What Oregon spends on schools, and what it gets

Start with the good number, because it is real and it gets skipped. Oregon's four-year graduation rate hit 83 percent, the highest it has ever been. Teachers and students did that. Anyone who tells the Oregon education story without that number in it is not telling it straight.

Now the harder one. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the one test given the same way in every state, Oregon fourth graders average 207 in reading against a national 214. Eighth grade math is 268 against 272. The state spends roughly $18,000 per student, close to double what it spent twenty years ago, and lands around 20th in the country on spending.

So Oregon is graduating more students than ever and those students are reading below the national average. Both things are measured, both are true, and the space between them is the question. It is possible that more students are crossing the line. It is also possible the line moved. Nobody is served by refusing to ask which.

This is not an argument about teachers. Rep. Elmer trained as one, taught, and started a school, and the position she has published is that teachers need the tools and the standards to use them. The failure, if there is one, is in the system that surrounds the classroom rather than in the person standing in it.