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Oregon is mentioned as an example of the general decline through the US. The article isn't really about Oregon specifically:

    Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have
    increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In
    actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math
    and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point
    decline—the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more
    and achieving much less.

I think that Oregon teacher salaries have gone up quite a bit more than the national average in the last 10 years, less so in the last couple.

My youngest child is just starting high school at the moment, and for the last several years much of math education seems to have been farmed out to really crappy software and short video clips running on chromebooks. She'd really be suffering without parental intervention.

All the fiascos in education raise a simple question. Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale, then spreading the improvements incrementally as they continue to be validated.

And why isn't this experimentation being done all the time, not randomly but competitively/cooperatively between school districts and individual schools? Each making small changes toward getting better results and sharing what they have learned. With most cross adoption happening naturally.

Creating and managing the context for the latter is what people with power should be doing. Not making top-down decisions devoid of the bottom-up wisdom and visible exemplars that big changes need to succeed.

Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational....

Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)

Good grief! The bush admin tried to getting better scores by standard testing ... as a scheme in some ways by-pass local control by trading improvement for cash or removing cash.

Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.

I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.

Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:

- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)

- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.

- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.

- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.

- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.

- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.

Spending is the issue. That money is spent on something, and it isn't (all) teaching either.

The chart in the link below shows employee vs students headcounts over 6 years. Even though student rolls went down almost all employment in the school system went up. Do we really need a +22% increase in Student Support Services when there are fewer students? Even teachers (only?) went up by 2.8% according to this (and again, students went down)? And why would librarians of all positions seem to be the ones whose positions were cut?

Basically, 'education' is nothing more than a jobs program for the politically connected, as clearly the focus is not on kids. And education is safe, because it's hard to argue against it, even if you're not talking about actual teachers.

Honestly I would expect if funding were cut, and particularly the admin, support, 'paraprofessional', and other non-teaching staff were fired, you'd find those test scores approach the pre-pandemic levels.

Will that happen? Of course not. These are politically connected people after all. We should all be angry.

https://x.com/johnfaig/status/2019108852365656477?s=20

Careful looking at their graphs. If you don't keep in mind that they are showing changes you could get a wrong impression. For example on the page they link to to get data from every state, https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ , it shows the graphs for Massachusetts and Mississippi side by side.

In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores).

That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph.

But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.

Almost no education research questions the quality of the students ability to learn. Students with an ability to learn will do so regardless of the resources expended, the ones that don't won't. Trillions wasted over the decades due to a preference to ignore reality.

Focusing solely on the school isn't going be the answer. Students spend more time not at school. That has an effect.

Spending millions on tablets, chromebooks, promethium boards and otherwise does not improve learning. shocked

What could possible explain this drop over the last ~10 years?

Unrelated: schools with effective phone bans are seeing improved grades and less absences.

Where is the money going? Isn't the average teacher pay down?

You can go to the "nations report card" and play around with the NAEP score stats: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...

For me, two things pop out in particular.

Firstly, in math, if you look at how the percentiles break down, it seems clear that while there an overall drop in performance from 2020-2023, it also seems clear to that the top end of doing relatively ok. For example, at the 75th percentile, the we are basically flat from 2008 to 2020 (before dropping in 2023) - 2008: 305, 2012: 309, 2020: 307, 2023: 301 (net -4). This contrasts with the median which went from 2008: 283, 2012: 287, 2020: 282, 2023: 274 (net -9).

This implies to me that whatever flaws are in the overall system (at least pre COVID), the top end was relatively durable.

Secondly, if you go the "student group scores" section and click through all of the different sub-groupings, the only group that looks to have an overall flat score at all is "Private: Catholic".

I think the combination of the upper end being pretty durable, as well as the higher scores in the only "self selecting" category in the dataset may support what a lot of people tend to grumble about - the distribution of domestic situations is not favorable.

Why was the headline changed? The story isn't about Oregon.

Maybe the Oregon people spent the money on art and music and sports and weren't trying to optimize some third-party academic's budget-to-test-scores efficiency metric.

Hoover Institute propaganda.

https://www.hoover.org/profiles/education-next

This is not surprising. It has been well known for a while that the amount of money given to the school systems has very little to do with students learning.

I think, in general, that the whole system is backwards and instead of giving money to school administrations to teach, we should be trying to figure out what are the obstacles to students learning.

Have we looked at nutrition? Economic crises lead to sharp spikes in poor nutrition especially when social safety nets have been stripped back. A generation whose growth is stunted by malnutrition is a plausible outcome of "tough love" welfare reform. A lot of people either lost their jobs or had to quit to take care of their children during the crisis. And there was a much degraded safety net to catch them.

Maybe we should copy what China is doing?

Their class sizes are much higher - 40 kids for 1 teacher. But there is a lot more discipline, the teachers teach only a few classes, spending most of their time on curriculum preparation, and the children have 3 hours of vigorous exercise everyday.

News flash: being a slave to the teachers union don’t give you better teachers

OMG. It's the !?%!@# pandemic. All education statistics measuring across 2020 are horrifyingly polluted. Kids who stayed at home for a year are behind relative to the same cohorts before or since, AND YET WE KEEP FLOGGING THESE NUMBERS as if they're signal and not noise.

I've seen this on the front page of HN like three times now.

It should be well-known by now that throwing money at education doesn't solve a thing.

How are they gonna fix education, if they cannot even grasp:

    If the method does not work, try a different method.

This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things.

It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:

* New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.

* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.

* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.

I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.

Not to make a broad generalization, but all spend is not equal. If schools redirect that spend into administrative salaries I would not expect to see any positive effect on scores.

Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read in the past about about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators being transmitted to students.

>> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm

>> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf

The cost to produce many things in American is too high given the relative strength of the US dollar. If our corporations need educated workers, they can just import them, like we import everything else. Why would US workers be any different than cars or widgets? They aren’t. The labor market is globalized too. Everything is precisely as the economics dictate. If our businesses couldn’t so easily import workers, we’d see massive improvements in NAEP. We act as if things are how they were. It’s all very tiresome.

The reasons are obvious but acknowledging them is taboo. It's much easier and politically convenient to blame everything on funding, despite the fact that some school districts have the budget of a small country.

Title has been editorialized.

In terms of the continuing "education depression" as discussed by this article, we still haven't gotten rid of "No child left behind". Of course kids are less educated than they used to be, you don't need to be educated to graduate.

Maine specifically is an important example. There has been no real change in education policy in the state, yet there is still significant reduction in outcomes.

The much maligned unscientific way of teaching reading was adopted in Caribou Maine far far far earlier than educational outcomes started dropping. The neighboring town did not adopt that way of teaching reading. They did not see different outcomes. IMO, the outcomes clearly follow the generation of kids growing up in a school system where you cannot be held back for not doing the work.

The entire time education outcomes have been going down, state highschool graduation rates have been going up. This is not because teachers like giving good grades to kids who don't learn things.

"No child left behind" is a disaster.

I know many people in the state who are looking to become teachers. Everybody always reminds them how terrible an idea that is for them in particular. Schools cannot hire people, because even with "Higher" salaries, the salaries are still bad. They have mostly been adjusted for inflation, so it seems like they have gone up a lot, but they have been adjusted from a point when they were already terrible and not a good salary.

Meanwhile, my mother is a 40 year teacher here. The rich neighborhood school she switched to pays her well, but provides zero institutional support. They did not allow her to purchase anything. No textbooks, no test generators, no enrichment videos, nothing. They don't support her at all.

She's one of the best educators I've ever known and every student she has taught agrees. She's so effective at being an educator that students who come from shitty families and cause disruption in other classes choose to spend time in her classes, and choose to spend time in her study hall to do their homework and become better students. This is true for thousands and thousands of students who went through her classes. She is the sole reason some northern maine kids know how to do math. She's a french teacher.

Some thoughts:

- Apathy is rampant in most workforces, presumably also teachers.

- In unionized workplaces where greater performance != greater pay, and greater pay is guaranteed regardless... No surprise there wasn't better outcomes.

- Not sure if this site has such a bent, but to me if the funding was going to rise 80% (twice as fast as inflation), it would have been nice to also see what market forces could have done via a voucher system.

Edit:

It will be really interesting to compare oregon public outcomes to something like this school in Austin https://nypost.com/2026/01/30/business/new-65k-private-schoo...

From my experience raising kids in public schools, adding money to a bad school only makes it worse.

Reminder that correlation!= causation