By JULIA SILVERMAN/The Oregonian/OregonLive
An early stage proposal by a consortium of Oregon community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees for aspiring elementary school educators is drawing significant pushback from colleges and universities that already prepare teachers.
The proposal, currently under review by the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission, would equip prospective teachers with degrees and allow them to sit for licensing exams after four years of study at a community college in Salem, Ontario, The Dalles, the Rogue Valley or the Corvallis-Albany area. Its backers hope the programs can be up and running by fall 2027.
The state also issued about 1,500 emergency and restricted teaching licenses in the 2024-2025 school year, meaning those educators are teaching out of their field of specialty or without a teaching license. That’s down from a pandemic peak of about more than 2,000, but is an exponential rise from just 10 years ago, when only about 1% of Oregon teachers worked under such licenses.
Additionally, those teaching on such licenses are disproportionally clustered in higher poverty school districts, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education.
“We were thinking about what is possible at the community colleges and where the gap is in terms of workforce demand and what higher education is able to produce in terms of meeting that demand,” said Kanoe Bunney, an education professor at Linn-Benton Community College, who is one of the leaders of the effort. “There was a conversation about the workforce needs of teachers in the state and how higher ed, as a whole, as a collective, is not meeting the demands.”
“We are concerned that the current proposal represents unnecessary duplication, risks lowering quality and lacks sufficient evidence of viability when compared to existing successful programs,” wrote John Watzke, dean of the School of Education at the University of Portland. “The stakes for Oregon’s students and schools are too high to experiment with underdeveloped models. Preparing teachers is not simply about filling workforce gaps — it is about shaping future generations.”
Jesse Longhurst, dean of the school of education at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, wrote that her institution was concerned the proposal would “stretch scarce public dollars even thinner” and strain working relationships between community colleges and universities.
“Particularly in rural Oregon, our institutions rely on each other,” Longhurst wrote. “Creating a parallel system of community college Bachelor of Applied Sciences programs would not only be redundant but would put us in direct competition with our community college partners.”
Her university and others already offer flexibility for teaching candidates, she wrote, with online and evening classes, courses that are taught on hybrid schedules and those that allow for student teaching in the school district where the student lives.
Bunney said she and other community colleges will continue to support students who want to transfer to four year universities and will encourage them to do so. But a university pathway is not for every student, she added, with some deterred by costs and complex logistics.
In just the past few years, there has been a pronounced spike in the number of Oregon teachers who earned degrees from private out-of-state virtual options, like Utah-based Western Governor’s University or Phoenix-based Grand Canyon University.
According to new data released this month by the Oregon Longitudinal Data Collaborative on Oregon’s teacher workforce, the number of new teachers in Oregon who studied outside of the state first spiked in the 2021-2022 school year, producing about half of the state’s 1,800 new teachers. By the following year, about 1,110 of the state’s new teachers came from educator preparation programs from outside the state, while just 600 had been locally educated.
It matters because nearly 70% of those who have studied in Oregon are still employed in local school districts after five years, compared with about 53% of those who attended an out-of-state program, according to the study of the state’s teacher workforce, which was released this month by the higher education commission.
It’s a relatively new phenomenon for community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in any field, though it is now allowed in 24 states. An Oregon law passed in 2019 expressly allowed the practice but limited it to “applied” bachelor’s degrees, which are typically narrowly tailored to focus on a particular set of skills.
Watzke, from the University of Portland, argued in his letter to the higher education commission’s leaders that approving an applied sciences degree in education stretched the boundaries of the law’s intention. Applied sciences degrees, he wrote, were intended for “workforce-aligned fields” such as information technology, data analytics and advanced manufacturing.
The bachelor’s of applied science in education effort is unusual in that it is designed as a joint program with pooled services among the five community colleges, Bunney said, in order to be certain the students can have access to the complete breadth of classes that they’d need.
“As a consortium, students would have the opportunity to take classes at any of our colleges,” she said, though student-teaching experiences would take place in a district they live in or near.
- Julia Silverman covers K-12 education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com
Great idea. Teacher shortages meet 4 year community college programs in local communities. Like the nursing programs. Filling local teaching opportunities. Kudos!
So tired of historic pattern of bringing people in from outside the community instead of giving local citizens a chance at family scale wage jobs. Hopefully locals already have housing. Another problem partially solved.