Oregonians believe in public education.
And we put our money where our values are. K-12 schools claim the largest share of Oregon’s general fund, and our spending per capita ranks 15th in the nation, according to educationfunding.org.
But as the latest statewide test scores make clear, that investment is failing to yield the outcomes parents want for their children.
By almost every meaningful measure, we are among the worst states in America when it comes to educating our kids.
The facts are damning.
Oregon comes in last among the 50 states for fourth grade reading scores, adjusted for demographics, according to the Urban Institute, and 49th for eighth grade math.
One in three students is chronically absent, state figures show. That also places us among the nation’s worst.
It doesn’t add up. After a decade of economic growth and a new tax lawmakers passed in 2019, school funding is strong. Yet test scores have gotten worse, not better. States that long trailed Oregon—Louisiana, Alabama, even Mississippi—have surged ahead. Mississippi now ranks No. 1 in fourth grade reading.
In many states, Oregon’s numbers would spark outrage. Here, they barely register a shrug.
At the Oregon Journalism Project, we wanted to do more than speculate about why so many of our tax dollars do so little for the 550,000 kids in Oregon’s public schools. In the months since OJP received its nonprofit status in May, our team has been talking to people inside and outside of Oregon, researching best practices and trying to develop a better understanding of the crisis in Oregon’s public education system. Not just an urban crisis, it ranges from Roseburg to Redmond to La Grande.
Today, we are launching a series of stories we will publish over the coming weeks and months to answer questions that too many in power have directly avoided:
Why are Oregon’s schools failing?
Who is responsible for the failure?
What are the consequences of failure?
And, most importantly, how do we dig ourselves out of this?
If you are a student, parent, teacher or former teacher, school administrator or policymaker with ideas on how to answer these questions, we want to hear from you. Please share your thoughts and how to reach you by clicking on this link.
Christine Pitts (Whitney McPhie)
Hotseat: Christine Pitts
By OJP Staff
November 12, 2025
Christine Pitts says there’s a simple reason why Oregon kids don’t know how to read. No one is checking how they’re taught.
Pitts, 38, a Portland-based education policy expert, is president and CEO of Open School Inc., a nonprofit that runs an alternative high school, provides extensive student mentoring, and trains tutors in early literacy instruction.
Pitts grew up in rural Oregon and earned her teaching degree and a master’s in education from East Carolina University. She taught grade schoolers in the Greenville, N.C., area for several years before moving back to Oregon over a decade ago and earning a doctorate in education policy from the University of Oregon.
A mother of four, including a child with dyslexia, Pitts has studied the science of reading and how it connects with state policy. She has also advised state and local education agencies on reforming their systems of assessment and accountability.
That experience left Pitts with a fundamental criticism: She had been taught a flawed way to teach kids how to read in graduate school and Oregon lacked an effective statewide solution to solve its reading crisis.
“Few people understand how schools actually work—and how they could work better—like Christine Pitts,” John Topagna, a senior policy adviser at ECOnorthwest, says. “Her experience spans classrooms, districts, and national policy tables, giving her a 360-degree view of what drives student success.”
Pitts describes what's wrong with letting local school districts decide how to teach reading.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
OJP: Oregon has the worst reading scores in the nation. How have we reached this point?
Christine Pitts: The lack of centralization and systemization.
We have 197 school districts in Oregon that run things pretty much their own way. How does local control fit into test scores?
With local control in Oregon, a lot of people think that, in law, Oregon has to follow local control. That is not true. It is a decision. It could stop immediately, today, right now, without any change in state law. It’s a culture shift. It’s a decision about how we’re designing policy and our follow-through in implementation.
Let’s talk specifically about reading. Is there a consensus on how to best teach kids to read?
Yes. Once there were two different sides of this debate. “Balanced literacy” versus the “science of reading,” which is explicit, direct instruction, because the way that kids learn to read is, they’re not going to pick it up like oral language processing. You actually have to teach them the phonemes, fluency and core components, and that has been documented by brain science and the science of learning.
So there is no debate anymore—it’s definitively settled?
Yes.
But some experts tell us Oregon elementary schools don’t teach the science of reading across the board. Why haven’t we seen widespread adherence to the reading science curriculum?
In Oregon, once a teacher is in the classroom teaching, they’re kind of just teaching what they want to teach, what they know. I have not seen any evidence of some wide evaluation tool to make sure that our teachers are teaching the curriculum. We don’t really value or consistently implement classroom observations.
Part of it is also that we have teaching colleges in the state who have maybe galvanized themselves ideologically. They are stuck in their ideas about how to teach reading, and they’re kind of being stubborn about not wanting to see the other side.
Can you name one specifically?
Oregon State University has been probably one of the last colleges to really come around to this and start implementing the science of reading in full. [The nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality’s 2023 report card gives the OSU’s master’s degree program in education an F grade for instruction in the science of reading-based principles.]
Pitts warns about falling prey to "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
If you’re a fourth grader who can’t read, can you recover?
Yes! We are not at a hopeless point. I think Mississippi is a great example.
You make the point that, in Oregon, we expect less of our public school students. What do you mean by that?
What does it mean to get a high school diploma in Oregon if we have an 80% graduation rate, but only 40% of our fourth graders can read and 30% of our kids are chronically absent? Does that mean that getting a diploma just means you’re showing up and attending class and then getting passing grades?
What can people do about it?
This needs to be a public discussion at every city club across the state. It can’t just be an urban, I-5 corridor conversation. And I actually think that in the rural communities, we see pockets of innovation that are incredibly powerful. Corbett, I’ve heard, has a great, innovative charter school model at the high school level.
Is the Oregon Department of Education equipped to deliver on the interventions and the accountability that you are touting and saying that Oregon needs, or does it need to be someone else?
ODE has to do it. That’s the only way it’s going to get done. The governor has a really powerful role as our chief education officer here, and she should be using the bully pulpit to set the bar and the broad agenda. And ODE needs to have the infrastructure inside to deliver on that accountability model.
Is she using the bully pulpit to your satisfaction?
I think she’s trying, but I think we could go a lot further.
What would it look like for ODE to do that?
I know, in the past, we’re really, really scared to have any negative consequences for a district, so we always focus on coaching, which is great. But if the coaching does not also involve really pragmatic discussion about what improvements need to be done, in what timeline, and with what urgency, it’s not going to do anything.
Would ODE take over a failing district or school, as Texas and other states have done on a case-by-case basis?
It would never happen here.
Many of these states that you’re pointing to as models spend less per student than Oregon does. So the issue is not money?
I think the level of spending is not the problem. I think where we are spending it is actually what we should be looking into. And we started this conversation talking about the science of reading. The fact that we’re just now fully investing in early literacy across the state, and yet Mississippi did this 13 years ago. That’s an example of how we just lag in our ability to come along with pretty typical national trends around education.
But why are we so slow? We pride ourselves on being pioneers.
I don’t think we’re having honest conversations about how we’re really doing.
Pitts says the teachers union has dragged its feet on implementing the science of reading.
Oregon passed an accountability law this summer, SB141, that puts millions of dollars into tracking how districts teach their students and how they progress, and creates a coaching program for districts that don’t meet goals. Thoughts?
We have an accountability bill that’s kind of being slow-walked out in the typical Oregon fashion, which is, you know, we’re going to circle and walk around this problem or this plan over and over again until it kind of dissolves away. My kindergartner started school during the pandemic, and this accountability bill will not be in full implementation until she is in 12th grade.
Who benefits from the status quo?
I’m wondering the opposite, who cares whether we’re successful? Where’s the rallying cry? This is what I’m looking for: people who are actually going to care that we are unsuccessful right now. When I see the headlines, “We made a 1 percentage point gain, so the tides are turning,” and I’m like, wait a second.
For many years in Oregon, there was a lot of discussion and talk about just about everything else that happens in a school, which is all important stuff—mental health providers being there for the kiddos; social, emotional learning; interpersonal skill development. But sometimes what we weren’t allowed to talk about was actually academic excellence. I think it’s going to be critical for us to actually value academic achievement again, which is a really important part of our economic success in our communities.
You have talked about the Southern Surge—Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and others—are near the top now in reading scores, focusing on the science of reading and other measures. They have historically been run by Republican governors and legislatures. So, to what degree is politics a factor here?
Unfortunately in Oregon, we let our political ideology drive our decision-making. I don’t think it has to. I think what we see in Republican states generally is that they’re willing to take bigger risks with their dollars. They’re willing to set standards high and keep them there consistently over time. And that’s something that, you know, from a management perspective, is very straightforward: just to set a goal and then drive that way and we’ll all be rowing in the same direction.
This is where I often get in trouble for bringing up the great George Bush quote about “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” When I first heard that line, that hit me in the gut. I can speak about this as an affluent, white teacher, who taught Black and Brown kids and some students from poverty. Maybe I have this bias where I think, OK, I’m going to lower the bar here because I want these kids to be successful today. And then all of a sudden, we’ve lowered the bar so much, not just in my classroom, but as a system, and that makes us all feel OK, right? But actually, no, it’s an injustice.