February 24, 1995

Oregon's School Reform: The CIM-CAM Flim Flam

Education Secretary Richard Riley may have been a new visitor to Oregon on February 20th, but it felt more like a trip back in time for many of us. It was, after all, just four years ago that then- Secretary Lamar Alexander travelled to Oregon with the same mission - to praise Oregon's reform plan, the Educational Act for the 21st Century, and tout the goals and standards of the America 2000 plan. Even in 1991 many Oregonians cautioned the bureaucrats to hold their applause until the Oregon plan showed measurable results. This time the Education Secretary had to pick his way through a minefield of angry parents and jousting legislators, upset over the lack of results from the four-year effort.

When he arrived in Oregon, Riley was greeted by the same faces in state government as his predecessor. State School Superintendent Norma Paulus still presides over the Oregon Department of Education. Vera Katz, former Democratic Speaker of the House credited with authorship of the bill, has parlayed high exposure from the far-reaching and controversial bill into a current stint as mayor of Portland. Truth be known, the Katz bill, as Oregonians refer to it, has even deeper roots winding back to the National Center on Education and the Economy, where fingerprints of the Clinton Health Plan's Ira Magaziner can also be spotted.

Oregon's reform plan spawned an astonishing plethora of committees and sub-committees, state-level councils and school site councils. They devised all new Certificates of Initial Mastery(CIMs) and Certificates of Advanced Mastery(CAMs), much to the dismay of confused and cash-strapped districts with little or no training budget, and baffled parents who still don't know a CIM from a CAM four years later. The grindingly-slow process of committee decisions on sweeping curriculum, process, and assessment changes has divided even the usually unified bureaucracy. Because the plan shifted funding power to the state, Department officials can demand compliance and implementation of the plan, even while insisting that districts and local school sites have choice and control. For example, objecting to a new "charter school" bill that would increase parental choice, Superintendent Paulus argued that the current reform plan already promotes charter schools, even though not one charter school exists in the state of Oregon.

Oregon education bureaucrats often describe the 21st Century School Act as " a seamless web" that covers a child from the time they are born until they join the workforce. Enhancing other Oregon legislation that enables social service workers to evaluate the homes of all babies born in the state, the Educational Act for the 21st Century also provides for state evaluation of the student's home environment. Objections have mounted to CIM and CAM requirements that some say promote specific political ideologies and reduce academic standards to vague process-oriented outcomes.

Among others, outcomes require the ability to: think, collaborate, maintain healthy interpersonal relationships, interpret human experience, and understand human diversity, applying appropriate cultural norms. At the time these outcomes were developed, assessment methods had not yet been addressed. In one "Wellness and Me" portfolio project, for example, teachers attempt to assess students' "physical, mental, and social health" by judging assessments students make about themselves, such as: "I respect my father and my mother." and "I believe in a God who answers prayers."

It is not surprising that many independent-minded Oregonians are struggling to escape this tangled web of state-run, committee-controlled reform, now known to opponents as the "CIM-CAM Flim- Flam." Last summer, opponents collected over 60,000 signatures in 6 weeks for an initiative to repeal the reform act. But legal and bureaucratic roadblocks limited the duration of the signature drive, causing it to fall short. Nonetheless, the repeal effort was revived in this session of the legislature. Only two short weeks before Riley's arrival, the House Education Sub-committee, chaired by Republican Representative Patti Milne, held joint public hearings with the Senate on repeal of the reform plan. Two scheduled sessions overflowed into several additional meeting rooms. Video terminals were wheeled in for throngs of angry parents and upset students and teachers who came to testify against reform. Hundreds also showed up for a follow-up demonstration on the capitol steps.

Much of the testimony went straight to the heart of Riley's concern for standards. One irate dad asked why standards had been lowered in the past. "If this group of teachers and administrators let standards slip before," he asked, " why are the same people still there now?" Another woman asked if the teaching practices adopted by Oregon are research-based. Where can we see outcome-based education working? "Let me see the school", she said, "I want to go there and see how they are performing on their tests."

Accountability for standards surfaced as a key issue. "Do we have good teachers?" asked one school board member. "We don't know - there's no way to evaluate them. Let's have accountability on the professionals, then accountability on the students." Another parent summed up, "[the reform plan] gives no guarantees that teachers will lose tenure for not teaching or for kids not learning, but it does admit they are failing now."

When Secretary Riley revisited Oregon's school reform plan, the goal was consolidating support. Instead, Riley got a firsthand view of how four years of committee-style decision making on the state level has confused and alienated parents and students, and inflamed the debate over standards. In Oregon, the standards controversy has heightened in direct correlation with the loss of local control and parental authority. Four years of futility later, Oregon's test scores show no overall improvement. Maybe there's a lesson there, and not just for Oregon. This is a lesson Mr. Clinton's Education Secretary can share with the entire nation.