Dear Oregon,
Ronda Fritz taught elementary school in North Powder. She had done what the profession asked. She earned an education degree, then a master’s in reading. She used the methods her professors taught her.
But those methods had not adequately prepared her to teach struggling children to read.
They did not help her son, either.
Trent was in third grade and could not read. He later told the Oregon Journalism Project he would “forget” his book so he would not be called on to read aloud. As an adult, he said, “I shaped my entire life in a way to avoid the things I struggle with.”
Today, he asks a heartbreaking question:
“What could I have been?”
That question captures the human cost of an institutional failure Oregon had years to confront.
Oregon’s latest test results show only 41.5% of third graders tested proficient in English language arts. Nearly six in ten are not meeting the standard.
How did we get here?
For years, education institutions moved away from explicit phonics toward approaches like whole language and balanced literacy.
But here’s the problem:
We already knew phonics worked.
Modern reading science has expanded our understanding of how children learn to read, but the fundamental idea was not discovered yesterday: children benefit from explicit instruction connecting letters and sounds.
So why did institutions move away from proven fundamentals without compelling evidence that the replacement would work better? More importantly, where was the accountability when the warning signs appeared?
Oregon can’t claim nobody warned us.
In 2013, a Secretary of State audit found Oregon lacked an independent check that newly licensed teachers were adequately prepared. Public colleges of education were not routinely tracking how graduates performed once they entered classrooms. In 2014, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that none of the Oregon elementary programs it evaluated met, or nearly met, its standard for scientifically based reading instruction. Nationally, 34% did.
That should have triggered a fundamental examination of the system.
Oregon should have dug into what was failing, challenged assumptions about how reading was being taught, examined teacher preparation, and made the changes the evidence demanded. Instead, the response was largely incremental: requirements, reports, compliance plans, and oversight layered onto the existing system.
Oregon managed the problem when it needed to reform the system.
Compare that with Mississippi.
In 2013—the same year Oregon’s audit was sounding alarms—Mississippi confronted its own reading crisis. Its reforms changed teacher training, deployed literacy coaches, screened children early, provided intervention, and established a reading requirement for promotion from third grade.
The results were not instantaneous, and no single policy deserves all the credit. But the gains are real. In 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th nationally in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By 2024, it ranked ninth.
Mississippi saw failure as a reason to reform. Oregon treated failure as something to manage.
That distinction goes far beyond education.
When something isn’t working in Oregon, the instinct too often is to create a task force, commission a study, write another report, add rules, appropriate more money, and increase taxes.
But process is a tool. It isn’t an outcome.
Oregon has certainly spent money addressing reading. Lawmakers allocated about $90 million to Early Literacy Success school-district grants. In 2024–25, districts reported $60.6 million in grant spending, including $13.3 million for professional development and coaching. Grantees reported 5,373 K–5 teachers received coaching aligned with the science of reading.
Retraining teachers may be necessary. But retraining is not the same thing as fixing the system that failed to prepare them.
The question should be:
What have we learned, and what have we fundamentally changed because of it?
Eastern Oregon University shows change is possible.
Ronda Fritz eventually earned her doctorate and helped rebuild the university’s reading coursework. She later opened a reading clinic that has trained more than 700 current and future educators.
Ronda didn’t simply study the failure. She learned from it and changed what she was doing.
Oregon government should demand the same of itself.
This is bigger than education. Too many government institutions measure success by money spent, programs created, and boxes checked.
We should measure government by whether it solves the problem.
That is the kind of accountability Oregon Freedom Coalition was created to pursue. We examine government, follow the results, and ask three basic questions:
Did it work? If it didn’t, why not? What needs to change?
Those questions matter because reports and processes alone do not produce reform. Understanding failure, learning from it, and changing what isn’t working can.
Ronda and Trent experienced both sides of that failure: one entered a classroom without the preparation she later concluded she needed; the other moved through school without learning to read.
Our teachers, taxpayers, and especially our children deserve a system capable of learning from failure.
No Oregon child should spend the rest of his life wondering:
“What could I have been?”
That’s the Diehl.