Feb. 3, 2025
Declining test scores: Scores for Oregon students on standardized tests continue to be among the nation’s lowest. On Jan. 29, the National Center for Education Statistics released results for the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a biennial set of math and reading exams administered to students in grades four and eight. Oregon students scored lower relative to their peers in other states in three of the four exams than they did in 2022. Only in eighth-grade reading did Oregon students gain.
Oregon’s rankings: Oregon fourth-grade scores ranked 48th in math and 46th in reading. Eighth-grade scores ranked 38th in math and 31st in reading.
It gets worse: The Urban Institute recalculates NAEP scores for each state to account for student demographics, including poverty, race and native language (read about the methodology in The New York Times here). The exercise (see graphs to the right) places Oregon last in both fourth-grade exams, 49th in eighth-grade math and 47th in eighth-grade reading.
Spending-performance disconnect: As the graph above shows, per-student spending in Oregon has increased substantially in recent years even as NAEP scores have dropped. The graphic ends with 2022, but the story in 2024 would be the same. Oregon’s fourth grade math average rose by one point in 2024, to 229. According to the National Education Association, meanwhile, Oregon’s estimated per-student spending for the 2023-24 school year rose to $16,507, or 22nd nationally. From 2023 to 2024, Oregon’s spending per student increased by 4.65%, the eighth-highest rate in the nation.
Why it matters: Oregonians deserve to see better outcomes for the billions of dollars they spend every year on public education. These include businesses, which pay a premium for education through the corporate activity tax and through the relinquished corporate kicker. Any business will tell you that customers will walk, if they can, when prices go up and service levels go down.
The takeaway: Oregon’s education system is not performing well, and identifying the source of the problem is necessary to improve it. As the numbers show, Oregon’s problem isn’t funding. Rather, Oregon’s public education system does not make effective use of the money available to it.
Read more: Understanding how Oregon funds public schools is difficult. To learn more, see Oregon School Funding: Sources and Distribution, a 2024 report provided by the OBI Research and Education Foundation.
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