[sullivanmatt]

I'm no longer living in Oregon but remain closely connected. I can't opine to the behavioral challenges, but in terms of the raw score drop I think there's also the one-two punch here of:

1) Schools were closed from Covid for a long time. Not here to debate whether that was good/bad/otherwise, but it is factually accurate to say Oregon schools remained remote longer than almost any others in the country, and we now know the duration of closure had pretty direct influence on learning outcomes.

2) In the past decade the Portland metro area has seen an influx of migration from economically disadvantaged families who are immigrants / first generation citizens / non-native English speakers in the home. Students from these families are lagging significantly behind their peers in terms of post-Covid recovery, which if I recall correctly, follows national trends as well.

[HDThoreaun]

Portland and oregon more generally is nowhere close to the top in terms of percentage of residents who are poor immigrants. Even if it is the immigrants bringing down scores(my experience in k-12 was that the immigrants were the hardest workers and even though they had a lot of responsibilities/struggles to overcome they were never the worst performers) why is oregon worse than areas with more of them?