Why is the Oregon Department of Education investigating Springfield Public Schools?

Arguing can be the key to an engaging science lesson.

That’s what Mikell Harshbarger found in 2022 when he tried a method of teaching that models what scientists do in the real world.

His fifth-grade students at Elizabeth Page Elementary School in Springfield designed their own experiments to find out what radish seeds need to grow. They decided what materials to plant the seeds in and how much to water them. They measured their radish plants every day, swarming past Harshbarger in the mornings when he opened the classroom door to see how the seedlings were doing.

After a couple of weeks, the students summarized their data and findings on large whiteboards. There were debates and disagreements on experiment designs and results, and everyone, even children with chronic behavioral problems, was engaged.

“The level of critical thinking that went into that — where they’d go around and look at other peoples’ data and go, ‘Wait, what’s going on here? That’s not at all what you should have gotten, we did the same thing and we got a completely different answer,’” Harshbarger recalled. “It was like, yeah, they’re little scientists.”

Units like this, however, take time. Harshbarger’s class spent 45 minutes to an hour a day, for three weeks, to complete the unit on plant growth. Harshbarger doesn’t have that luxury anymore. Instead, he said, he has 30 minutes a week to teach science, a time allotment that does not meet state recommendations.

Harshbarger also says teachers do not have the curriculum materials to meet the standards set by the state — and they haven’t for a long time.

He’s the driving force behind an Oregon Department of Education investigation into whether Springfield Public Schools’ elementary curriculum complies with state standards. 

While the district appears to be in the process of creating its own science and social studies curriculum, school board members say they’re in the dark on its progress over the past year, after receiving the same information in an Oct. 13 board meeting that they received last year, about the district’s plan of action.

Meanwhile, teachers, parents and community members have been publicly complaining. They argue Springfield educators lack teaching autonomy and the district has a lopsided focus on literacy and math, which standardized testing pressure has exacerbated.

Brian Richardson, Springfield Public Schools director of communications and community engagement, declined interview requests from Lookout Eugene-Springfield about science and social studies curriculum because of the ongoing state investigation.

A teacher’s persistent complaints

When Harshbarger started working in Springfield in 2005 as an eighth-grade teacher, he noticed students weren’t coming to middle school with the social studies or science knowledge they needed. He switched to teaching fifth grade in 2017 and determined teachers didn’t have the time or materials to teach the subjects. 

Springfield does not currently have adopted elementary science or social studies curriculums, which are the materials teachers use to make lesson plans, assignments and assessments. This means lesson planning falls on teachers. 

According to Harshbarger, Springfield teachers grade students for effort — instead of proficiency — in science and social studies, just like art, health, physical education, music and writing legibly, which makes them less likely to focus on these subjects during a school day.

“It’s like, ‘Well, why would I spend all this time where it’s not even something that the district values?’” Harshbarger said.

He first wrote to the Springfield school board about the issue in October 2022. He then wrote about it again to two school board members in November 2023. In that letter, he  asserted the district was out of compliance with state requirements for instructional materials in the 2022-23 school year; elementary teachers had not had up-to-date science or social studies materials since the previous adoption cycle of instructional materials for science in 2016 and social studies in 2018.

Each year, districts are required to submit what’s called a Division 22 Assurances report, in which they indicate whether they are in compliance with each of the state’s requirements, which includes a requirement for a “planned K–12 instructional program” for all subjects. But it is, in essence, an honor system.

“Under the statute, school districts are presumed to be in compliance until a deficiency is found,” the Oregon Department of Education website states.

In its report, Springfield Public Schools indicated it was in compliance with all requirements during the 2022-23 school year.

The district considered Harshbarger’s November 2023 letter to board members to be a formal complaint and investigated Harshbarger’s claims.

When Joyce Smith-Johnson, Springfield elementary school director, found Harshbarger’s complaints unsubstantiated, he appealed to the state, and the Oregon Department of Education launched its investigation in June 2024.

That investigation still has no estimated date for completion, according to Liz Merah, the department’s strategic communications administrator. Harshbarger’s last update from the state in May said the investigation would be completed by Nov. 15, after a second extension of the deadline.

If a district is found to be out of compliance with state standards, administrators must submit a plan to the state outlining how they will come back into compliance by the beginning of the next school year. The education department’s deputy superintendent can grant a one-year extension, but if the district is still not in compliance, the state can withhold funds until it is in compliance, although this is rare, David Collins, assistant superintendent in Springfield for instruction, said in a recent school board meeting.

Harshbarger has also written to the board multiple times over the past two years about the district’s lack of compliance with state standards. Most recently, he and 74 other teachers signed a July letter and presented it to the board as a written public comment in August.

The district took it as another formal complaint. District administrators have yet to present findings about the complaint, despite board policy that states the superintendent has 10 days to respond.

Testing prioritizes English, math

Dustin Dawson, a science specialist at the Lane Education Services District, said schools nationwide struggle to find the time to squeeze science and social studies into their curriculums.

The biggest reason? Administrators face immense pressure to increase math and reading scores on state assessments, because states use these subjects to measure school success.

“They put 90% to 98% of their energy, as much as they possibly can, into reading, writing and math,” Dawson said. “And everything else gets dropped or at least diminished.”

Elementary school days are generally six to six-and-a-half hours to accommodate younger children’s attention spans. Dawson estimates that if an elementary school were to meet all its required standards, students would have to go to school 10 hours a day, year-round. There’s also no required amount of science instruction minutes, only a recommendation of 45 minutes a day from the state education department.

“Basically everything that is asked for is not possible given the structure that we have right now,” Dawson said.

Another challenge to the puzzle of fitting science into the school day is new, more rigorous standards. Oregon adopted the nationally recognized Next Generation Science Standards in 2014, which make science education less about memorization and more about figuring out how the world works, Dawson said. This aligns with how kids naturally learn and makes learning more memorable.

But the new science standards are complicated and ambitious. To fit them into an elementary school day, Dawson and other experts think integrating science lessons into reading instruction could be the answer. Eleven years later, however, districts including Springfield are still figuring out how best to do this.

Integrating science and language arts

The most recent update Springfield Public Schools gave to the public about elementary science curriculum was at the Oct. 14, 2024, board of education meeting, when members heard a presentation about the district’s Division 22 Assurances for the 2023-24 school year. In the assurances, the district detailed the same plan for elementary science curriculum they presented to the board in April of that year.

The board voted April 8, 2024, to postpone the adoption of elementary science curriculum for a year to allow time for the district to create its own science curriculum based on its state-approved English Language Arts materials.

The state education department initially recommended this approach when the new science standards came out in 2014 because there was not enough published curriculum that complied with the new standards, especially at the elementary level.

Jonathan Light, a Springfield school board member at the time and now the board chair, asked middle school director Whitney McKinley what the district was doing to get elementary students up to speed on science because of the lack of up-to-date materials.

“We are the first to admit that we have not done a good job at integrating our science standards at elementary,” McKinley said in the April 8, 2024, meeting.

She explained that a subcommittee of teachers, headed by a science teacher on special assignment, Dara Brennan, was working on taking texts from the English Language Arts curriculum and making units and lessons out of them. McKinley said in a year, the committee would have all six science units integrated and would come back to the board for approval.

But Light confirmed to Lookout Eugene-Springfield that the district has not provided information to the board about elementary school science curriculum adoption since the April 8, 2024, meeting, despite the fact that McKinley said they’d come back to the board in 2025 with a recommendation.

“There’s been no conversation at all,” he said.

When Lookout asked Richardson, Springfield Public School’s spokesperson, for an interview with district staff about the integration of the science and reading, he declined, citing the need to wait until the state investigation has concluded.

The integration of science and reading has not been going to plan, according to Harshbarger.

Harshbarger was a part of a teacher committee that worked with Brennan over the course of two summer sessions to integrate the district’s English Language Arts curriculum with science.

They first met in the summer of 2023 to find readings that aligned with science standards and create science lesson plans around them. Harshbarger remembers coming away from the committee with one unit to try with students during the 2023-24 school year. Because of time constraints, he wasn’t able to fully teach the science portion of the lessons. It “fell flat,” he said.

In the summer of 2024, he and other elementary teachers combed through the English Language Arts curriculum, creating a spreadsheet with the possible cross-curricular opportunities that aligned with state science standards for each grade level. 

Harshbarger, who was teaching third grade at the time, found 49 reading excerpts that included a science topic. But only eight of those aligned with third-grade science standards. Even when readings did align, a teacher would have had to supplement the reading with additional readings to properly teach the science standard.

“We all kind of had a come-to-Jesus moment with (Brennan) saying, ‘Look, it’s just not there. We can’t do what you want. There’s just so little, there’s so little science.
And when there is science, it’s often at the wrong grade level,’” Harshbarger said.

Brennan tried a different approach to integrating science and reading last fall: professional development. She scheduled eight sessions over the course of the 2024-25 school year for third- through fifth-grade teachers, but after two sessions of talking about how to integrate the new science standards into literacy, the rest of the sessions were canceled.

Harshbarger said he doesn’t know why — teachers were never given a reason. But he knew that many teachers were frustrated by having to sit through the training because they knew they wouldn’t have enough time to teach the material.

Since then, the district gave teachers access to “Mystery Science,” a video-based science curriculum and some craft materials for hands-on activities that go along with “Mystery Science” lessons. 

Harshbarger said it’s better than nothing, but wasn’t on the list of state-approved science materials. The hands-on activities are also longer than 30 minutes, making them impossible to fit in his schedule.

His class will participate in a new program this year called “Microscopic Explorations,” led by Brennan. According to a video posted on Springfield Public School’s YouTube channel, Brennan will bring microscopes into classrooms and teach lessons based on grade-level Next Generation Science Standards. Third-graders, for example, will look at fossils. Brennan said in the video that the program existed before but didn’t follow grade-level standards.

“Science should be fun and exciting, and I think that excitement encourages and engages the students further,” Brennan said in the video. “This is an introduction, and I’m hoping they’ll want more.”

‘This is gaslighting’

Before Harshbarger’s complaints made it to the state, Joyce Smith-Johnson, the Springfield district’s elementary school director, ruled that they were untrue.

Smith-Johnson pointed out the different time slots in Harshbarger’s schedule where he could teach more science and social studies, including 15 minutes during the morning Harshbarger sets aside for class announcements, news and attendance, 25 minutes Harshbarger sometimes has available when his class doesn’t need to do physical education and the 30 minutes per day he already alternates between health, science, social studies, art and social-emotional learning.

“There is now and has been ample time, both stand-alone blocks identified for science and social science instruction, as well as a plethora of integrated opportunities within our literacy block, to teach both science and the social sciences,” Smith-Johnson wrote.

When Harshbarger read Smith-Johnson’s response, he felt frustrated. The bits of time she proposed using for science and social studies instruction were too short to properly teach anything and would never have been seen as adequate for subjects like math and reading.

“This is gaslighting, plain and simple,” he said.

Lookout asked Springfield Public Schools about Smith-Johnson’s email to Harshbarger and Richardson, again citing the ongoing department of education investigation, declined comment.

Smith-Johnson wrote enthusiastically in the email about Brennan’s plan to integrate science and reading curriculum.

She brought up a lesson she had observed in a third-grade classroom that integrated science and reading through an English Language Arts excerpt about the solar system. Learning about the solar system, however, is not a third-grade standard, according to the state’s science standards document.

Smith-Johnson also said in her email to Harshbarger the district was going to file a multiyear action plan in November 2024 with its Division 22 assurances report detailing how it will bring its instructional materials up to state standards. This accompanied the district’s self-report that it was not in compliance for instructional material requirements.

Others speak out

Harshbarger has been complaining about the lack of science, social studies and other subjects in Springfield elementary schools for three years. Recently, however, others have been talking about the issue.

The Community Alliance for Public Education, a group run by parents, teachers and community members, gave Harshbarger’s complaints an online platform through its website and Facebook page.

Light, the school board chair, reached out to the Oregon Department of Education to request information about the curriculum investigation. Because he didn’t coordinate with district administration, district administrators called it “a misuse of authority.”

Sarah Bosch, a former Springfield Public Schools kindergarten teacher of 11 years, started a change.org page titled “Demanding a Well-Rounded Education for K-5 Students in Springfield School District #19” that has gotten 380 signatures. It includes the signature of former U.S Rep. Peter DeFazio.

Bosch spoke at a Sept. 9 school board meeting, along with three other community members.

“As a former (Springfield Public Schools) teacher, I understand the value of emphasizing reading and math subjects,” she said. “However, subjects like science, art and geography are the hooks that capture the delight, imagination and engagement of young learners.”

Robert Morgan, whose wife is a Springfield teacher and whose daughter worked for the district for eight and a half years, has seen the personal toll district expectations have taken on teachers. His daughter quit last year from burnout and took a job at an online school.

“Morale is low,” Morgan said. “Teachers are feeling disrespected.”

Bosch and Morgan both ran for the Springfield Board of Education in the spring and lost.

Ingrid Nordstrom, parent of two elementary students in Springfield Public Schools, said she sees a heavy focus on reading and math in the work her kids bring home, but she doesn’t see her kids having the opportunities to do science experiments, do art projects, write stories, learn about historical figures or how government works. She said she was also concerned about teacher autonomy.

“Teachers are highly trained professionals who know how to create supportive learning environments and respond to students’ needs,” she said. “But in our schools, teacher expertise and experience is being devalued, and our kids are paying the price.”

Correction: Mikell Harshbarger is currently a fourth-grade teacher at Elizabeth Page Elementary. Photo captions previously stated the wrong grade.