Oregon policymakers vowed in 2023 to upgrade the way the state’s youngest learners are taught to read. Gov. Tina Kotek cited it as a top priority.
And the state was relying on Portland-based regional education laboratory Education Northwest to make sure those efforts hewed to the model and paid off for early readers. Education Northwest was in line to receive $4.6 million in federal funding over the next five years to do similar work throughout the Northwest and Alaska.
But the Trump administration this week canceled that research.
The grant funding the administration axed supported operations at Education Northwest, one of many congressionally authorized regional of centers that provide research and technical support to state and local education entities on topics like school improvement and building the teacher workforce.
The Northwest research group was working with the Oregon Department of Education to track the $90 million set aside by lawmakers in 2023 to shift early literacy teaching statewide. The state’s goal is to move to a “science of reading” based approach, which emphasizes phonics and phonemic awareness as key to helping young children learn to read and understand books.
Researchers were helping the state agency evaluate whether districts were using best practices as they implemented the literacy shift. Their research was also intended to help the state set a plan for collecting and analyzing information about how districts spent their early literacy funding, to inform how future rounds of funding could best be directed.
“The framework would have helped ensure that teachers were using proven methods to teach reading in every school district in the state,” said Jannelle Kubinec, the CEO of WestEd, the nonpartisan research agency that managed Ed Northwest’s regional lab programs. “Now Oregon teachers and students will not benefit from that work.”
The grant terminations were just the latest in a series of such actions from the U.S. Department of Education under President Donald Trump, who has empowered billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to take a bludgeon to various federal agencies via his Department of Government Efficiency.
Marc Siegel, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education, said his agency’s staff “depend on [Education Northwest’s] guidance and support for the most up-to-date research. We are working to analyze the impact and a path forward. ODE receives funding from several areas and is currently assessing the impact of changes at the federal level so that we can continue creating confident and competent readers and writers.”
— Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com