Excellent investigative series on Oregon education and literacy

Leaving It Up to the Locals Impedes Oregon’s Much-Needed Reading Recovery, Oregon Journalism Project, February 1, 2026

Excerpts:

Angela Uherbelau, founder of Oregon Kids Read, a reading advocacy group, says the Oregon Department of Education and elected officials defer to local control as an excuse for not using their authority to direct funding to schools with a continued history of low reading scores.

“It’s not local control,” she says, “it’s local abandonment.”

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A case in point: Ronda Fritz, a former elementary teacher and currently an associate professor at the College of Education at Eastern Oregon University, was on a tutoring assignment at a La Grande elementary school a year or two ago when she spotted the latest reading textbooks, selected from an ODE-approved list, stacked unused on a closet shelf.

It wasn’t a surprise. “I’ve been in schools where I’ve seen teachers have those curriculums still in the shrink-wrap,” she says.

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Oregon Kids Read argued that millions should go first to the 42 “most neglected” schools—both rural and urban—that have stayed at the bottom in reading for more than six consecutive years.

But ODE and lawmakers decided otherwise. J. Schuberth of Oregon Kids Read worked on the legislation and said ODE officials didn’t want to upset local districts by targeting the money. “They said it would be shaming the schools,” Schuberth says.

The Democratically controlled Oregon Legislature has not exactly charged to the rescue of children who haven’t been taught to read.