I can't speak for the cities. At least in rural oregon where some of my family resides there's a few competing factors.
For starters, services in rural oregon are terrible. If you aren't in portland, living in nearly any part of oregon translates into being multiple hours of driving to get to any sort of medicine (for example). This applies to pretty much all sorts of desirable things you might want.
But further, even though rural oregon is isolated, the housing prices there (and everywhere) remain at extremely high levels. Due to some of the geography of oregon (lots of hills and mountains) many of these small communities simply have no location where you could build a house even if you wanted to. Unless a city decided to eminent domain some land/a home to build housing (fat chance) the current supply is the maximum supply.
That makes it really hard to hire competent teachers. In many cases you are asking them to do 1, 2 hours, or longer commutes just to teach (if they aren't an established community member. Which is increasingly rare. Most people looking for an education want out of these rural communities). Often times, these rural communities are less destinations for teachers and more stepping blocks for new teachers to then get hired in more desirable locations. That results in high levels of turnover which kills student/teacher relations.
My guess on why cities suffer is a bit different. In my own city (not oregon), it's because of overcrowding, plain and simple. The kids are packed in like sardines. I'd imagine building new schools in a place like portland would be pretty difficult and expensive. So you end up with a large and growing population and limited school infrastructure to handle the ever growing pop. Decreasing the student:teacher ratio is simply a must if you want better results.
My childhood school (rural) ranked as one of the best in Idaho and even was nationally ranked. How did it get there? A couple of factors. For starters it's well positioned, there's a smaller city nearby with a decent amount of services and a larger city just a 45 minute drive away. That makes it pretty easy to find teachers. The student/teacher ratio was almost absurdly low (10:1 in my class). Finally, all the teachers were themselves long term community members. My highschool math teacher taught everyone in my family and some of their kids. There was a relationship there that's hard to recreate.
The schools we played sports against were almost universally in a worse state. Particularly the most isolated schools which were 3 hours from nearly service.
As an addendum: there is an exception to my theories that I really have no good explanation. There was a native american reservation school which was close to the same city we were. It had more money than god thanks to the casinos and had some of the nicest facilities with long-term teaching staff. Yet their student outcomes were absolutely awful. Very few went on to higher education. My best guess is that while the school was the gold standard in terms of funding, the tribe's families weren't so lucky, having a much lower SES score than my school.
For starters, services in rural oregon are terrible. If you aren't in portland, living in nearly any part of oregon translates into being multiple hours of driving to get to any sort of medicine (for example). This applies to pretty much all sorts of desirable things you might want.
But further, even though rural oregon is isolated, the housing prices there (and everywhere) remain at extremely high levels. Due to some of the geography of oregon (lots of hills and mountains) many of these small communities simply have no location where you could build a house even if you wanted to. Unless a city decided to eminent domain some land/a home to build housing (fat chance) the current supply is the maximum supply.
That makes it really hard to hire competent teachers. In many cases you are asking them to do 1, 2 hours, or longer commutes just to teach (if they aren't an established community member. Which is increasingly rare. Most people looking for an education want out of these rural communities). Often times, these rural communities are less destinations for teachers and more stepping blocks for new teachers to then get hired in more desirable locations. That results in high levels of turnover which kills student/teacher relations.
My guess on why cities suffer is a bit different. In my own city (not oregon), it's because of overcrowding, plain and simple. The kids are packed in like sardines. I'd imagine building new schools in a place like portland would be pretty difficult and expensive. So you end up with a large and growing population and limited school infrastructure to handle the ever growing pop. Decreasing the student:teacher ratio is simply a must if you want better results.
My childhood school (rural) ranked as one of the best in Idaho and even was nationally ranked. How did it get there? A couple of factors. For starters it's well positioned, there's a smaller city nearby with a decent amount of services and a larger city just a 45 minute drive away. That makes it pretty easy to find teachers. The student/teacher ratio was almost absurdly low (10:1 in my class). Finally, all the teachers were themselves long term community members. My highschool math teacher taught everyone in my family and some of their kids. There was a relationship there that's hard to recreate.
The schools we played sports against were almost universally in a worse state. Particularly the most isolated schools which were 3 hours from nearly service.
As an addendum: there is an exception to my theories that I really have no good explanation. There was a native american reservation school which was close to the same city we were. It had more money than god thanks to the casinos and had some of the nicest facilities with long-term teaching staff. Yet their student outcomes were absolutely awful. Very few went on to higher education. My best guess is that while the school was the gold standard in terms of funding, the tribe's families weren't so lucky, having a much lower SES score than my school.