The Oregonian – Helen Jung
As campaign promises often are, Gov. Kate Brown’s seven-point education strategy is long on aspiration and short on specifics.
Brown doesn’t say how she would fund the teacher hiring spree that would be required by her proposal to reduce class sizes in grades K-3 across the state. She doesn’t mention how much her promise to expand free preschool for 10,000 more kids in the next biennium would cost. And she doesn’t show how her disjointed proposals link together to create a compelling vision on par with the comprehensive plan – though similarly lacking price tags – unveiled in June by her opponent, Republican Knute Buehler.
While those deficiencies are significant, there’s a bigger omission that ensures her education white paper will remain just that – an exercise in the theoretical. Nowhere does Brown address one of education’s biggest threats: the increasingly massive chunk of school district dollars that go to employees’ pensions rather than to students’ education. And until state leaders enact reforms that restructure Oregon’s unsustainable public employees retirement system going forward, they are unlikely to find the revenue – or support for new taxes – to make the game-changing investments that Oregon students need.
The math is daunting and unavoidable. In the coming biennium, Oregon’s 197 school districts are projected to pay $1.3 billion to the Public Employees Retirement Fund – 18 percent of their payrolls – and $375 million more than the last biennium. And the worst is yet to come as required pension contributions are expected to surge for the next several years to feed Oregon’s $22 billion unfunded liability.
Editorial Agenda 2018
Press for a student-focused education system
Help defuse Oregon’s ticking time bombs
Focus attention on the root causes of homelessness
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Read more about the editorial board’s priorities for 2018.
Yet Brown maintains that changes to teachers’ retirement plans amount to “balancing the budget on the backs of our teachers,” her spokeswoman told The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board in an email. “Teachers work very hard every day to serve our children in incredibly demanding jobs and investing in our classrooms means investing in them,” spokeswoman Kate Kondayen wrote.
So instead, Brown chooses to balance the budget on the backs of students. Oregon’s public-school students receive less school time than their peers – as much as a year’s less instruction over the course of their K-12 careers than students in Washington state. Oregon students also have larger class sizes and a dropout problem that contributes to the state’s third-worst graduation rate in the country.
And even when voters in 2016 overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to dedicate $300 million to career and technical education and high-school dropout prevention strategies, Brown and state legislators helped plug the state’s budget by allocating only $170 million. Brown, as part of her education strategy, is now pledging to fully fund the measure for the coming biennium, because “the budget is in good enough shape,” Kondayen emailed. An odd statement considering economists are projecting a deficit of $1 billion for the 2019-2021 biennium and warn a recession may be on the way.
But Brown’s also wrong to think that putting off PERS changes will somehow protect teachers. Inaction hurts them too, by robbing districts of the resources to add teachers, counselors and support staff and, as the pension crisis tightens its grip on state spending, leading to greater layoffs. It’s already happening. Even with more revenue than ever before in Oregon’s red-hot economy in the 2017-2019 biennium, school districts have laid off teachers, cut programs or let vacant positions go unfilled to cover their increasing expenses.
This is a reality that Buehler tackles head on in the education platform that he released. He states up front his support for requiring employees to redirect contributions from individual accounts to the pension fund and other reforms that would free up dollars to help fund a long list of educational investments. He envisions adding General Fund dollars and, if necessary, seeking new revenue to increase the education budget 15 percent for the first two budget cycles in order to pay for smaller class sizes, a 180-day school year, college classes for high school students, grants for school reading aides and a wide range of teacher supports.
Certainly, these are also campaign promises that may or may not materialize if he were to be elected. But it highlights one more uncomfortable truth for Brown. After three and a half years as governor and the de facto superintendent of education, Brown can only offer Oregonians a list of what she’ll do for education as opposed to a strong resume of what she has done. It will be up to Oregonians to decide whether her campaign promises – absent proven educational wins – are enough to secure their vote for another term.
