Even after accounting for differences in poverty and race, Oregon’s fourth-graders ranked dead last among all 50 states in both reading and math, according to a 2025 Urban Institute analysis of national test scores. Behind Alabama. Behind West Virginia. Behind Mississippi. Behind every state Oregon would never think to compare itself to. 

In April, I heard New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s lecture at the University of Oregon about bridging America’s political divisions. I wrote to him afterward about what I’ve been arguing in this space for a year: Oregon’s gap between progressive intentions and public outcomes.

He wrote back: “The metric of progressivism should be progress, and in education we’re regressing. We have failed our state’s kids, and that’s not Trump’s fault. That’s our fault.”

In 2019, Oregon passed the Student Success Act — a tax on business sales and the largest tax increase in state history — to fund its schools.

The tax generates $1.5 billion a year for education, pushing Oregon’s per-student spending above the national average. Yet the return on our investment has been questionable, as Andy Saultz, dean of Lewis & Clark’s graduate school of education, recently observed: “We’ve seen large investments in schools that have not been met with increases in achievement.”

Kristof is right: The metric should be progress. Oregon has poured record money into its schools and built no system for asking whether the spending produces learning. The state measures compliance, not outcomes — and treats the investment itself as the achievement.

During February’s legislative session, the Oregon Education Association opposed Senate Bill 1555, which would have scrapped the state’s 25-year-old school-funding model and overhauled how funding is allocated to Oregon schools.

The Legislature’s own independent review had found the model too narrow to account for Oregon’s neediest students. The union’s lead lobbyist, Emily McLain, told the Senate Education Committee the short session was the wrong venue. The committee chair, Sen. Lew Frederick, a longtime union ally, killed the bill.

Then Oregon Education Association went further. Myrna Muñoz — an Oregon Department of Education employee with a sister in the Oregon House and other sisters who work for the union — launched a primary challenge against Sen. Janeen Sollman, a Democrat who co-sponsored SB 1555 and had already crossed the union on a bill granting unemployment pay to striking workers.

Oregon Education Association gave Muñoz’s campaign $10,000. Senate leadership backed Sollman with $40,000 in combined donations from Ways and Means co-chair Kate Lieber, Senate President Rob Wagner and Majority Leader Kayse Jama.

State Sen. Mark Meek, a Gladstone Democrat and one of the few legislators willing to criticize union publicly, told the Oregon Journalism Project: “Who’s responsible for the lack of performance in schools? They are, not us.” Everyone in Salem, it seems, has someone else to blame.

The accountability Oregon refuses to adopt has been tested elsewhere. In his February 2026 column, Kristof named the reforms Mississippi used to climb from the bottom of the rankings to the top: holding back third-graders who can’t read at grade level, A-through-F school report cards, state takeover of failing schools. The mechanisms work because Mississippi enforces them. Alabama and Louisiana followed the same playbook with similar results. Black fourth-graders in Mississippi now outscore their peers in Massachusetts.

But the sequence mattered as much as the list. Rachel Canter founded Mississippi First and led the state’s reform effort for 17 years. In a new Progressive Policy Institute report, she documents the sequence: Mississippi built its accountability system — straightforward A-through-F school grades instead of complex grading systems, state takeovers of failing districts — before passing its literacy law. Oregon has never graded its schools. A state that adopts Mississippi’s reading reforms without the accountability system has not copied Mississippi.

Oregon Education Association has fought the tools that produced Mississippi’s results — mandatory testing that tracks student growth, funding reform that directs money to the neediest schools. But strong teachers’ unions coexist with strong outcomes in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois. So the obstacle isn’t organized labor, but Oregon Education Association’s own institutional priorities.

Oregon’s education failure has many authors — a district in Eugene that has churned through five superintendents in six years, a state pension system carrying nearly $30 billion in unfunded liabilities, declining enrollment statewide. But only one of them can kill a bill in committee.

A union opposing a school-funding reform bill is lobbying. A committee chair killing it is governing. A primary electorate that fails to hold both accountable is enabling.

Parents deserve a public accounting of which schools produce results and the freedom to choose one that does. As long as Oregon Education Association holds a veto in Salem, they will get neither.

Joshua Purvis is a civic strategist in Eugene. He is co-chair of the city of Eugene’s MUPTE Review Panel and co-chair of the Southeast Neighbors Association.