The governor of a state with one of the shortest school years in the country has issued an executive order aimed at blocking any further erosion of instructional time as schools face budget pressures that have previously led some to reduce instructional hours and as the state confronts its below-average math and reading achievement.
“We cannot lose any more time,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said at an April 16 news conference announcing the executive order. “We have to protect what we have, and why I’m acting today with this executive order is I’m hearing from district after district that they’re looking at their budget situation, and they’re thinking about providing even less time. So we’ve got to stop the bleeding, we have to stop reducing instructional time.”
Oregon school districts average 165 days per school year compared to the typical 180-day year nationwide, according to a recent analysis by ECONorthwest, an Oregon-based economic policy research group. The state requires at least 900 instructional hours in K-8 and 990 hours in grades 9-11, compared with the nationwide average of 1,231 hours per school year, the analysis found.
Oregon students receive fewer hours of instruction than their peers in all but Hawaii, Maine, and Nevada. And teachers have said they simply don’t have enough time to catch students up to grade level, especially after the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic that have set achievement back.
To complicate matters, the ECONorthwest study found the proportion of Oregon students who were chronically absent in the 2023-24 school year—meaning they missed 10 percent of school days or more—exceeded the national average, translating into even more lost instructional time.
“There is urgency because school boards are making decisions this month and next about the upcoming school year,” Kotek said at the news conference.
A ‘good first step’ or an ‘additional challenge’?
The governor’s order directs the Oregon Department of Education to request that the state board of education prioritize policies that prevent any further reductions in student instructional time due to budget or operational pressures.
The order also requires districts that have reduced student instructional time for the current and next school years to submit plans outlining how they will restore that time to at least 2024–25 levels by the start of the 2027–28 school year.
The governor’s order also bars the state education department from issuing waivers that allow districts to fall below minimum hours of instructional time, except in declared emergencies. Finally, the order calls for changes to state rules so that hours of instructional time reflect actual student-teacher engagement, which would bar counting activities such as professional development and parent-teacher conferences toward required instructional hours.
“We know that too many of our students are not getting the time in the classroom that they need to succeed,” Kotek said. “We can simply not get better student outcomes if we continue to give our students less instructional time.”
Kotek’s order received support from an advocacy group that commissioned a recent study on instructional time and student attendance in the state, but a more measured response from a public school administrators’ group.
“For decades, Oregon’s children have been getting shortchanged when it comes to the length of the school year, which is why the governor’s actions today are really important first step in getting our children the time they deserve,” Sarah Pope, the executive director of Stand for Children Oregon, said at the governor’s news conference.
She noted that when her group worked to improve the state’s literacy curriculum recently, “we started hearing there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the year to implement the new literacy curriculum.”
“Oregon ranks 47th in the nation for time in school,” Pope said. “By graduation, the average Oregon student will attend 195 fewer school days than students across the country. That’s one full academic year.”
The Coalition of Oregon School Administrators said in a statement that while it shared the governor’s concerns about loss of instructional time, budget constraints and collective-bargaining agreements leave districts with a choice of reducing staff or instructional time.
“The governor’s executive order introduces an additional challenge for districts already navigating declining enrollment, rising [pension] obligations, increasing operational costs, and the financial pressures facing educators themselves,” the group said. “While we share the goal of protecting and expanding instructional time, we believe that a mandated approach at this moment is unlikely to produce the meaningful, sustainable change Oregon students deserve.”
Kotek said she has worked to boost state education funding and that some districts may need to make different spending choices to allow for more instructional time.
“Not every school district is having similar budgetary challenges, so it is up to our local leaders to look at what they’re doing and decide how they can make things work based on the increased resources the state has given them,” she said.