Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century The Oregon Statewide Assessment System satisfies requirements in Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. Introduced in 1991 as House Bill 3565 and amended in 1995 as House Bill 2991, the Act mandates a world-class educational system for Oregon. In order to bring this system about, the Oregon State Board of Education was to describe the skills and knowledge to be mastered by students in a set of explicit Content Standards. In addition, the State Board was to prescribe the performance standards that a student must meet in order to obtain a Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM). The CIM is awarded at around grade 10 to students who have met performance standards. At grades 3, 5, and 8 the State Board set performance standards for benchmarks leading to the CIM. Assessments in the OSAS are directly related to content standards either through the content of test questions or through scoring guides based on standards. Scores or ratings on the assessments express the degree to which students have mastered content standards. The link between assessments and standards is fundamental to the design of Oregon’s assessment. Procedures for writing test items, rating student performances, and adopting standards ensure a wide degree of public input and participation from educators across the state. The Act was influenced by a model set forth by the National Center for Education and the Economy ( http://www.ncee.org/ ) in their publication “America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages. The overriding concept governing the plan was that all students can and should be educated to a high standard. Among the features promoted by NCEE were the creation of content and performance standards at benchmark grades, the use of assessments to verify the performance of students and schools, certificates of initial and advanced mastery, and the use of multiple measures in assessment. The implementation of these ideas caused a shift in the role of state regulatory agencies. Previously states had created curricula for schools to follow and monitored delivery of the curricula through appropriate teacher preparation, classroom methods, and textbook choice. Under standards based reform, states began to focus on what students had learned rather than what or how they had been taught. Assessment and evaluation are central to this model. If assessment results are to be meaningful, they must meet technical standards for accuracy and consistency. The documents in this collection demonstrate this technical adequacy.

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http://www.oocities.org/micelf/essays/edessay4.htm

• • Per Ardua Ad Astra: Education in Oregon

• • THE NEED

• • In 1991, the Oregon legislature mandated a radical transformation of Oregon's public education system. Not merely a set of reform proposals put forward by the state's Dept. of Education, the kind that come and go without much effect in states all over the country, HB 3565, known as The Oregon Education Act for the 21st Century, had the power of law. Not merely a codification of reforms to the existing system, it was intended as an essential transformation of the purpose and process of schooling in Oregon.

• • This law shocked Oregonians. After all, Oregon has a good K-12 school system, producing students who rank eighth nationally in SAT scores. And Oregon's performance is actually better than those figures suggest because some states limit the students who can take the SAT test to the top ten percent of their high school students. In Oregon about forty percent of all high school students take the SAT, and the state still ranks eighth nationally.

• • So why did the legislature feel the need for a major transformation of an already successful school system? The changing economy. No longer is it possible to secure a good paying job right out of high school in logging, mill work, or other high paying blue-collar industries. Declining wood supplies, tough environmental laws (ever hear of the spotted owl?), and a changing national economy altered the realities faced by high school graduates in the last twenty years. Today's economy has created higher expectations of Oregon's workers, who now need better language, math and computer skills than was demanded by employers twenty years ago. The Oregon legislature felt the need to "provide students with lifelong academic skills that will prepare them for the ever-changing world." (Oregon Revised Statue 329.015)

• • The legislature also reacted to the social pressures of rising poverty rates (1) and the growing shortage of highly skilled workers. Even though Oregon's attractive location, livability and well educated work force have allowed it to prosper, especially in the last decade, Governor John Kitzhaber reported that although Oregon has experienced a surge within the high-tech industry, a disproportionate number of high-wage, research and development jobs in the high-tech fields are going to out-of-state workers because Oregon's work force needs more and better training.(2) These thoughts are also reported by the School Transformation Advisory Council, a consortium of business and education leaders, in a publication titled "Framework of Implementing School Transformation in Oregon":

• • • "In just the past two years, Oregon's successful economy has created thousands of openings in well paying, skilled positions for which there is a shortage of qualified Oregonians. As a result, employers have begun importing the workers they need. The new talent is Oregon's gain, but when Oregonians are left behind because of skill deficiencies, everyone loses."(3)

• • So the Oregon Legislature came to realize that the system no longer matches the need. The world has changed dramatically the last two decades, creating critical new demands that Oregon's school system needs to do a better job of addressing. They came to realize that good is no longer good enough. Thus was created The Oregon Education Act for the 21st Century.

• • THE STANDARDS

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