Overview
Strengths
- Oregon has laid out an ambitious long-term vision and has incorporated stakeholder feedback and input throughout its plan.
- The equity lens that is described appears to be thoughtful, detailed, and appropriate.
- Oregon also places emphasis on growth in its school rankings, and it is trying to emphasize early learning, for example in its exploration and development of social-emotional learning standards for kindergartners, as well as the focus on culturally relevant pedagogy.
- The state has articulated strategies for identifying and counting subgroups of students, although it is still unclear how they will actually be incorporated into the state’s rating system.
- The state identifies school districts as the agent of change throughout the plan and provides a clear theory of action for districts.
Weaknesses
- Despite articulating a deep commitment and priority for advancing equity, Oregon’s plan does not clearly identify the state role or strategy for advancing it through objective statewide expectations and criteria.
- While Oregon’s description of the indicators in its accountability system is clear, it is not apparent how the indicators, weights, and subgroup performance are combined to identify schools.
- In particular, the state doesn’t clearly define consistently underperforming subgroups, or how schools with low-performing groups will be identified annually for targeted support.
- Oregon’s plan also does not contain any indication of the kinds of interventions or evidence-based practices it imagines will support its low-performing schools. The implementation section references “leveraging state-sponsored and evidence-based system initiatives,” but the theory of action underlying state-supported intervention is not articulated.
- In addition, Oregon has not clearly identified concrete criteria for low-performing schools to exit improvement status.