Most Oregon teacher prep programs still get an F in reading instruction

QuickTake:

While Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon universities earned As in a new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, other programs received failing grades or did not provide the information required to rate them.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories by the Oregon Journalism Project digging into questions about K-12 public education in Oregon: Why are Oregon’s schools failing? Who is responsible? And how do we dig ourselves out of this? See all stories in this series.

A new report shows Oregon continues to fail to educate future elementary teachers how to successfully teach reading.

The National Council on Teacher Quality’s report, Decoding Progress in Reading Preparation, grades teacher preparation programs across the nation.

It gave F’s to most of Oregon’s public teacher prep programs for failing to prepare aspiring teachers in scientifically based elementary reading instruction known as “the science of reading.”

Only two Oregon programs — those at Eastern Oregon and Southern Oregon universities — earned A grades. (Nationally, 53% of evaluated programs earned an A.)

The new report called out Portland State University in particular as the only state university in Oregon that wouldn’t share its literacy syllabuses, so it was not given a grade.

Oregon’s private colleges that prepare aspiring teachers also declined to share syllabuses with national evaluators, despite repeated outreach to individual programs.

“This lack of transparency makes it impossible to know whether some programs are placing new teachers in classrooms without the knowledge of how to teach their students to read successfully,” the report says.

The failing grades or lack of transparency around their programs matter because, as Oregon Journalism Project has pointed out in an ongoing series, Oregon Public Schools: What Went Wrong, the state’s fourth grade reading scores, adjusted for demographics, rank 50th in the nation, according to an Urban Institute analysis.

Despite spending years of political capital and more than $100 million to boost early literacy, more than 48% of Oregon fourth graders are below basic proficiency in reading — a deficit experts associate with future poverty.

“If I’m a parent of a child who’s struggling to learn to read, I want to know that my child’s teacher has graduated from a teacher prep program that actually taught that teacher how to teach my child to learn to read, aligned with the best methods that we have,” says Heather Penske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “Reading outcomes for kids won’t improve unless teacher preparation improves.”

Most teachers in Oregon received their teaching degree at one of Oregon’s 14 colleges and universities that offer teacher prep programs. In Oregon, the state agency that ensures the quality of those programs and licenses new teachers is the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

Oregon Journalism Project asked to talk about the report with executive director Rachel Alpert, who sought a preview copy in April. She did not reply to the request for an interview.

A year ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality asked Bill Rhoades, director of teacher preparation at the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, for help encouraging the Oregon programs to submit their materials, but Rhoades did not reply to that request, the National Council on Teacher Quality says.

Rhoades doesn’t recall the email, but encouraging universities to cooperate is “beyond TSPC’s purview,” he said, using the acronym for Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

Rather, an education program knows best how to respond “in a manner that aligns with its own priorities and interests,” he said in a statement.

On Nov. 5, 2025, the national council sought more help, this time contacting Gov. Tina Kotek’s education director, Johnna Timmes, for help, emailing her a list of nonparticipating programs. Again, no reply.

Penske, president of the Washington, D.C.-based research group, says Oregon, compared to other states, “is weak” as far as holding its teacher training programs to account.

The National Council on Teacher Quality notes that, unlike in many other states, Oregon’s Teacher Standards and Practices Commission does not typically review the syllabuses for reading courses to see if teacher prep programs adhere to the five standards of teaching literacy or teach contrary practices.

If so, the agency might have realized that several private college and university programs — at Linfield, George Fox, Lewis & Clark, Pacific and Warner-Pacific — have each assigned textbooks in the past year that were rated “unacceptable” by National Council on Teacher Quality’s experts, including some that contained debunked teaching methods banned by some states’ teacher prep programs.

“The state is allowing these teacher preparation programs to continue to enroll candidates and to give them licenses to teach reading to students,” Penske says.

Three years ago, as part of Oregon’s early literacy initiative, Kotek issued an executive order directing educators to come up with requirements to align teacher preparation programs to “science of reading” by 2024, and to have them instituted by fall of 2026.

National Council on Teacher Quality’s “ratings do not determine whether an Oregon educator preparation program meets state standards,” Kotek said through a spokesperson. “However, the review does provide one more piece of evidence that Oregon’s teacher prep programs aren’t operating the way we want them to.”