Oregon’s new Education Accountability Act puts attendance under the microscope. But who actually has the power to change it?
Oregon considers a student who attends more than 90% of their enrolled school days a “regular attender.” In the 2025–26 school year, just 64.5% of Oregon K–12 students met that standard. More than one in three students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of their school days—roughly two days a month. (Oregon)
Two days a month may not sound like much. But repeated throughout a student’s education, those absences represent a substantial amount of lost instructional time. Missing two days a month over a 13-year K–12 education can add up to more than 230 missed school days which is the equivalent or more than a full academic year.
Oregon now wants to change that.
Senate Bill 141, the Education Accountability Act, makes regular attendance one of the measures Oregon will use to evaluate educational progress. The state has established a goal of increasing K–12 regular attendance from a 66.5% 2024–25 baseline to 78.3% by 2029–30. (Oregon)
The goal itself is difficult to argue with. Students need to be in school to learn.
But if attendance is going to become a measure of school success, perhaps there is a more fundamental question Oregon should ask:
Who actually has the power to make a child attend school?
Are we expecting principals and teachers to pull children out of bed each morning and get them to school?
Of course not.
So when a student is repeatedly absent, who are we really holding accountable?
What Exactly Is Oregon’s Education Accountability Act?
Senate Bill 141 is, in simple terms, an attempt to create a statewide scoreboard for Oregon’s public schools.
The law establishes seven statewide measures:
- K–2 regular attendance
- K–12 regular attendance
- Third-grade literacy
- Eighth-grade mathematics
- Ninth-grade students on track to graduate
- Four-year graduation
- Five-year completion
Rather than simply asking whether schools are meeting a single statewide standard, Oregon is developing performance-growth targets for individual districts in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Education. Districts will establish local Performance Growth Targets based on their own data, priorities and circumstances, while aligning those targets with the statewide measures. (Oregon)
In other words, the state is saying:
Here are the outcomes we believe matter. Let’s measure whether students and districts are moving toward them.
There is nothing inherently unreasonable about that.
The public should know whether students are attending school. Parents should know whether children are learning to read. Communities should know whether students are graduating. And districts should be expected to respond when students are not succeeding.
In fact, ODE describes SB 141 as a move toward shared accountability, continuous improvement, coaching and support, rather than simply a compliance system. (Oregon)
Accountability is not the problem.
The question is whether accountability without sufficient control becomes meaningful accountability at all.
Attendance Is Measurable. That Does Not Mean Schools Control It.
A school can monitor attendance. A teacher can call home. A counselor can meet with a student. A principal can create an attendance team. A district can send letters, make phone calls, conduct home visits and connect families with community resources.
But none of those people can physically make a parent or guardian get a child out of bed in the morning.
Oregon law already recognizes where much of that responsibility lies. State law requires children to attend school and places a duty on the person who has control of the child to send the child to school and maintain regular attendance. (Oregon)
That creates an uncomfortable question.
If the state places the responsibility for getting a child to school on the adults responsible for that child, but measures the school district on whether the child attends, where should accountability actually fall?
A seven-year-old who does not come to school because a parent cannot get them out the door is not responsible for that absence. A child who is experiencing homelessness, transportation difficulties, untreated health problems, anxiety, bullying or other significant barriers to attendance may not be responsible either.
Those children need support, not punishment.
However, if Oregon wants attendance to improve, the state also cannot ignore the adults and circumstances that actually determine whether a child walks through the school doors.
ODE itself identifies transportation, housing and food insecurity, health care access, family responsibilities, mental health, bullying, school connectedness and other barriers as factors that can contribute to chronic absenteeism. (Oregon)
Oregon Has a Serious Attendance Problem
This is not simply a matter of districts failing to meet an arbitrary state goal.
Oregon’s attendance numbers are among the lowest in the country. The 2025–26 data show some improvement, with more than 7,000 additional students classified as regular attenders compared with the previous year. But the statewide regular-attendance rate was still only 64.5%. (Oregon Journalism Project)
That means Oregon remains nearly 14 percentage points below its own 78.3% regular-attendance target for 2029–30.
The gap becomes even more striking at the school level. According to an Oregon Journalism Project analysis of data released by the Oregon Department of Education, only 26 of nearly 1,300 Oregon public schools reached the 90% regular-attendance benchmark during the 2025–26 school year. (Oregon Journalism Project)
And the differences between communities are striking.
Portland Public Schools increased its regular-attendance rate from 64% to 65.4% during the 2025–26 school year. That is progress, but it remains well below the state’s 2029–30 target. (Willamette Week)
Then there is Malheur County.
Its 2025–26 regular-attendance rate reached 83.5%, the highest in Oregon at nearly 19 percentage points above the statewide rate and already above Oregon’s 2029–30 target. (Oregon Journalism Project)
That difference deserves attention.
If one Oregon community can achieve an attendance rate above the state’s future target while much of the state remains far below it, perhaps Oregon should be asking what those communities are doing differently.
What Happened in Malheur County?
When Oregon lawmakers passed Senate Bill 817 in 2021, the law ended the practice of school districts referring families to the judicial system for irregular attendance through Class C violations. ODE specifically states that districts are no longer allowed to cite a parent with a Class C violation as part of a district response to a child’s irregular attendance. (Oregon)
The intent was understandable: avoid financially penalizing families who may already be struggling with poverty, housing instability, health problems or other barriers.
But educators in Malheur County believed they had lost an important last-resort accountability tool.
In 2023, Malheur County adopted a local ordinance restoring the ability to issue truancy citations. The county’s approach does not begin with a citation. School districts first work with families through conversations, meetings and attempts to identify and remove barriers. When those interventions fail, a citation can bring families into truancy court, where school officials and social-service providers can participate in the process. The court can require wraparound services such as parenting classes or mental-health referrals. (Oregon Journalism Project)
The results are difficult to ignore.
During the 2025–26 school year, Malheur County superintendents issued 47 citations among more than 1,000 chronically absent students, and only one resulted in a fine. The $500 fine remains a potential consequence, but it can be dismissed when families follow through with the attendance plan and required services. (Oregon Journalism Project)
The answer in Malheur County, then, is far more nuanced than simply claiming, “Truancy court works.”
The citation itself is not the entire intervention.
The larger intervention is the combination of school outreach, family engagement, community services and, when necessary, a legal mechanism that requires a family to engage with those supports.
Whether the ordinance itself caused Malheur County’s attendance gains cannot be established from these data alone.
But the correlation is difficult to dismiss.
Malheur County now has the highest regular-attendance rate of any Oregon county. Two other Eastern Oregon counties, Union and Umatilla, have since adopted similar ordinances, and an Oregon Journalism Project analysis found that their attendance rates increased at roughly twice the rate of statewide improvement over the period studied. (Oregon Journalism Project)
That does not prove that truancy citations caused those improvements.
It does, however, raise a reasonable question:
Is Oregon missing an important accountability tool by placing attendance responsibility primarily on schools while limiting the mechanisms available to address adults who repeatedly fail to ensure their children attend?
The Classroom Reality
Oregon’s Department of Education increasingly describes attendance as a community issue, emphasizing barrier removal, family engagement, wellness supports and collaboration across systems. ODE’s current attendance framework specifically identifies relationships, student and family engagement, data systems and a holistic team-and-community approach as components of attendance improvement. (Oregon)
The theory is sound.
A child is more likely to attend when their family trusts the school and feels supported. A student who feels connected to school is more likely to want to be there. A family experiencing transportation, housing, health or other challenges may need someone outside the classroom to help remove those barriers.
Strong communities absolutely help solve attendance problems.
Consequently, building those essential safety nets requires a resource that schools are critically lacking:
Time.
Consider the daily reality of the classroom.
An educator is simultaneously responsible for differentiated instruction, behavioral interventions, foundational literacy, state assessments and the social-emotional stability of two to three dozen children.
Expecting that same educator to act as a localized social worker, who is individually diagnosing and solving chronic absenteeism without dedicated staffing, external support or robust community integration, is an impossible expectation.
We cannot simply demand stronger family relationships from educators without considering the capacity required to build those relationships.
And this is where accountability becomes complicated.
If the state wants schools to improve attendance through stronger relationships with families, then it must also ask whether schools have the time and personnel to build those relationships.
The Question Oregon Should Ask About SB 141
The Education Accountability Act is intended to create shared responsibility. ODE describes the new system as involving the state, Legislature, Education Service Districts, school districts, tribes and community partners. The department also emphasizes that the new accountability system is intended to be responsive to local context and to provide coaching, tools and partnership to districts working toward improvement. (Oregon)
That language matters.
Because if responsibility is truly shared, then attendance should not become a number that is simply placed on a district’s report card.
Attendance should become a problem that the entire community is expected to address.
Consider the difference:
“Your attendance rate is too low. Fix it.”
Versus:
“Your attendance rate is too low. What is preventing students from attending, and what resources, partnerships and interventions are necessary to change it?”
The first measures failure.
The second attempts to solve it.
Both can involve accountability.
Only one necessarily creates capacity for improvement, and that solution takes time, money and resources.
So Who Should Be Accountable?
Perhaps the answer is not one person or one institution.
Schools should be accountable for what schools control.
Districts should be accountable for what districts control.
The state should be accountable for the policies and resources it controls.
And adults responsible for children should be accountable for doing what they can to ensure those children attend school.
That does not mean punishing elementary students.
It does not mean assuming every absence is the result of an irresponsible parent.
And it does not mean replacing support with fines.
It means recognizing that different problems require different forms of accountability.
A child who is missing school because there is no transportation needs transportation.
A child who is missing school because of untreated anxiety needs support.
A child whose family is experiencing housing instability needs community resources.
A child who is being bullied needs a safe school environment.
Additionally, when a child repeatedly misses school because their guardian refuses to ensure attendance despite repeated intervention, Oregon should have a meaningful mechanism for addressing that situation as well.
Schools cannot be expected to carry all of those responsibilities alone.
What Should Marion County Do?
This is where Oregon’s statewide accountability conversation must become a local mandate.
Marion County cannot afford to wait for the state’s bureaucracy to finalize its metrics before addressing its own missing students.
Local legislators, county agencies and community organizations must come to the table to answer three specific questions:
1. What are the specific, localized barriers keeping Marion County students out of the classroom, and which of those require non-educational community agencies to solve?
2. How can we build a coordinated safety net that brings families, health services and housing organizations together the moment a student’s attendance begins to slip?
3. When a family repeatedly ignores school-level interventions, what structural mechanism will Marion County use to compel engagement?
These questions do not require opposition to SB 141.
In fact, they are consistent with its stated goal of shared accountability.
If the state intends to hold local districts accountable for whether a child walks through the door, the state must provide the legislative and financial scaffolding to actually get them there.
Accountability Should Lead Somewhere
Oregon is right to care about attendance.
It is right to want children in classrooms. It is right to want students to read proficiently, succeed in mathematics, graduate from high school and leave school prepared for adulthood.
The question is not whether those goals matter.
They do.
The question is whether measuring those goals is enough to change them.
A percentage on an attendance report cannot get a child out of bed.
A teacher cannot drive to every student’s home each morning.
A principal cannot solve transportation, housing, health and family barriers alone.
And a school district cannot control every decision made outside its buildings.
If Oregon wants attendance to improve, it must look beyond the attendance number and ask what is keeping children from school in the first place and who has the ability to change those circumstances.
Accountability is necessary. But accountability only works when it is placed where responsibility and authority actually meet.
Oregon has decided to measure whether students show up.
Now, it needs to decide who is responsible for helping them get there.