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Oregon’s Education Funding Slips Nearly 7.5%

College & Career Readiness, Current Events & News | 12/11/2015

Scott McDonald
Regional Digital Strategist

Scott manages digital communications strategy and implementation for Stand Oregon and Illinois.

State funding for education is not the silver bullet to improve results for our children. But it’s not nothing, either. Not only does it show a state’s commitment to its students, but it provides the resources necessary to make quality strides for all children.

In this regard, Oregon – like high school graduation rates – lags behind many other states. Total state education funding in Oregon was 7.4% lower in 2014 than it was in 2008, before the recession truly took hold.

Not only that, but Oregon’s education funding looks even worse when state and local school funding are combined. Taken together, school funding has slipped 5% between 2008 and 2014.

Cutting funding for our schools, especially at a time when our state has moved to higher standards for our students, is no way to improve quality. Our schools must have the resources they need to provide ALL Oregon children with the high quality education they deserve.

Read the full report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities here.

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  • Rigor and course relevancy are critical ingredients of the soup needed to nourish our youth’s choices regarding their personal, economic, and overall cultural stability, no doubt. While it is important to shine the light on low graduation rates and the urgency for improving school circumstances, let’s remember some very powerful tools already on line in Oregon: The state's Office of Student Access and Completion (OSAC) has long maintained the nation’s foremost system for sensitively linking Oregon scholarship donors to individual students. More recently, at the turn of this century, OSAC launched the ASPIRE mentoring program, which directly works in more than a hundred Oregon schools to connect local volunteers with individual students to support them as they struggle with critical life planning choices. At the same time, a sister organization—the Oregon Career Information System (CIS)—has a software interface (CISconnections) that enables local businesses and schools to mix and mingle skills and resources to provide some extraordinary collaborative school-work interfaces for students and teachers. These three very important opportunities could use some funding prioritizing along with our fretting about graduation rates. If our kids had better visions of where they might take their lives I trust they just might correct their own graduation rates! Alan Baas/Cottage Grove
    Alan Baas

    December 16, 2015 10:24 AM