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.

“Something has to change in Oregon schools,” Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University told the Joint Ways and Means Subcommittee on Education last month. “More money did not produce any kind of bumper increase in student outcomes. ”

The discussion isn’t just academic. Students’ eighth grade math scores correlate directly with whether they graduate from high school, whether they go to college and how much they earn over their lifetimes, Roza said.

“Not only that, they are a predictor of the state’s future economy. If Oregon is hoping to spur economic growth going forward, this is a four-alarm fire,” Roza added.

It’s not that more money doesn’t matter. In fact, rigorous research shows that when spent correctly, it can have a significant impact, particularly for low-income students, said Matt Chingos, the vice president for education data and policy at the left-leaning Urban Institute. He and his team analyzed the national test score data and found that, when adjusted for household income and demographics, Oregon elementary and middle school students scored lower than those in any other state on reading and math.

Any curious person, he said, would look at such results and wonder what can be learned from states like Florida and Mississippi, which spend significantly less per pupil than Oregon and get much better results for students of color and those from poorer families.

“If you’re a state that’s spending a lot and getting relatively poor outcomes, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror,” he said.

States that are successful, Roza told The Oregonian in a follow-up interview, have a laser focus on clear academic goals, are upfront about disappointing results, require data-informed course corrections and are willing to pay stellar teachers more to work in high-needs schools.

Oregon checks none of those boxes.

Instead, the state allows each of its 197 school districts to decide how best to spend the bulk of their state funds, save for carve-outs on early literacy and career-technical education. State regulators collect basic metrics — a time-consuming, sometimes duplicative chore for districts — but provide minimal oversight and guidance.

Republicans seized on Roza’s message, casting it as a reason to support vouchers so parents can pull their children out of the public school system in favor of private or religious alternatives on the state’s dime.

Such a proposal will go nowhere in Oregon, given Democrats’ political control and the strength of the state teachers union. But some Democrats are signaling that they are ready to talk about how to get greater bang for the state’s buck.

“There is a bigger sense right now than I have ever seen before about accountability and adding guardrails when it comes to renewing policies that cost money,” said Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham, co-chair of the education budget subcommittee. Ruiz is a former school board member at the perennially low-performing Reynolds School District; his own preschooler will start public school in Gresham in a few years.

He’s not the only state official calling for more accountability for school spending and performance. In 2022, auditors at the Secretary of State’s office released a “ Systemic Risk Report ” on schools. It warned in no uncertain terms that if Oregon continued its lax approach to failing to set clear goals for schools on student performance, the state was at risk not only of wasting taxpayer dollars but failing a generation of children. The three-week-long teacher strike in Portland in 2023 further magnified the issue.

In response, the Legislature spurred the Oregon Department of Education to launch an accountability task force in 2024. Its 40 participants met nearly weekly over a year — late on Friday afternoons, when attendance was often spotty — ostensibly to come up with clear recommendations for fixing the system once and for all. Instead, multiple participants describe rambling meetings that were heavy on discussion of hopes and dreams for the state’s children and light on actual policy fixes.

The panel’s final report generated polite but pointed questioning from lawmakers on the House Education Committee. Democrats and Republicans alike said they wanted more specifics.

Kotek’s office has since stepped in and is working to develop “a set of administrative actions to ensure the Oregon Department of Education also holds up its end of the bargain and operates efficiently,” a spokesperson for the governor said last week.

Through a spokesperson, Kotek said that the state has correctly prioritized increasing school spending over the past few years, including with the big corporate tax hike to boost schools.

But, Kotek continued via her spokesperson, “Investments cannot be a blank check. When Oregon’s education system is not delivering for students, we cannot keep doing the same thing and hope for different results.”

The Oregonian obtained an excerpt from her forthcoming plans for administrative actions that suggest that the governor — whose primary focus in her first two years in office has been housing — wants to see clearer statewide goals for what students should learn and how that is measured.

Right now, the loudest message to school districts from the state is to focus squarely on graduation rates, said Andrea Castañeda, superintendent of the Salem-Keizer schools, Oregon’s second largest district. That is virtually the only metric that has shown a notable increase over the last decade, even as Oregon’s four-year graduation rate remains well below the national average,

In light of the dispiriting test results, Castaneda said, a reset is in order. She suggested intensified focus on third and fifth grade reading and eighth grade math alongside the four year graduation rate.

Based on the excerpt of Kotek’s critiques of the current system, the governor also appears likely to push for neutral, third-party evaluations of what the state’s education spending is delivering. Right now, districts submit reams of data to the Oregon Department of Education, which collates that information but does minimal evaluation and intervention even when red flags pop up.

That’s not a recipe for success, education policy advocates say.

“Where districts are getting [promising] outcomes and making progress, we should be looking more deeply at what it is they are doing,” said Whitney Grubbs, executive director of Foundations for a Better Oregon, an influential schools nonprofit. “And in places where there is the same level of investment but outcomes are not happening for kids, we need a set of progressive interventions that are supportive and research-based.”

In the meantime, school advocates’ collective pitch is clear: To thrive, Oregon schools need smaller classes, more support for special education students and better pay to attract and retain experienced teachers. Yes, they say, there are fewer students in Oregon public schools but their needs are more acute.

Roza, meanwhile, pointed out that research and other states’ experience suggest putting money into highly effective reading instruction, summer learning for the most at-risk students, intensive small-group tutoring and extra time in the school day for math all pay off. So do prioritizing putting a high performing teacher at the front of every classroom over backfilling a school with new teachers and a host of helping adults, she said.

State Rep. Susan McLain of Forest Grove, a former teacher, pushed back on Roza’s presentation, saying that tests do not capture a school’s effectiveness and may not reflect a student’s growth.

“The only time [students] might not have shown that skill was on that test,” she said. “But if you give them a different way to demonstrate what they know, they have an opportunity to do that. They may be more relaxed. They may have a better understanding because there’s a dialogue about what we are asking them to do.”

Senate education chair Lew Frederick of Portland, a former spokesperson for Portland Public Schools, backed her up. He’s been around long enough, he said, to see many an educational rescue plan come and go.

“We have a lot of things that are working” in classrooms across the state, Frederick said. “We need to add those things that are working, rather than just say. ‘Let’s throw it all out.’”