All About Steve

[March 5th, 2008]

In a debate reminiscent of the spat between Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over Louis Farrakhan’s uninvited Obama endorsement, Oregon’s leading candidates in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate have been battling over who hates No Child Left Behind more.

First, Senate candidate Steve Novick rejected No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education policy. Then candidate Jeff Merkley denounced it. Then they both more or less rejected and denounced it.

Novick, a lawyer; and Merkley, speaker of the Oregon House, have been fighting over who is the strongest opponent of No Child Left Behind because teachers despise the Bush policy. Its purpose is to raise public-school students’ test scores, but it is also an underfunded mandate.

And on the eve of the Oregon Education Association’s union endorsement meeting this weekend, neither candidate wants to tick off the powerful teachers union’s 48,000 members.

But before there was the bane of teachers known as No Child Left Behind, there was an equally incendiary—and just as test-heavy—educational policy elevating emotions in Oregon. Some say it was even the state prequel to the federal No Child Left Behind.

The policy, passed by the Oregon Legislature in 1991, was known as CIM/CAM. And one of its defenders in the Democratic establishment was Novick, who from January to October 2003 was the legislative coordinator for the Oregon Department of Education tasked with warding off threats to CIM/CAM, which stands for Certificate of Initial Mastery and Certificate of Advanced Mastery.

The OEA was also a supporter of CIM/CAM, but eventually turned against the certificates as many of its members were screaming about the extra paperwork they created.

“It is amazing how many people bought this pig in a poke,” says Caleb Burns, a Democrat and a leading opponent of the educational measure.

The certificates of mastery promised to revolutionize schooling in Oregon—by setting a high standard for what Oregon wanted its students to learn and by assessing students in a way that required real problem solving rather than filling in bubbles with No. 2 pencils.

Some of the problems with CIM/CAM were evident from the start. Teachers had little to no input on the program. Then things got worse. Despite its aspirations, CIM essentially became a series of standards-based tests put into practice across the state. CAM was a less widely implemented vocational training program. Together the programs cost tens of millions of dollars a year, but they were never fully embraced by many schools.

Because of that and because of the cost, a strange alliance of the left and the right emerged over the years to take down CIM/CAM.

And the efforts came to a boil in 2003, when Novick was working as legislative coordinator for State Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo. She started her term in January of that year as a CIM/CAM believer, at the same time that CIM/CAM opponents were working to kill the certificates.

First came House Bill 2415. The bill, which was backed by leading charter-school advocate and onetime Castillo opponent Rob Kremer, would have ended CIM/CAM. Novick testified in Salem against abolishing the program, saying, according to minutes from the May 1, 2003, meeting, that CIM/CAM was working fine and that it was a valid program that had been subjected to outside reviews.

Novick says now that “kill” bill was also an attempt to outsource Oregon’s own assessment programs to “off-the-shelf” testing companies, a move he and Castillo opposed. The bill never made it to the floor.

To make sure Kremer and his cronies lost their battle to kill CIM/CAM, Rep. Vic Backlund (R-Keizer) introduced a compromise bill, House Bill 2744. That measure purported to limit CIM/CAM, but its purpose was to shift the discussion around CIM/CAM from the testing system’s deathbed to its recovery room, Kremer says.

“It wasn’t just a matter of ‘Are CIM and CAM good?,’ it was also ‘Should CIM and CAM be replaced by off-the-shelf commercial tests,” Novick says of HB 2744.

The compromise bill passed with Merkley’s support, though his public record now shows the same evolution on CIM/CAM as the teachers union.

Eventually, the 16-year battle to undo CIM/CAM succeeded with the support of Merkley, then the House Speaker. On April 18, 2007, under Castillo’s supervision—and long after Novick left the state education department—the Oregon House voted to kill CIM/CAM with House Bill 2263. Novick says he also probably would have voted with Merkley to kill CIM/CAM, but his public record remains in favor of preserving the certificates.

The certificates’ ghosts still linger in Oregon—and the rest of the country, for that matter. Today the only thing more common than tests in schools is teachers’ grumbling about tests in schools.

“It clearly led to No Child Left Behind,” says Bill Bigelow, a widely respected Portland teacher on leave who is also the editor of the left-leaning Rethinking Schools magazine. “I really think people should have spent their time opposing the whole thing.”