What we did was straightforward – a “fact check” of the Oregon Department of Education’s (ODE) “Community-Informed Recommendations for Equitable Graduation Outcomes” report, delivered to the Oregon legislature on September 1st, 2022. This report was created in response to Senate Bill 744, which was signed into law in 2021. You may remember this bill as the one that extended Governor Kate Brown’s pause of the Essential Skills Proficiency tests that were required to graduate high-school.
As we reviewed ODE’s report and the roughly 100 research studies and other citations included within it, we continually found ODE misrepresenting evidence and making unsubstantiated claims. In other words, they lied. They lied to all of us.
Here are links to download our full, 27-page report as well as a short, 2-page summary. I recommend starting with the summary and then moving on to the full report when you’re ready for the deep-dive: