Reports
Identity Politics Ideology in Oregon’s K-12 Public Education System
The Oregon Department of Education has woven identity politics ideology into K-12 policy and teacher training. Millions of dollars go to DEI/SEL staff across school districts responsible for implementing these concepts and practices.
Oregon’s “Equitable Graduation” Report – Review & Findings
Oregon’s “Equitable Graduation” Report Is Filled with Plagiarism, Mistaken Citations, and False Claims (Report #5), Press Release, Executive Summary
Oregon’s Accessible Private Colleges and Universities Are the Best Value – 2017 OAS Report
Issue Briefs
Issue Brief #13
Oregon’s three largest public universities, OSU, UO, PSU, have dedicated a large amount of funding and institutional resources to implementing DEI at all levels and the ideological shifts and baggage that accompany it. This is an ineffective use of funds, especially with ever-inflating costs of college tuition. It is also out of line with the traditional ethos of the university as an institution and the legislatively defined purpose of the public university system. OAS calls for the reduction of DEI spending and institutional influence.
Issue Brief #11
Oregon governor Tina Kotek on June 27 appointed Charlene Williams as the interim director of the Oregon Department of Education beginning July 10, pending Senate approval. Williams is patently unprepared for and ill-suited to the challenges of public education in Oregon. Her track record and published remarks indicate a candidate more interested in stirring racial division and maligning white students than in making Oregon public education a national leader. The Oregon Association of Scholars urges the Senate to reject her nomination when it convenes in September.
Issue Brief #10
Oregon Senate Bill 409 passed the Oregon Senate by a 27-2 vote on April 11, 2023 and was sent to the Oregon House of Representatives Committee on Education for consideration. While the bill is a positive symbolic step that recognizes the rights of parents, taxpayers, and other stakeholders to know what is taught in public schools, by itself it will do nothing to ensure this. That is because under pressure from the state teacher union, Senate Democrats gutted the bill of provisions requiring transparency at the district and school level.
Issue Brief #8
Portland State University on November 2, 2022 hosted a racially discriminatory community cocktail party which is estimated to have cost at least $20,000 and had no connection to the university’s research and teaching mission.
Issue Brief #7
In a report of 2017, the Oregon Association of Scholars found that the state’s major public and private universities were delivering mediocre results to students based on the valueadded of a degree from each institution. A new report issued by the Texas Public Policy Foundation updates and confirms the earlier results. The report finds that Oregon is failing in higher education, even more than was apparent in the previous OAS report.
Issue Brief #6
On January 3, 2022, Portland State University president Stephen Percy issued a sweeping framework to turn PSU into a race and ideology-centered cult. The so-called “Plan for Equity and Racial Justice” represents a significant turn away from education as the primary mission of PSU.
Issue Brief #5
The common reading program for freshmen at the University of Oregon intended to prepare incoming college students for intellectual rigor and academic excellence achieves neither aim. Since its launch, it has veered sharply in the direction of polemical and didactic works of the far left and is taught in a way that amounts to political indoctrination.
Issue Brief #4
Data released today by the Oregon Association of Scholars shows that the partisan imbalance in donations to major political parties by individuals who identify themselves as members of faculty or staff at the three major public universities in Oregon has reached alarming levels: somewhere between 96% and 99% of donated monies go to the Democratic Party.
Issue Brief #3
Contemporary diversity ideology – a set of narrow principles insisting on the preeminence of physical and cultural differences among individuals, a unity of political viewpoints, cultural relativism, and the undemocratic redistribution of power in society — has transformed from an original focus on legal compliance with state and federals laws to a sweeping ideological program of transformation in Oregon higher education.