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In a tense discussion of education funding in a state where dismal student outcomes are drawing scrutiny, experts from the American Institutes for Research took center stage Wednesday night at a joint meeting of the Oregon House and Senate education committees.
They were there to answer hot-button questions about a report they produced to reevaluate a measurement called the Quality Education Model. The QEM projects the cost to adequately educate students statewide. AIR’s commissioned report suggests Oregon needs to spend a lot more on education than the QEM asks for to produce better student outcomes.
The report is a win for school funding advocates, who have long cited the Legislature’s inability to meet the QEM’s funding recommendations as evidence lawmakers are to blame for poor performance in schools. In their report, AIR’s researchers wrote that the QEM, which hinges on achieving just one outcome—a 90% graduation rate for Oregon students—was too narrow in its scope. In contrast, their own model factored in graduation rate, reducing chronic absenteeism, and improving reading and mathematics results.
Factoring in more outcomes—and making costs more reflective of different schools in Oregon that have higher poverty—meant the price tag soared. In 2022–23, Oregon would have had to make up a funding gap of $2.8 billion to catch up to AIR’s numbers. That’s about $1.87 billion more than the QEM would have required: $935 million for that year.
But the conclusion AIR reached was perplexing in the context of another informational session the Joint Ways and Means subcommittee on education heard in late January. There, legislators were presented with education spending charts by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University that mapped increased Oregon education spending since 2013 alongside student outcomes, which had decreased during the same period of time.
Since that presentation, first reported by WW, the gap between school funding and student results has been the talk of Salem.
Edunomics Lab director Dr. Marguerite Roza says the charts suggest Oregon is not spending as intentionally as it could. But her charts have faced nationwide criticism in recent weeks by a number of other education experts, as EdWeek has reported. Those experts were joined by AIR researchers, including Dr. Bruce Baker, an education finance scholar at the University of Miami, who says the graphs have been presented out of context.
“What it takes to actually estimate the spending associated with achieving a given cost target across different types of students and districts…. The methods and data used by Edunomics to do that are wholly insufficient for making any judgment in that regard,” Baker said at the hearing.
Roza told WW that the charts did not mean to suggest that increased education spending would not result in better outcomes. “Edunomics Lab hasn’t suggested that money doesn’t matter, or that more funding wouldn’t help in Oregon,” she says. Still, “when comparing Oregon to other states, it is hard to ignore that other states have been more successful in leveraging incremental dollars to drive progress for students.”
She added those targeted investments could be in programs like high-dosage tutoring, better teacher training, or reducing chronic absenteeism.
Other education experts EdWeek interviewed have highlighted the same argument that the Oregon Parent Teacher Association put forward in its 10-page criticism of Roza’s data, which is that outcomes from the COVID pandemic might have been even worse without increased spending.
“To improve the disheartening status, we fully support efforts to identify and integrate national and international educational best practices in Oregon to address the pressing needs of our students,” Robin Remer, the PTA’s vice president of legislation, wrote in a follow-up email to WW.
But Remer blamed lack of spending as the reason Oregon can’t start falling in line with Roza’s goals: “The choices before many Oregon school districts right now based on the governor’s recommended budget are not good choices; they are dire and heartbreaking,” he says.
In their presentation to lawmakers this week, Baker and the AIR team were inclined to agree with that assessment. Setting higher goals requires more money, he argued—and the more ambitious the benchmarks are, the worse the state’s funding looks.
In follow-up emails with WW, Baker was also harsher in his criticism of Edunomics. He wrote that any analyst “would or should know how [the charts] will be misinterpreted and misrepresented in political context.” The data, he adds, provides little insight on whether, how or how much money ultimately matters for student outcomes.
“We were trying to walk Oregon legislators through a report which applies rigorous methods for addressing those very questions,” he wrote. “The question of whether more spending is needed depends on the outcome goals. Higher outcomes will require more spending. It’s also the case that higher-need districts will require more funding to get kids to the same outcomes.”
Even with the Edunomics charts under attack, it seemed many legislators had questions about increasing the efficiency with which state dollars are spent. Several asked how the AIR model factored in effective spending from school districts.
Baker says AIR’s projections can help analyze differences in effective spending between districts in Oregon. Once the model generates the cost prediction for each school to reach their desired outcomes and those numbers are met, Baker says the team can look at how the ones that spend more efficiently organize their resources.
“Our model, a cost function model, does not directly describe how dollars are used by particular schools,” said Jesse Levin, a co-author of the AIR report. “But it can tell you a great deal about what the distribution of efficiency is across schools and then you can use that as a jumping off point to investigate further.”
Legislators, on the whole, expressed their interest in spending more effectively.
“Even if a district or entity feels like they’re making a best choice for their local values, it might be not necessarily aligned with the strategic best practice,” Rep. Courtney Neron (D-Wilsonville) said at the hearing. “But we know that what we spend money on really matters, and we’re trying to figure out ways that we can be most efficient with our state dollars.”
Sarah Pope, executive director of Stand for Children Oregon, a nonprofit that advocates for public education, says she was skeptical of the AIR report and presentation.
Pope says AIR researchers told legislators that Oregon had spent more on education and didn’t have the outcomes to show for it, and then expressed reasoning that they should continue to spend more. She, like Roza, called for a more data-driven approach.
“You saw legislators go, how, if we spend more, are we likely to get a different return on that, or different outcomes?” Pope says. “Isn’t the definition of insanity when you do the same thing, the exact same thing again? I saw skepticism, and I was really proud.”