“I think everyone knows that Himself and I transferred our kids to the next neighborhood school over from us — we cross one busy street instead of two this way, and it’s equal distance from our assigned school.

(If we lived one block north we’d be assigned to the school we’re now attending.)

Our neighborhood school is a special-focus, with a school-within-a-school. But if you’re not interested in the special focus (we weren’t. It wasn’t a good fit for our daughter. It was a frickin’ disaster, to be honest) the neighborhood school gets starved out by the “special” school and chaos and resentment reign.

I’m with Nicole — the boundaries need to be redrawn.”

It was from this post.

I know Wacky Mommy posted it in a comment, and I think I did too. They’re in the archives somewhere. We haven’t tried to hide the fact that we’ve used the transfer policy.

The point is, once again, that this is not about “personal choice”. This is about district policy. The district has set up a self-reinforcing cycle that makes transfers the obvious choice for many families. I don’t blame anybody for doing what they think is best for their children.

But I advocate ending that policy, and making things better for everyone, even if it curtails my own personal choice.

First remove any legitimate reason for transfer from one neighborhood school to another (lack of programs, class size, etc.), then remove the ability to transfer.

I don’t want to get into who’s got kids at what school or why. That’s too distracting from the policy issue at hand, and it lets the school board off the hook for their policy that bleeds our poorest neighborhoods of nearly $40 million a year.

Steve, thanks for responding. I didn’t see in the link for the posting you provided where you mention that your own family takes advantage of this policy. Yes, let’s do keep civility towards families that have taken advantage of this policy. I agree that for the system as a whole, neighborhood schools should be supported and the policy should be slowly disabled. However, I have taken advantage of the school transfer policy, and most likely will do so again (if the option is still available) when we have to reapply to stay in the same cluster at the middle school age (which is not Jefferson, no).

Amanda’s position on open transfers has never been clearly defined (she’s never defended neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers outright, for example), and I think she’s coming around to a position on funding equity that we can all agree with. I’m willing to give her more time to get it right once she gives it more thought. If not, well, at least she’s thought about it more than anybody currently on the city council.

All people are reasonable up to a point, Steve, but some people are just plain wrong on some issues. School choice is one of those issues, and Amanda Fritz is just plain wrong in her support of it.

And Marcia, as I said, “white flight” is a metaphor. It has elements of both classism and racism in it. However you want to define it, it’s alive and well in Portland.

Private schools play a similar role and now charter schools are beginning to also. I imagine the attraction is you feel you have some degree of control in a charter school about how it is run etc.

So I believe we are left with only two options, dump the transfer system and shut down the escape clause (this would mean focus options and charters) or fix the poorer schools. I think most people who are involved in the school district politics would choose the later. That is why I have always supported it as the main approach.

That said, they aren’t about to do either. And I know someone is thinking — oh, yeah, Beaverton. They do it.

But Portland is totally different than Beaverton, the difference in who attends a school in outer SE is incredibly different than who attends a school in the NW. I am not joking when I refer to kids whose mom’s are in jail and whose dads are on drugs and contrast them to kids whose moms are doctors and dads are lawyers. In Beaverton there is much less difference.

So fix the schools which aren’t working, particularly at the middle grades, and get the resources to those children who deperately need them.

I am sure if we just sat down with SFC and PSF and explained it to them they would be more than happy to transfer a lot of the district resources away from their schools into the lower economic areas.

In Amanda’s defense, if she didn’t see the value of schools to the future of Portland, she wouldn’t be bringing this stuff up. I appreciate the work she’s doing to get a better statement on education into visionPDX.

My point is that while she cares at a high level, she isn’t attentive enough to how the policy she meekly defends is screwing over our red-zone neighborhoods.

I think she’ll “get it” in time. She’s a reasonable person. I imagine she doesn’t want to get too far out ahead of the issue, lest it become a liability in her potential city council race.

Regarding “white flight”, that’s a term I’ve used frequently to characterize the wholesale abandonment of lower class schools by Portland’s white (and sometimes black) middle class. It’s a metaphor, of course. Few white families actually flee the city, but many flee the neighborhoods in which they live when it come to “choosing” a school.

Another great post, Steve. You’re on quite a roll.