2025 Legislative Summit Spotlights Focus, Collaboration, and Accountability in Public Education

Focusing Oregon’s Direction 

As Oregon charts its way forward for children, FBO Executive Director Whitney Grubbs refreshed the Summit audience’s memory on one of the state’s most significant recent investments in public education: the 2019 Student Success Act. 

“The Student Success Act was really an effort to challenge school districts to deeply engage with their communities, to think about how we target supports for students, and to build some shared accountability for student success,” said Grubbs. Unfortunately, she continued, the legislation may have enjoyed “the shortest honeymoon period on record.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it took everything school districts had just to keep up with day-to-day student instruction. Five years later, the hurdles are still high. Educators and students still face the pandemic’s impact on academic learning and mental health, all while federal funding that helped schools weather the worst of the crisis has run out.

Despite severe headwinds, the Student Success Act’s implementation charged ahead. Recent research from FBO shows the new law is not only boosting academic and mental health support for K-12 students, but also strengthening collaboration and accountability in the K-12 system. Slowly but surely, the law is helping schools, districts, and the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) target investments more effectively and equitably to ensure every student receives a high-quality public education.

Citing research by education systems scholar Dr. Michael Fullan, Grubbs emphasized that the Student Success Act “has done a really nice job of moving us in the direction of several conditions” for lasting systems change. “The [law] asked districts to focus on the students who we are not serving well, asked them to look at data and use that to focus their efforts.”

Christy Perry, a retired superintendent of the Salem-Keizer and Dallas School Districts, agreed with the need to keep focus. She urged the state to minimize distractions, bemoaning Oregon’s tendency to get distracted by shiny new ideas and opportunities that risk further burdening already overwhelmed school districts. “All with good intentions,” she explained, “every person from the governor to our legislators wants what’s best for Oregon kids, but we get caught up in doing too many things. And then we’re spread so thin.” 

Offering a national perspective, President of the Education Commission of the States José Muñoz spoke in admiration of what Oregon has accomplished. “You’re doing some beautiful things out here,” he said, echoing calls to double down on what works. “Lean into what you’re doing well.”

Cultivating Collaboration

The theme of collaboration ran deep throughout the Summit’s programming. The day began with a deep dive into the practice of tribal consultation, a session led by ODE Assistant Superintendent April Campbell, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and Renée Roman Nose, ODE’s Native American Student Success Coordinator and a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.

Tribal consultation is a legal requirement in Oregon. Any time a state or school district decision could impact one or more of the nine federally recognized tribes in Oregon, the state must consult with the tribe(s) and collaborate government-to-government. Every tribe has different expectations of tribal consultation, but in no case does tribal consultation mean submitting a completed plan and requesting cursory approval. It means consulting with tribes early on, when a plan isn’t yet fully developed, and genuinely collaborating with them to reach a mutually agreed upon solution.

The collaborative approach embedded in tribal consultation leads to stronger outcomes for youth. As stewards of the land since time immemorial, and peoples with a culture centered on the collective good, tribes offer invaluable expertise.

“If I could, I would hold each one of your hands, because we are in this work together,” said Renée Roman Nose, who coordinates ODE’s Native American Student Success Plan. “For each and every one of you who are making a difference each and every day, you are changemakers. Our youth need you. They need your voice. They need your advocacy. They need your passion. And they need our energy. And we need to come together for the future of all our children.”

Securing Accountability

With K-12 system accountability a top priority for Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, the Summit dug deep into a topic that will surely be high on the 2025 legislative agenda. In a session titled “From Dollars to Outcomes: Building the Bridge from K-12 Funding to Student Success,” a cross-sector panel of state, education, and community leaders explored what accountability means and looks like in practice.

FBO’s Whitney Grubbs, who moderated the panel, offered a starting point. She described accountability as a “clear system of roles, responsibilities, and responses that ensure our public resources are equitably, effectively, and efficiently used to produce positive experiences and successful outcomes for all students.”

Aryn Frazier, Executive Director of the Center for Black Excellence, went further. “I think that the definition of accountability is actually really simple,” she said. “Accountability, put most simply, is how we put our commitment to justice for children into action. That means, what is the plan … when we do not meet the goals that we’ve got? What do we do when what we did does not work?”

Sen. Janeen Sollman, the new Co-Chair of the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Ways & Means Subcommittee on Education, noted that “accountability is not something that our superintendents are afraid of. They welcome it. They wrap their arms around it and say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

She also maintained the importance of context when holding school districts accountable to certain measures of success. For example, the Forest Grove School District struggles to meet third-grade reading standards, because they have so many students who are learning English as a second language. That same group of students in their senior year of high school surpasses literacy standards. “So looking at a snapshot for accountability is important, but how and where and when you look at that is going to be critical.”

Johnna Timmes, the Education Initiatives Director for Gov. Tina Kotek, later reinforced the opportunity and imperative to strengthen K-12 system accountability. “Accountability is not about more reporting or testing. It’s about stewardship, measurable outcomes, and transparency,” she said in the Summit’s closing call to action. “It’s about ensuring the dollars invested in education are used with a focus on what matters most: student success. It’s about those measurable outcomes that help us know programs and initiatives that we invest in are working, delivering the results our kids deserve. It’s also about making sure everyone from families to lawmakers has a clear view of how those decisions are made, how resources are allocated, and how progress is tracked.”

Whatever the mechanism, Frazier argued that truly achieving accountability in public education requires the state, school districts, and communities to all share at least two core beliefs.

“We have to believe that every child can learn,” said Frazier. “It is not a given that people believe that. For most of our nation’s history, people did not believe that. But … we also [have to] believe that it is important that every child learns—that we don’t think it’s okay that some kids didn’t learn to read, that some kids didn’t learn math, that we only need a few kids to have the opportunity to make the decision to go to college, and everyone else can fill into the other jobs, some of which we know won’t pay their rent in this increasingly expensive state. If we believe those two things, then we also have to believe that it’s not that there are kids who are failing. We have to believe that there are kids who are failed by all of us.”

Oregonians Are Ready for Solutions

After exploring the key themes of focus, collaboration, and accountability, Summit participants put these ideas into practice in breakout sessions. The sessions, facilitated by state legislators, education advocates, and community leaders, dove into three key strategies that promise to accelerate progress for Oregon children: expanding summer and after-school programs, strengthening early literacy and early learning, and amplifying the power of Oregon’s student success plans to close academic disparities.

In each breakout session, participants shared visions, elevated questions, parsed details, and constructively engaged tensions, reflecting what José Muñoz celebrated earlier as critical to collaboration and progress: “unity without uniformity.”

Indeed, Summit participants were united in a real-time interactive poll about the core values and priorities that should guide Oregon’s public education system. Public opinion research shows Oregonians resoundingly agree with promising strategies to provide a high-quality and inclusive public education to all students, although they remain divided when asked whether they see public schools taking steps to improve. 

“How can we leverage that agreement across Oregonians?” asked Peter Koehler, a trustee at the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, when considering how the next legislative session can deliver the tangible change that most Oregonians want to see, and that all Oregon children deserve. “How can we turbo-charge the collective will?”

Koehler reminded the audience that in 2019, some businesses stepped up and supported the Student Success Act, even as it raised corporate taxes, because investing in children and public education brings broad social and economic benefits for all Oregonians. State leaders, agencies, school districts, community-based organizations, philanthropy, and business must work hand in hand once again at this pivotal moment for children in the wake of the pandemic.

With a strong mandate from Oregonians—and a strong framework for public education improvement in the Student Success Act, Early Literacy Success Initiative, and other promising efforts—Oregon should be poised for a courageous 2025 legislative session that will accelerate progress for children. 

“Oregonians are ready for solutions,” said Dr. Charlene Williams, Director of the Oregon Department of Education, in rousing remarks to the Summit audience. But she also reminded the room that a framework alone won’t drive transformative change

“Some of us come from a culture that says, ‘we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ We are done with the perpetual disparity that has persisted for decades in this state,” Dr. Williams asserted to wide applause. “It’s time to build on [Oregon’s framework] with urgency, with clarity, and with an unshakeable commitment to results for our students.”

Foundations for a Better Oregon’s 2025 Legislative Summit was made possible with generous support from the Oregon State Capitol Foundation.