Late last month, when newly released national test scores showed Oregon elementary and middle school students ranked near the bottom of the barrel in math and reading, the silence was palpable.
The state Department of Education did not issue any press releases about the results of what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card, scores that were otherwise scrutinized from coast to coast for any sign that students were recovering from pandemic setbacks.
Gov. Tina Kotek, too, was quiet.
Organizations representing the state’s school board members and school administrators said nothing.
There were crickets from the Oregon Education Association teachers union, which has long railed against drawing any conclusions about school performance based on test scores.
Instead, the focus from many of those advocates is to gear up for a huge push to convince lawmakers to pump more money into Oregon schools, beyond the $11.3 billion proposed by Kotek for the next two years. Their aim is to stave off looming cuts as districts prepare to shed counselors, educational assistants and librarians to reflect decreased student enrollment and rising labor costs.
In the past eight years, their efforts paid off: Oregon super-sized spending on education, including from the landmark $1 billion a year corporate tax designed to fuel student success and via more than a billion dollars in pandemic relief funds. Yet it has seen test scores drop steadily since 2017, exacerbated by the pandemic’s toll, eventually landing in the nation’s basement.
Those results have fueled a simmering counternarrative that the fundamental problem isn’t a lack of money: It’s how Oregon schools spend it, amid a vacuum of direction and lack of insistence on best practices from the state Department of Education and the governor’s office.
Well, no kidding. The problem is that the Democrats in control of the legislature and the Oregon Department of Education probably couldn’t do a better job of torpedoing public education if they tried. Hope springs eternal, but Oregon has failed a generation of kids by refusing to hold parents and students accountable, allowing virtually unrestricted cell phone use, letting disruptive students run rampant, and more.