by Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle
June 16, 2026
For the third time in less than two years, reading advocates are calling on lawmakers to require the Oregon Department of Education to send the state’s literacy investments to elementary schools with the highest need, rather than letting districts decide how much schools get.
Angela Uherbelau, founder of the nonprofit Oregon Kids Read, told lawmakers at a Monday meeting that the education department is not upholding the intent of a 2025 law that provided an additional $100 million through 2027 for reading tutors, teacher training, reading curriculum and in-school reading specialists at elementary schools with “the lowest rates of proficiency in literacy.”
It builds on the $120 million Early Literacy Success Initiative the Legislature passed in 2023.
“You don’t need a Ph.D., you don’t need a law degree, you don’t need hundreds of pages of guidance to understand the clarity in this one sentence: which is that the literacy initiative rules should really prioritize the schools with the lowest proficiency in literacy,” Uherbelau said.
The education department distributes money to districts based mostly on enrollment, but the State Board of Education passed rules in 2025 that instead allow the districts once they’ve received the money to send it to all elementary schools with “literacy proficiency rates that have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.”
The latter applies to almost all Oregon elementary schools, Uherbelau said, neutralizing the intent of the bill and the intervention and growth for the kids most struggling year over year that advocates and lawmakers hoped would result.
“If you look at these rules, grants can go now to almost any (elementary) school throughout the state, because unfortunately most of our schools in Oregon have not recovered to their pre-pandemic literacy levels,” Uherbelau told lawmakers. “The legislative intent seemed pretty clear, and yet we went through a process where the output ended up being something that was completely far away from what elected leaders had voted for.”
Most Oregon fourth graders have not recovered from pandemic losses in reading ability, according to state standardized test scores. Over the past 25 years, nearly two in five Oregon fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words. And despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment during the last 25 years, those levels have not budged.
Some schools need less help than others
Oregon Kids Read joined the Oregon chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the national nonprofit Decoding Dyslexia in asking lawmakers last May to require at least $17 million of the $100 million reading investment go toward 42 of the state’s “most neglected” schools, with the highest percentage of third through fifth graders not reading at grade level since at least 2018.
And Oregon Kids Read fought to ensure that the line about funding the schools “with the lowest rates of proficiency” made it in the 2023 reading initiative. But, Uherbelau said, a closer look at how money was most recently doled out to schools shows some districts are not targeting high needs schools with the investment, but sending equal portions of funding to high- and low-performing schools.
Uherbelau presented data to lawmakers comparing four elementary schools in Portland that received the same percentage of literacy funding from the state in its most recent round of awards, but with vastly different student proficiency levels.
While 94% of students at Access and 85% of students at Alameda elementaries in Portland read proficiently, only 21% of Lent Elementary students and 11% of Rosa Parks Elementary students scored the same. Despite those differences, each school received 1.5% to 2% of the district’s reading initiative money. Access Elementary is an alternative and “accelerated school,” according to its website.
State literacy officials at the meeting said that 91% of districts with more than one elementary school were sending money to the highest needs schools under their purview and, according to one slide, that “ODE is following up directly with districts to address prioritization concerns.” But only about one-third of Oregon school districts have more than one elementary school, officials added.
Liz Merah, a spokesperson for the education department, said in an email that she could not provide a list of districts of concern until the agency finishes consulting with each of them about the issues.
She added that districts in their applications for funding were required to indicate the approximate portion of funds they would distribute to each school based on one or more characteristics such as reading proficiency, focal student group population or federal improvement status.
The lack of targeted investment in the lowest performing schools is an issue Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read also raised in a January letter to Oregon Department of Education Director Charlene Williams, asking if the agency could provide information on how much literacy funding had been awarded to the 100 lowest proficiency schools identified in the 2022-2023 school year.
Williams did not provide the answer, and in a letter back to Read encouraged him to read a report the agency published in February of 2025.
Results so far
Overall, education department officials at the Monday meeting said that since the literacy initiative launched, more than 191 of 197 school districts and 64 charter schools received funding for reading interventions that have benefitted more than 3,000 Pre-K to 3rd grade students and provided reading and writing tutoring for nearly 18,000 students.
Recent state standardized test scores show Oregon third graders reading proficiency improved by 1 percentage point year-over-year, and 66 districts showed at least 3 percentage points of growth over the prior year. For American Indian and Alaska Native students, the increase was an average of 9 percentage points in third grade English Language Arts proficiency.
The grants have funded training for more than 5,000 K-5 teachers — roughly 74% of all K-5 teachers in the state — and helped subsidize the cost of state approved reading curriculum so that 170 school districts in Oregon now have curriculum that aligns with the best practices, according to the reading science.
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