Have Our Aspirational State Policy Goals Become Excuses for Delay?

If those goals extend beyond the terms of current officeholders, with no deliverables to achieve while they’re in office, we’re likely to see more aspiration than accomplishment.

Tim Nesbitt served as chief of staff for Gov. Kulongoski. A former union leader, he lives near Independence and oversees a specialty apple orchard.

Courtesy Oregon Department of Transportation

Like many Oregonians, I like big ideas. But I’ve lost patience with many of our big goals.

Consider these two examples, which the legislature adopted in 2011 and 2016 respectively:

• Getting 100% of our high school students across the graduation finish line by 2025; and,

• Securing 50% of our electricity from renewable energy sources by 2040.

They’re big goals, yes. But they’re also futuristic ones, set to distant dates. That makes it easier to avoid tough choices on how to achieve them — until their due dates are upon us, and we realize we’ve run out of time to get the job done.

We’ve seen marked improvement in our high school graduation rate, which climbed to 83% last year. That progress is laudable. But it didn’t come from our ambitious goal setting.

One source of this improvement can be found in Measure 98, which was approved by Oregon voters in 2016 despite opposition by many of the same legislators who embraced the 100% graduation goal. Thanks to that measure, we are now directing more state funds to interventions at the 9th grade level and more career-technical training in the later grades. Those approaches are working, because they’re action items, not talking points.

Still, even with Measure 98’s innovations and welcome improvements in funding for our K-12 system, we won’t get to a 100% graduation rate by 2025. That’s another problem when we set our goals too high. No matter what our best efforts, we’ll never get there. Even if we were able to raise our graduation rate to the best in the nation, at something like 95%, we’d still fall short. Attainment in this instance will always be aspirational.

For these reasons — waiting too long and, in some cases, shooting too high — I’ve become a big-goal skeptic. When pressed, advocates will defend our most ambitious goals as “stretch goals,” the kind you know you’ll never fully achieve but will force you to up your game by trying. Maybe, provided we don’t stint on the stretching, beginning now, not later.

Obviously, the best big ideas are the ones we make real. They start with doing and advance by doing more, year after year.

Former Gov. John Kitzhaber’s Oregon Health Plan qualifies as one of these best big ideas. But it required a step-by-step evolution from a budget-oriented approach to prioritize health care for the poor to become a new system of regionalized managed care networks that now cover one in every four Oregonians. It took decades of experimentation and revision to put this new system in place, in which every two-year budget cycle served as an immediate deadline to deliver the best next steps.

Yet another example is vote-by-mail, which started out as an option in our local elections in 1981. We didn’t begin with the goal of all-mail elections by a certain date. Instead, we test drove small demonstration projects all the way to statewide adoption with the passage of Measure 60 in 1998. We got there incrementally, relentlessly, showing what worked and winning hearts and minds for the new system over a period of almost two decades.

I don’t think we should give up on ambitious goal setting, especially when it comes to taking on important issues like education and climate change. And, yes, progress on these issues will take time. But I hope we’ve learned that big ideas require a lot of smaller ideas and the constant ferment of doing and redoing by engaged citizens in order to make them real. If we don’t sweat the stretch goals, they’ll quickly devolve into empty promises and engender the cynicism that is all too common about government programs these days.

Citizen engagement is key. Some of the most effective action items advanced in Measure 98 came from a series of community forums that Gov. Kitzhaber’s Education Investment Board convened to launch the 100% graduation effort. That board was later disbanded by legislators who comforted themselves and reassured their constituents that we weren’t giving up on our 2025 goal. Well, um, I hate to say it, but it’s clear now that we’re not going to get there.

Which leads to my last concern about big goals: If those goals extend beyond the terms of current officeholders, with no deliverables to achieve while they’re in office, we’re likely to see more aspiration than accomplishment. It’s hard to take seriously the “fierce urgency of now” when we’re thinking in terms of distant decades.

In future posts, I’ll highlight some smaller, short-term ideas to improve our high school graduation rate and accelerate the shift to renewable energy. I hope others will do the same — not by 2025 or 2040, but now, in the months ahead, on this site and others, and in our communities across the state.

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