Oregon Pays Dearly for Poorly Performing Schools

Earlier this week, WalletHub, a personal finance website, produced a relatively simple comparative study of public education in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This research calls into question the linear relationship between school funding and academic performance.

Oregon spends $16,000 per pupil on public education. That puts the Beaver State just above the median for state spending, but, using an index of quality metrics, WalletHub finds Oregon far below the median in school performance. We lag at 45th place.

Looking at the scatter plot, we are in the northwest quadrant, the points colored red. Those are states that divert more than the average amount of resources from their economy into their schools yet have below-average performance. In contrast, the points colored green in the southeast quadrant are significantly more efficient educators, spending less than average per pupil to deliver higher than average academic results.

Just eyeballing this data, my guess is that a least-squares fit would show an upward-sloping line, but it would entail a low coefficient of determination (or R-squared). That means expenditures do have some predictive value, but the impact of education spending is smothered by other factors.

Oregon needs to figure out what those other factors are. Solving that policy question will benefit Oregon’s children more than diverting additional money from their household budgets.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.