LPC Responds to Chalkboard's Recommendations

OSBA President David Beeson and Legislative Policy Committee Chair Linda Brown sent a letter to the Chalkboard Project supporting its 13 recommendations for improving education in Oregon following the committee's May 2006 meeting.

Expressing overall support of and gratitude for the Chalkboard Project's work, the 35-member committee outlined OSBA's stance to each of Chalkboard's recommendations:

Recommendation: Provide each new teacher (and each new principal) with a mentor who will provide personalized support for three years.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports reviving Oregon's existing Beginning Teacher Support Program (ORS 329.790 et seq) and expanding it to include building principals if state funds, in addition to State School Fund resources, to adequately support the program are made available.

Recommendation: Enhance professional development of every teacher and administrator in Oregon.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports enhancing professional development for educators by strengthening the requirement that continued professional development (CPD) is a condition of license renewal, more directly linking CPD to the educators' subject area endorsement and school districts' student achievement goals, and prohibiting CPD plans from being a subject of collective bargaining.

Recommendation: Launch voluntary pilot programs in select schools to test new ways for evaluating and paying educators. The pilot programs should include giving financial rewards to schools when schools reach student achievement goals, and new individual pay structures that offer raises to teachers based Oil performance, not seniority.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports pilot programs that reward schools who reach student achievement benchmarks. OSBA also supports exploring new and different ways to evaluate the performance of and compensate professional educators on bases other than strictly seniority.

Recommendation: Reduce class sizes to 15 students in kindergarten and first grade. Research in state such as Tennessee has shown that class sizes of no more than 15 in these two critical grades have a major impact on student achievement.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports providing financial assistance to school districts to significantly reduce class sizes, especially in the early grades. However, local school officials must be granted the flexibility to determine if class size reduction to a predetermined level in specific classrooms is necessary or other actions are needed in specific instances to improve teaching and learning in the early grades. Additionally, any state financial assistance for class size reduction must recognize school districts' facilities requirements.

Recommendation: Provide a reading tutor to every student who is not reading at grade level in grades K-3.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports tutoring and other intervention practices that can improve K-3 reading skills if additional state funds are made available to support them.

Recommendation: Launch a statewide program to find and implement cost savings, such as by "pooling" (with other districts and/or statewide) supply purchases or reducing health care costs.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports state-level efforts that will Iead to reductions in school districts' non-classroom related support services costs. However, OSBA has and will continue to strongly oppose a statewide mandatory health insurance pool.

Recommendation: Give the State Board of Education the authority to conduct school performance audits.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports this concept so long as the scope of the audits is clearly defined, they are conducted in tandem with school districts' required annual financial audits, are performed by professionals who understand school district business practices, will not result in additional auditing costs for school districts, and are not intended to second-guess or criticize the policy decisions made by locally-elected school officials.

Recommendation: Provide fixed grants to districts for transportation costs, encouraging efficiency in district busing practices.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports pupil transportation cost reimbursement mechanisms that provide incentives for school districts to seek greater efficiencies in their student transportation systems.

Recommendation: Adopt Chalkboard's Open Books Project statewide. The Open Books Project is an online tool to make it easier for the public to understand and track K-12 school district spending.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports the Open Books Project and its application on a statewide basis.

Recommendation: Double the size of the state's school stability fund to equal 10 percent of the state's general fund, convert it to general "rainy day" fund for schools and other state services, and fill the fund by redirecting the personal and corporate income tax "kicker."

OSBA Response: OSBA supports increasing the maximum allowable size of the current Education Stability Fund, but opposes converting it into a general state rainy day fund. OSBA supports major reform of the state's existing "surplus-kicker" law by preserving kicker refunds in a new state reserve fund.

Recommendation: Establish a new guaranteed level of state school funding per student - a "floor" the state will never go below.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports this concept so long as there are protections built in to prevent the floor from becoming the ceiling and mechanisms in place to protect small school districts with declining student enrollment. (OSBA's Legislative Policy Committee is in the process of developing criteria that will be used to determine OSBA's support of the various K-12 funding stability and predictability proposals currently under discussion.)

Recommendation: Repeal the state laws that allow some communities, but not others, to raise varying amounts of money through local school levies. Replace them with a new law that allows every school district to ask for extra local money equal to 15 percent of what it receives from the state school fund.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports granting authority to school districts to seek from their voters supplemental operating revenue from a variety of additionaI sources. OSBA also supports modification of existing constitutional property tax limits to allow greater local financial autonomy.

Recommendation: If new revenues are necessary, they should not come from income tax increases since such variances are the primary cause of our current school funding instability, but from a mixture of different revenue sources.

OSBA Response: OSBA supports structural tax reform that will reduce the volatility of Oregon's current tax system and raises the revenue necessary to provide K- 12 school funding adequacy as defined by the Quality Education Model.