of positions had to be cut or were cut?

Silverman: As the series shows you, they lost a lot of … They tried very hard, as many districts do, to protect classroom teachers. So that means that they wound up cutting a lot of the people who are behavior supports for kids: the people who are there to make sure that kids are actually going to school and not vaping in the bathroom; [the people who help] if a kid is having a meltdown so that everybody else can continue learning; and some specialists who will work one-on-one with kids who are struggling.

They had to make cuts in all kinds of places because that’s what you do when you’re faced with a situation like that. There’s no wrestling or volleyball at the middle school anymore – I think I got that right, apologies to Reynolds if it’s a different team. Those are the kinds of things that keep some kids coming to school every day.

Miller: I want to hear more details about what you learned specifically at Reynolds. But let’s take a step back. So you found that Oregon is an outlier, nationally, in the way it calculates levels of student poverty across districts. In what way?

Silverman: That’s right. Oregon’s the only state in the country that relies solely on the U.S. Census in order to produce this part of the funding formula. And I want to make it clear, the poverty metric is just a portion of the state’s overall funding formula, and we’ll talk a little bit about that later on. But we’re the only state that is solely reliant on what’s called the Small Area Income Poverty Estimates, or SAIPE. Some other states do use that data, but every other state uses it in blends or in combination with other data to get a better estimate of how many children are actually from families experiencing poverty.

What really gets to me is that Oregon already uses and has a better metric, and they use that to calculate academic outcomes. So, if you go to the Oregon Online Report Card, which is put out by the Oregon Department of Education, and you look up Reynolds, it will tell you that 51% of students at that district are from families experiencing poverty. And that is for purposes of reporting how well they do on tests, what their absenteeism levels like. Then, if you go and look at what percentage of the student body is from families experiencing poverty for financial purposes, it’s 16%.

Miller: And the reason that this is important is that those percentages directly correlate to how much extra money the state gives districts? So the higher the number of families in poverty or kids in families living in poverty that a district has, the more extra money a state will give to the district.

Silverman: Correct.

Miller: How much money are we talking about in Reynolds’ case? So if, for example, the state overnight said, instead of this old U.S. Census-based analysis or calculation, we will use the one that we’re already using for academic achievement, from 16% to 51% or so, how much more money would Reynolds get?

Silverman: About $10 million which would, by the way, have been more than enough to keep the days that they had to cut from the school year, and then some.

Miller: What were you able to learn about why it is that Oregon has stuck with this system that, now, no other state has? It can’t be a technical question. It can’t be, “we don’t know how to calculate this any other way,” because as you said, they are currently using a different, in a sense, lower bar, a more generous or maybe more honest way to capture poverty. So they already have access to that. It’s not a question of a lack of knowledge. So how do you explain it?

Silverman: It’s a question of politics. And changing this is going to take political will and political courage. You have a fixed amount of money available for public schools. From the state general fund, that number is about $11.4 billion in the current biennium. If you add in federal funding, it goes up to about maybe $17 billion. So, if you change how much of that pot which districts that serve greater concentrations of high needs students are gonna get, then that money’s got to come from somewhere. And the “losers” – I put that in quotes – are probably going to be districts like Portland, which is actually a pretty low poverty district; Beaverton, another low poverty district; Bend-La Pine, another low poverty district; Lake Oswego; and on and on.

Miller: It’s a relatively limited list. But it’s big districts and politically powerful.

Silverman: It’s a relatively limited list, but it’s big districts. That’s exactly right.

Miller: You had a graph and even in those districts that you mentioned, they too, it seems, would theoretically benefit from this change. Because let’s say if it’s Lake Oswego, I forget the exact numbers, but maybe 3% now to 6%. But it’s a bigger difference for schools like Reynolds. In the end, if the state made this change without adding more money – that’s the key – then Reynolds and other higher poverty districts would get more money, and PPS, Lake Oswego, Bend-La Pine would get less?

Silverman: Comparatively less, that’s correct. So what would happen is the per-pupil base amount of funding, which is the level of funding that’s given for a kid with no special needs whatsoever … I often use my son for this example. Sorry, Ben. He’s just a garden variety kid. He’s not in special ed or anything. He is worth to Portland Public Schools, which is where he goes, about $11,200 a year. And that’s factoring in also teacher experiences, because the teacher experience levels are a part of the formula. If they were to make no other changes, but just to reallocate money to some of the high needs districts, he would be worth about $10,800 to Portland Public Schools.

Miller: I want to come back to the politics, but let’s dig a little bit more into what you learned from your reporting at Reynolds. You spent a while at Glenfair Elementary School. What did you take away from visiting the third grade classroom of Anne Harris?

Silverman: Anne Harris is one of those magic teachers. Every school has one. You want your kid to get assigned to them.

Miller: Ideally, a school has more than one.

Silverman: Yes, but she was a really wonderful educator, and I felt really lucky to spend an entire day in her room because that doesn’t happen very often these days. One of my biggest takeaways was this. I hear a lot from parents in Beaverton, Portland and Hillsboro who are incredibly upset because there’s maybe one, two, three, maybe four high-needs kids in their child’s classroom that they feel is really causing disciplinary problems or making it more difficult for other kids to learn. That’s true. I’m not negating that.

But Anne Harris, in that room, has maybe 20 high-needs kids of 24. The kids in her room had such backstories. Some of them were only in third grade. This is maybe the sixth or seventh elementary school they’ve attended. Some of them have woken up and been woken up by the police at their front door in the middle of the night. One of them, while I was there, was out because his mother had just died while he was in the house. Some of them have lived previously in refugee camps in Myanmar or all over the world, and have just arrived in the United States and are learning to speak English. It is just different. If you are listening and you have a kid who goes to a more garden variety elementary school, I am here to tell you, I get it. There’s a tough kid, or three or four, in your child’s class. But it is not the same. It is not the same.

The other thing that I really noted is that, in my children’s elementary school, there were parent volunteers everywhere, all the time. And that is simply going to be less of the case in a school like Glenfair, not because the parents don’t love their kids or because they don’t care, but because it is a financial privilege and luxury to be able to volunteer in your kids’ classroom. So for the vast majority of the day, it was Anne and her kids on their own.

Miller: You also spent time with a high schooler. What did you learn from her, a high school graduate now?

Silverman: Yes, congratulations to Giselle and the whole Class of 2026. Giselle’s story is meant to be the more hopeful part of this series, in the sense that it is certainly possible to break through if you attend Reynolds or any other high poverty district in the state. I was really struck by how many of her friends, and Giselle as well, were working either full-time or nearly full-time jobs while they were in high school.

Miller: I should say one of the things that struck me, along those lines, is not just having jobs but working a full overnight shift at an Amazon distribution center and then going to school. So not sleeping at all overnight, working and then going to school.

Silverman: Or Dave, honestly, not going to school. Chronic absenteeism is a huge issue at Reynolds, and as one of the stories in the series tried to to pinpoint, there’s lots of reasons for that. But one of the reasons absolutely is that students have been working long hours, late hours. And it’s pretty tough to get yourself to first period or maybe sometimes even second period if you’ve just finished an overnight shift.

Miller: All right, so let’s go back to the politics here. In a sense you were making the [equity] argument to richer Portland area parents, saying you may think that you wish your kids at PPS, Beaverton or wherever had more instructional time because statewide it’s abysmal, our numbers compared to the national average, but there are students and families in districts that have it worse. That’s, in a sense, the equity argument, or am I oversimplifying it?

Silverman: It’s sort of the argument. The fifth story in the series – it’s long and wonky, and I get it if people maybe couldn’t wade all the way through – it pulls back and says the poverty metric is maybe the biggest flaw in the current formula that Oregon uses to figure out how much money should go per pupil, but it’s far from the only flaw. I could have focused this entire series on special education and the extremely weird way that Oregon funds special needs kids.

Miller: The state puts a cap on how much a district is going to get, which is way below the number of special ed kids that most districts have?

Silverman: Right, and that’s also very weird. There are not many other states that have anything even remotely like that at this point. Oregon’s funding formula has not been revised since 1991. It is one of the oldest in the country. It is showing its age. And I think what I really learned during the course of this series is that I don’t see how the state can wait much longer to begin the hard, serious work of complete formula redesign, top to bottom.

Miller: But how far would formula redesign go without more money? This gets back to what we were talking about earlier. Just the one piece of the formula redesign would be saying, OK, for high poverty districts and calculating poverty, we could change that which could put “winners and losers” in different categories. But you can come up with the same version of that for any funding calculation change. So I’m just wondering how far you think this conversation goes, if we’re only talking about different allocations of the same pot of money, as opposed to more money?

Silverman: One of the most interesting interviews I had, throughout the course of this research, was with the Speaker of the House of Colorado, a Democrat. Colorado recently redid their funding formula and it was a long process there. It took them maybe five or six years, from start to finish. And she said to me, “Look, we told folks, park the issue of adequacy.” That’s the how much money question. “We need to focus on equity.” The formula itself needs to be more equitable, and the formula is fixed. That’s not what changes. You can fight every year about how much money the formula is going to have, how much money you’re plugging into the formula. But the formula itself is fixed, and it needs updating and revision. That’s where I landed on this, and I do want to say that I feel like there’s some momentum in Oregon right now.

Miller: What makes you say that? What did you hear that makes you say that?

Silverman: I heard from folks in the legislature, from the governor’s office. Actually, I just talked to someone in the governor’s office about this this morning, and she said essentially the same thing: This is complicated [and] it is going to take a long time, but this is in the conversation now in a way that it wasn’t before.

I do want to say, I think some folks read this series and thought, great, money alone will solve this problem. I don’t think that’s the takeaway. Reforming the funding formula or reconsidering the funding formula will solve this problem. More money might be part of it. But there is a parallel conversation that I hear a lot about in Oregon, about not just how much money we’re putting in. It’s about how we spend it.

Miller: And it’s worth saying that we’re around average, even a little bit above average per capita in terms of per-pupil spending in the state.

Silverman: Correct. And our academic outcomes? Not.

Miller: Julia, thanks very much.

Silverman: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Julia Silverman is an education reporter for The Oregonian. You can find a link to her series about the state’s current K-12 funding system on our website.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day 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.