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I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly why Oregon has some of the worst scores in the country (I believe it ranked dead-last this year when adjusted for socio-eco

I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly why Oregon has some of the worst scores in the country (I believe it ranked dead-last this year when adjusted for socio-economic factors). When I see what's going on around me, I can only think it's somewhat related to broken family's and undisciplined kids. The stuff that my kids come home and tell me is happening in school is pretty mind blowing. I've also noticed a complete reversal on any form of discipline. There's not even detention anymore. It seems in the name of acceptance we're taking in all kids, even ones exhibiting extremely aggressive behaviors, and then doing absolutely nothing to curb those behaviors.

ajross 1y ago
I have kids in Oregon public schools. The schools themselves (in the sense of classroom education) are fine, for the most part. But education is very underfunded (especially relative to the tax base). So kids like mine do just fine, but anyone who needs outreach or extra support tends not to get it. That hurts badly on aggregate test scores, but not so much on college acceptance performance. So it's hard to correct, politically. And no, it's not the lack of discipline. In fact my experience is that the peer culture around my kids is much, much safer and respectful than what I saw growing up. And I went to what at the time was the consensus-best public school system in the country!
- megaman821 1y ago
  Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi? Some of the worst performing schools in my area have the most funding per pupil. A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents.
  - ajross 1y ago
    > Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi? No, but they outperform Mississippi too. The article is about the first derivative, not the signal.
  - danans 1y ago
    > Some of the worst performing schools in my area have the most funding per pupil. > A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents. You are describing the situation often occuring in poverty, crime, and violence plagued communities (of which the US has many). In those situations schools need more funding than a more well off area because they are doing more than education: they are default community social support centers, providing food, mental health support, and sometimes even shelter for children who are facing horrible scenarios in their communities and homes. Pulling funding from those schools without addressing the societal issues will make things worse, not better. Right now, the school is the point of social service delivery.
- Duwensatzaj 1y ago
  > education is very underfunded Wrong. https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/02/05/dramatic-increases-in-school-spending-have-not-improved-outcomes-for-oregon-students/ https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/02/05/dramatic-incre... > Students in Oregon saw their reading and math scores decline over a decade when the state’s spending on schools rose by 80%, an analysis by Georgetown University shows.
  - dmix 1y ago
    Another data point > For decades, taxpayer spending on K-12 education has consistently increased, outpacing inflation by 2.5 times over the past 50 years. But while most people believe that more funding should lead to better outcomes for students, the evidence indicates that higher spending alone has had little impact on improving student achievement. https://myelearningworld.com/us-educational-spending-50year-analysis/ https://myelearningworld.com/us-educational-spending-50year-...
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    Spending more on administration is not the same as spending more on education. It's the same problem as colleges right now: The superintendent making $250k a year in a school system where the teachers cannot afford to pay their rent. The average teacher salary in Oregon is $45k. It has NOT increased by 80% in that time frame. Nobody can afford to be a teacher, certainly not people with a valuable level of time, effort, productivity, and success.
jobs_throwaway 1y ago
How do they look in terms of raw scores? Those are the rankings that matter.
- lolinder 1y ago
  No, those are the rankings that are immaterial to measuring the success of a school system. Raw score rankings do not as a rule measure the output of schools, they measure the involvement of parents, which will always have a much larger impact on child outcomes than the schools do. Schools are an important marginal add-on that we want to make better, and in order to measure their value add we have to find ways to account for parental involvement and remove it as a factor. Socioeconomics is a passible proxy for involvement.
sullivanmatt 1y ago
I'm no longer living in Oregon but remain closely connected. I can't opine to the behavioral challenges, but in terms of the raw score drop I think there's also the one-two punch here of: 1) Schools were closed from Covid for a long time. Not here to debate whether that was good/bad/otherwise, but it is factually accurate to say Oregon schools remained remote longer than almost any others in the country, and we now know the duration of closure had pretty direct influence on learning outcomes. 2) In the past decade the Portland metro area has seen an influx of migration from economically disadvantaged families who are immigrants / first generation citizens / non-native English speakers in the home. Students from these families are lagging significantly behind their peers in terms of post-Covid recovery, which if I recall correctly, follows national trends as well.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Portland and oregon more generally is nowhere close to the top in terms of percentage of residents who are poor immigrants. Even if it is the immigrants bringing down scores(my experience in k-12 was that the immigrants were the hardest workers and even though they had a lot of responsibilities/struggles to overcome they were never the worst performers) why is oregon worse than areas with more of them?
miltonlost 1y ago
Oregon is 2 different states: there's the west coast and big cities (Portland, Eugene), and then there's the East Half, which is rural and underfunded. So you have highly funded schools and then underfunded.
cogman10 1y ago
I can't speak for the cities. At least in rural oregon where some of my family resides there's a few competing factors. For starters, services in rural oregon are terrible. If you aren't in portland, living in nearly any part of oregon translates into being multiple hours of driving to get to any sort of medicine (for example). This applies to pretty much all sorts of desirable things you might want. But further, even though rural oregon is isolated, the housing prices there (and everywhere) remain at extremely high levels. Due to some of the geography of oregon (lots of hills and mountains) many of these small communities simply have no location where you could build a house even if you wanted to. Unless a city decided to eminent domain some land/a home to build housing (fat chance) the current supply is the maximum supply. That makes it really hard to hire competent teachers. In many cases you are asking them to do 1, 2 hours, or longer commutes just to teach (if they aren't an established community member. Which is increasingly rare. Most people looking for an education want out of these rural communities). Often times, these rural communities are less destinations for teachers and more stepping blocks for new teachers to then get hired in more desirable locations. That results in high levels of turnover which kills student/teacher relations. My guess on why cities suffer is a bit different. In my own city (not oregon), it's because of overcrowding, plain and simple. The kids are packed in like sardines. I'd imagine building new schools in a place like portland would be pretty difficult and expensive. So you end up with a large and growing population and limited school infrastructure to handle the ever growing pop. Decreasing the student:teacher ratio is simply a must if you want better results. My childhood school (rural) ranked as one of the best in Idaho and even was nationally ranked. How did it get there? A couple of factors. For starters it's well positioned, there's a smaller city nearby with a decent amount of services and a larger city just a 45 minute drive away. That makes it pretty easy to find teachers. The student/teacher ratio was almost absurdly low (10:1 in my class). Finally, all the teachers were themselves long term community members. My highschool math teacher taught everyone in my family and some of their kids. There was a relationship there that's hard to recreate. The schools we played sports against were almost universally in a worse state. Particularly the most isolated schools which were 3 hours from nearly service. As an addendum: there is an exception to my theories that I really have no good explanation. There was a native american reservation school which was close to the same city we were. It had more money than god thanks to the casinos and had some of the nicest facilities with long-term teaching staff. Yet their student outcomes were absolutely awful. Very few went on to higher education. My best guess is that while the school was the gold standard in terms of funding, the tribe's families weren't so lucky, having a much lower SES score than my school.
ianbicking 1y ago
There's definitely a phenomena I've seen especially post-Covid where parents and schools just let a child... not learn. Not attend school, not attend classes. Substitute virtual education which is just a pretend education.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

ajross 1y ago

I have kids in Oregon public schools. The schools themselves (in the sense of classroom education) are fine, for the most part. But education is very underfunded (especially relative to the tax base). So kids like mine do just fine, but anyone who needs outreach or extra support tends not to get it. That hurts badly on aggregate test scores, but not so much on college acceptance performance. So it's hard to correct, politically. And no, it's not the lack of discipline. In fact my experience is that the peer culture around my kids is much, much safer and respectful than what I saw growing up. And I went to what at the time was the consensus-best public school system in the country!

megaman821 1y ago
Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi? Some of the worst performing schools in my area have the most funding per pupil. A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents.
- ajross 1y ago
  > Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi? No, but they outperform Mississippi too. The article is about the first derivative, not the signal.
- danans 1y ago
  > Some of the worst performing schools in my area have the most funding per pupil. > A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents. You are describing the situation often occuring in poverty, crime, and violence plagued communities (of which the US has many). In those situations schools need more funding than a more well off area because they are doing more than education: they are default community social support centers, providing food, mental health support, and sometimes even shelter for children who are facing horrible scenarios in their communities and homes. Pulling funding from those schools without addressing the societal issues will make things worse, not better. Right now, the school is the point of social service delivery.
Duwensatzaj 1y ago
> education is very underfunded Wrong. https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/02/05/dramatic-increases-in-school-spending-have-not-improved-outcomes-for-oregon-students/ https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/02/05/dramatic-incre... > Students in Oregon saw their reading and math scores decline over a decade when the state’s spending on schools rose by 80%, an analysis by Georgetown University shows.
- dmix 1y ago
  Another data point > For decades, taxpayer spending on K-12 education has consistently increased, outpacing inflation by 2.5 times over the past 50 years. But while most people believe that more funding should lead to better outcomes for students, the evidence indicates that higher spending alone has had little impact on improving student achievement. https://myelearningworld.com/us-educational-spending-50year-analysis/ https://myelearningworld.com/us-educational-spending-50year-...
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  Spending more on administration is not the same as spending more on education. It's the same problem as colleges right now: The superintendent making $250k a year in a school system where the teachers cannot afford to pay their rent. The average teacher salary in Oregon is $45k. It has NOT increased by 80% in that time frame. Nobody can afford to be a teacher, certainly not people with a valuable level of time, effort, productivity, and success.

jobs_throwaway 1y ago

How do they look in terms of raw scores? Those are the rankings that matter.

lolinder 1y ago
No, those are the rankings that are immaterial to measuring the success of a school system. Raw score rankings do not as a rule measure the output of schools, they measure the involvement of parents, which will always have a much larger impact on child outcomes than the schools do. Schools are an important marginal add-on that we want to make better, and in order to measure their value add we have to find ways to account for parental involvement and remove it as a factor. Socioeconomics is a passible proxy for involvement.

sullivanmatt 1y ago

I'm no longer living in Oregon but remain closely connected. I can't opine to the behavioral challenges, but in terms of the raw score drop I think there's also the one-two punch here of: 1) Schools were closed from Covid for a long time. Not here to debate whether that was good/bad/otherwise, but it is factually accurate to say Oregon schools remained remote longer than almost any others in the country, and we now know the duration of closure had pretty direct influence on learning outcomes. 2) In the past decade the Portland metro area has seen an influx of migration from economically disadvantaged families who are immigrants / first generation citizens / non-native English speakers in the home. Students from these families are lagging significantly behind their peers in terms of post-Covid recovery, which if I recall correctly, follows national trends as well.

HDThoreaun 1y ago
Portland and oregon more generally is nowhere close to the top in terms of percentage of residents who are poor immigrants. Even if it is the immigrants bringing down scores(my experience in k-12 was that the immigrants were the hardest workers and even though they had a lot of responsibilities/struggles to overcome they were never the worst performers) why is oregon worse than areas with more of them?

miltonlost 1y ago

Oregon is 2 different states: there's the west coast and big cities (Portland, Eugene), and then there's the East Half, which is rural and underfunded. So you have highly funded schools and then underfunded.

cogman10 1y ago

I can't speak for the cities. At least in rural oregon where some of my family resides there's a few competing factors. For starters, services in rural oregon are terrible. If you aren't in portland, living in nearly any part of oregon translates into being multiple hours of driving to get to any sort of medicine (for example). This applies to pretty much all sorts of desirable things you might want. But further, even though rural oregon is isolated, the housing prices there (and everywhere) remain at extremely high levels. Due to some of the geography of oregon (lots of hills and mountains) many of these small communities simply have no location where you could build a house even if you wanted to. Unless a city decided to eminent domain some land/a home to build housing (fat chance) the current supply is the maximum supply. That makes it really hard to hire competent teachers. In many cases you are asking them to do 1, 2 hours, or longer commutes just to teach (if they aren't an established community member. Which is increasingly rare. Most people looking for an education want out of these rural communities). Often times, these rural communities are less destinations for teachers and more stepping blocks for new teachers to then get hired in more desirable locations. That results in high levels of turnover which kills student/teacher relations. My guess on why cities suffer is a bit different. In my own city (not oregon), it's because of overcrowding, plain and simple. The kids are packed in like sardines. I'd imagine building new schools in a place like portland would be pretty difficult and expensive. So you end up with a large and growing population and limited school infrastructure to handle the ever growing pop. Decreasing the student:teacher ratio is simply a must if you want better results. My childhood school (rural) ranked as one of the best in Idaho and even was nationally ranked. How did it get there? A couple of factors. For starters it's well positioned, there's a smaller city nearby with a decent amount of services and a larger city just a 45 minute drive away. That makes it pretty easy to find teachers. The student/teacher ratio was almost absurdly low (10:1 in my class). Finally, all the teachers were themselves long term community members. My highschool math teacher taught everyone in my family and some of their kids. There was a relationship there that's hard to recreate. The schools we played sports against were almost universally in a worse state. Particularly the most isolated schools which were 3 hours from nearly service. As an addendum: there is an exception to my theories that I really have no good explanation. There was a native american reservation school which was close to the same city we were. It had more money than god thanks to the casinos and had some of the nicest facilities with long-term teaching staff. Yet their student outcomes were absolutely awful. Very few went on to higher education. My best guess is that while the school was the gold standard in terms of funding, the tribe's families weren't so lucky, having a much lower SES score than my school.

ianbicking 1y ago

There's definitely a phenomena I've seen especially post-Covid where parents and schools just let a child... not learn. Not attend school, not attend classes. Substitute virtual education which is just a pretend education.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]