Jim Green says one solution for Oregon’s worst-in-the-nation reading scores is a governor’s executive order away.
Green should know. For 25 years, he worked the halls of the Capitol, first as a lobbyist and then as executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, which represents 1,400 elected members across the state’s 197 school districts. A lawyer, Green also served two terms on the Salem-Keizer School Board.
Now retired, Green has regrets. In particular, he rues some of the victories his group (alongside the teachers union and the Council of School Administrators) achieved over the past two decades. Among them: undercutting state reading assessments by helping pass perhaps the nation’s strongest testing opt-out law and beating back efforts to require phonics-based reading instruction in elementary schools.
“We went too far in saying, ‘Don’t mandate anything,’” Green says.
Today, only 40.3% of Oregon third graders are proficient in reading, as measured by state tests. Green says his group’s success contributed to what he concedes is a statewide disgrace.
The governor could spark a turnaround, Green insists, if she did one thing: issue an executive order that every new Oregon elementary teacher must pass a standalone exam in the science of reading. Nearly 20 states require such a test for teachers, including Colorado, Louisiana, California, and Mississippi—and all of them have higher reading scores than Oregon.