As Gov. Tina Kotek seeks her second term in office , she has staked a hefty part of her educational legacy on ensuring that Oregon schools help many more of the state’s youngest students learn to read with ease and fluency.

Oregon’s bottom-of-the-barrel literacy rankings prompted the governor in 2023 to form a panel tasked with reforming how the state’s colleges and universities prepare future teachers, special educators, reading specialists and administrators. The idea is to better prepare the next generation of educators to teach kids to read.

The panel recommended more research-backed teaching methods in college curriculums by next fall, to better reflect decades of findings about how human brains best process written language. Oregon’s teacher licensing agency adopted the

See Full Page