Education Denial in Salem

The poor performance of Oregon public schools might reach a critical mass. Like crime, inflation, and Joe Biden’s cognitive capacity, three issues last year where the stark reality overpowered the coordinated message of America’s knowledge-worker elite that controls the commanding heights of media, government, academia, and corporate bureaucracies, this issue might be a game changer. Actually, even those three issues didn’t get much traction here, but maybe Oregon public education outcomes will. The disconnect between Oregon’s nation-leading spending on K-12 education and its nation-lagging results might break through into policy decision-making.

The first stage is denial. “Crime is just a form of protest against social injustice.” “Inflation is transitory.” “Joe Biden is as sharp as ever.” Willamette Week has some nice reporting on the denial coming out of Salem in the wake of the legislative testimony of Dr. Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Dr. Roza testified in detail how Oregon has been outspending most states in education over the past decade while trailing most states in academic achievement.

If you are not a regular reader of Willamette Week, you’re missing out on some of the best reporting in Oregon. Education reporter Joanna Hou nicely captures the governing establishment’s reaction to this overwhelming evidence of misgovernance:

• State Rep. Susan McLain (D-Forest Grove) took issue with using tests as the single measure for comparison. Students might have grown, she says, outside of testing environments.
• State Sen. Lew Frederick (D-Portland) said he has relatives in Mississippi who are educators who say the state’s progress is overhyped. He urged his colleagues not to overreact.
• State Sen. Janeen Sollman (D-Hillsboro) was equivocal, noting Oregon’s success in some academic measures but not others.

Ultimately, these arguments confirm the problem rather than deny it. When Representative McLain harkens to some other unknown success that went unmeasured, the very act of making such an assertion without evidence is an admission she didn’t have anything more convincing to say.

When Senator Frederick downplays a state like Mississippi, which spends far less on education than we do, yet has literacy rates the Senator would be touting as success if Oregon taught reading as well as Mississippi, he’s indirectly highlighting the essence of the problem. How high teachers are paid to teach reading cannot overcome the inherent pathologies of teaching reading the wrong way. Mississippi had a strong phonics emphasis long before Oregon discovered the Beaver State’s fashionable rejection of that tried and true pedagogy has been a tragic mistake. I wrote about this back in 2022. Why are so many Oregon public schools still not teaching reading correctly, and why is Senator Frederick minimizing the significance of such an unforced error?

When Senator Sollman equivocates on academic success, she’s pointing to another problem. In addition to teaching the most important skill, like reading, wrong, Oregon wastes a lot of money funding our public schools’ emphasis on things other than academics. Oregon does even worse, relative to the nation, in math. What academic measures was she referring to? Here are the slides from Dr. Roza’s testimony. Read them yourself. There are none. Spending more per pupil is not, itself, an academic success. Perhaps that’s why Willamette Week used the word “equivocal” to describe Senator Sollman’s denial of this very serious policy failure.

This is a policy problem, not an intractable problem. Oregon has so many things going for us relative to Mississippi. It should be easier for us to be a relative national success story in education, not such an outlier of decline. The policy solution is obvious: school choice. Until schools compete for that money, they will have little incentive to improve performance.

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