Gov. Tina Kotek's sweeping executive order demanding more instructional time for Oregon students will force exactly zero additional minutes of classroom instruction on the vast majority of the state's districts — exposing yet another government mandate that generates headlines while delivering nothing for the families it claims to serve.
According to an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive, at least 137 of Oregon's 197 school districts — serving three-quarters of the state's students — won't have to add a single minute to comply with the first phase of Kotek's order. A maximum of four districts will be directed to add a week or more. In the Portland metro area, virtually every large district, including Portland Public Schools, Beaverton, and Hillsboro, faces no change whatsoever.
This matters because Oregon's students already get weeks, and in some cases months, less instructional time than their peers nationwide — and the state's educational outcomes rank near the bottom nationally. Research consistently shows less instructional time means less learning. Kotek told the state school board, "We have to get more instructional time," and repeatedly talked about "stopping the slippage" of class time. The slippage continues.
How did the governor's office inflate the impact? A top Oregon Department of Education official testified that nearly half of districts, serving more than half of students, would have to extend calendars or publicly explain why not. But the state's preliminary tally counted districts that would have extended calendars on their own anyway, plus districts that lost time to severe weather, furlough days, equipment failures, and safety threats — time the vast majority of districts automatically restore the following year regardless of any executive order.
The order's only real teeth lie in its second directive: eliminating the longstanding policy that lets districts count up to 30 hours of parent-teacher conference time and 30 hours of teacher training toward required instruction time. Whether the Oregon Board of Education will actually do that — and how fast — remains unclear.
Meanwhile, parents in Texas are demonstrating what it looks like when communities actually demand change instead of settling for press releases. Texas lawmakers banned cellphones and smartwatches during the school day starting in 2025-26, and individual districts are going further. Garland ISD limited screen time to one hour per day for students ages 2 to 5 and two hours for students 6 and older. Lockhart ISD voted to reduce screen time and create more time for outdoor play. Richardson ISD is now cutting back on "passive screen time" in the upcoming school year.
Scott Ricamore, a father of two elementary students in Richardson ISD, captured the plain common sense that Oregon's bureaucracy can't seem to muster: "We want them to understand how to use it. But what we don't want is for kids to be using a device all day for all their learning."
One university expert, Liz Kolb of the University of Michigan, argued that screen time quantity matters less than what students are doing on screens. Maybe. But parents on the ground see the distraction, the disrupted sleep, the stunted social growth — and they're acting on it without waiting for a governor to pretend she fixed something.
Kotek's order would be a stretch to claim as a major win on the campaign trail this fall. The real question is whether Oregon parents will keep accepting theater from their institutions while students in other states get something closer to accountability.
