Oregon’s teacher licensing agency picks its next leader

The Oregon agency that oversees

educator licensing and teacher preparation programs

has tapped the assistant superintendent of a Polk County school district as its next leader.

Rachel Alpert will replace Melissa Goff, a former education adviser to Gov. Tina Kotek and the former superintendent of Greater Albany Public Schools in the Willamette Valley who has been the interim executive director of the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission since late 2023. Alpert starts her new role on June 30.

Most recently, Alpert served as the assistant superintendent and director of human resources at the Dallas School District in Polk County. Over the course of her career, she has also been an elementary school principal and a special education teacher.

Alpert will be the agency’s third new leader in the last two years. The small state agency wields an outsized impact on the state’s 60,000-plus educators and is funded mainly by the licensing fees paid by them or by their employers on their behalf.

Goff, who did not apply for the permanent job. previously told The Oregonian/OregonLive that in the last few years, the agency has reduced the amount of time it takes to process new educator licenses and renewals and prepared for an overhaul of the technology used to process both applications and complaints about potential teacher misconduct.

But Alpert will need to deal with the backlog of requests to investigate alleged educator misconduct, leading to long wait times. In 2024, Goff has told lawmakers, 463 such cases were referred to the agency, up from an average of 211 cases a year from 2020 through 2023.

It takes TSPC on average about 13 months to complete an investigation, Goff has said, though some can stretch on for far longer, especially if an educator challenges an investigator’s findings.

Oregon is one of only eight states that has a completely independent agency overseeing teacher licensing, approving education preparation programs and investigating complaints against educators.

A

bill to merge the agency

, which has a biennial budget of about $20 million, into the state Department of Education has been sitting in limbo in the Legislature’s budget committee for the last two months. Its prospects for moving forward this session are unclear.

In a presentation to legislators in February, Goff estimated that if the agency stayed autonomous, it would take an additional $1 million in funding to make a dent in its investigations backlog. Merging with the Oregon Department of Education, she estimated, would cost about $1.9 million.

The agency is also charged with approving educator preparation programs at Oregon colleges and universities, a

contentious area in recent years

as the state has worked to change the way future elementary teachers are prepared to teach the state’s youngest children to read, efforts that have been met with some pushback.

— Julia Silverman covers education for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach her via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com

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