One of the most puzzling things about Vicki Phillips’ agenda at Portland Public Schools was the way her policies either contradicted or competed with one another. “School Choice” (note the capitalization) was a held so dearly, that it may have cost the district $1.1 million in federal grant money.

With open transfers causing massive divestment in North and Northeast Portland, school closures were inevitable. Unfortunately, one of the schools on Vicki’s chopping block was Applegate Elementary, which was one recipient of a $5.2 million US Department of Education grant awarded to help desegregate the Jefferson cluster.

Without the efforts of Lynn Schore, a Neighborhood Schools Alliance activist, PPS would have happily swept this under the carpet. But Lynn was dogged in filing and following up on the Freedom of Information Act request that brought this to light.

Schore’s work has exposed yet again that an open transfer policy is at odds with other district goals, such as strong neighborhood schools and ending racial segregation. The sad fact is that even with Phillips gone, we’re stuck with a strong “School Choice” bias in our administration and, evidently, on the board (the degree to which we will discover as they take up the issue this fall).

PPS seems quick to dismiss this loss of money as a problem. “When the buildings closed, the need was reduced,” Willamette Week quotes an unamed PPS spokesperson as saying.

There’s a lot more to this story, and hopefully we’ll get more of it in the weeks to come. How was the rest of the grant spent, for example? Will this stick to Vicki Phillips, or did she cover her ass? If she covered her ass, who will take the fall? Stay tuned, folks, this could get interesting.

Thanks to reader Zarwen, who pointed out that my ZIP code map was a little fuzzy around the edges. This prompted me to spend some time collating the PPS attendance data by cluster. The result is a more accurate (if not substantially different) view of how Portland Public Schools’ open transfer policy has created a two-tiered school system by unevenly distributing state general fund money around the city.

The pattern is the same: massive divestment in working class and poor neighborhoods, with those funds reinvested in the hottest real estate markets of Portland.

(Click on image for full-size view.)

I’ve based this on the exact same as the ZIP code map, but I’ve reorganized the data by cluster instead of ZIP. Have a look at the reorganized spread sheet if you’re as nuts for numbers as me.

Methodology for this map is the same as for the ZIP code map. That is, for each school, I subtract the number of PPS students in the attendance area from the number of students at the school and multiply the result by that school’s budget per student. I then totaled these numbers for each cluster. For the sake of this map, I’ve included Benson in the Cleveland cluster, since it is physically within the attendance area.

So no new conclusions here, folks, but hopefully a more accurate view of what I’ve been talking about. The next time somebody talks to you about “failing schools” in our poverty-affected neighborhoods, you might want to point out that you get what you pay for.

Edited to say: Hey, happy Labor Day! I hope you got a paid holiday, and if not, I hope you got time and a half or a comp day. If not, well, damn, I’m really sorry. Anyway, here’s to all us working folks who create all the wealth in the world and keep the economy humming. Cheers!

Folks have asked me to enhance my neighborhood divestment map with demographic data and the locations of schools. Great ideas I intend to work on as I have time.

But I want to keep looking at another important angle for a bit. At the macro level, a level removed from the complicated business of actually educating the unwashed masses (a.k.a. tomorrow’s tax payers), it’s all about economics. Specifically real estate.

Our school board is vested with the power to distribute state general fund money. As I’ve clearly shown, they currently take tens of millions of dollars a year out of our poorest neighborhoods and lavish it on neighborhoods with some of the most expensive real estate in town. Any real estate broker will tell you that one of the critical elements in pricing and selling a house is neighborhood schools. (Even with open transfers, it’s rare to see a real estate listing that doesn’t mention schools.)

The bottom line, intended or not, is that PPS policy is enhancing property values in our richest neighborhoods and holding down values in working class and poor neighborhoods.

Everyone who owns property in Portland has a dog in this fight, even if they don’t have school-aged children.

So, who’s got the most interest in keeping the existing transfer policy? Those who own property in the green zone, with or without children in school.

(Click image for a larger view, including a key to school board members)

Here’s my map with school board members superimposed over the zones they live in and represent. No surprise that David Wynde and Bobbie Regan are mostly in the green. They were among Vicki Phillips’ strongest supporters, and seem to have bought in to her corporate grant-funded, market-based schools agenda more than anybody. Now that we see graphically how this policy benefits their net worth, it’s really no surprise they’ve been so unfailing in their support of it.

Most other board members have small pieces of green in their zone (with the notable exception of Dan Ryan), but the vast majority of green falls in Wynde’s and Regan’s zones.

What I’d like to see is the other board members making some noise about this. In the most cynical sense, shouldn’t they be trying to bring home some bacon, too?

Honestly, this is a fundamental issue of economic fairness. Beyond the school board’s duty to educate our children, they have an ethical responsibility to distribute state tax revenue in a way that provides the most benefit to the most people. Current PPS policy clearly benefits owners of property in the hottest real estate markets in Portland to the detriment of the rest of us.

Make no mistake, this is about class. How can a “progressive” city like Portland allow this to continue? I know folks who live in the green zone don’t have much interest in changing things, but what about everybody else? Will we continue to let the board steal this economic benefit from us without so much as a peep?

The debate we’ve begun having here about Portland Public Schools’ open transfer policy is just the leading edge of the storm. We can expect things to get even more heated as the board belatedly begins discussions about the segregated shambles created by open transfers and Vicki Phillips’ self-contradictory experiments in market-based school reforms. (Somehow, she actually seemed to believe that “School Choice” was a salve for racial segregation; common sense and statistics show us the opposite is true.)

One thing I would like to make crystal clear: I do not blame any family for choosing to transfer out of their neighborhood public school. This is a debate about policy, not individual choices.

The simple fact is that PPS policy encourages transfers, and every transfer encourages more. Many schools in our besieged red-zone neighborhoods have capture rates below 50%. Once the majority of neighborhood students have transfered out, it’s a no-brainer for other families. This is how the PPS open transfer policy feeds into a self-fulfilling cycle of “failing schools”. There is a clear “skimming” effect (documented by the Flynn-Blackmer audit), as middle-class families pull out, leaving poverty-affected students and teachers and administrators struggling to meet draconian goals set by No Child Left Behind.

If the school board actually considers curtailing neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers for elementary schools, as I have advocated, they must do this only as part of a larger re-examination of attendance area boundaries and special focus schools.

As we enter this debate city-wide, I urge everybody to treat each other with civility and respect, especially those who have taken advantage of open transfers to flee schools that are suffering from PPS policy. We are all in this together, which is one of the basic tenets of public education. Together, we can make our public schools work better for everybody.

I’m struggling to figure out why it is, and when it became so, that open transfers are sacrosanct in Portland Public Schools. Even after Multnomah County Auditor Suzanne Flynn and Portland City Auditor Gary Blackmer condemned the PPS policy in June of 2006, noting that “the transfer policy competes with other Board policies such as strong neighborhood schools and investing in poor performing schools,” Portland’s school leaders are still loathe to even discuss curtailing the open transfer policy.

Not surprisingly, my search for answers leads me to a familiar old nemesis: Vicki Phillips. In her response to the searing Flynn-Blackmer audit (included at the end of the audit report linked above), Phillips shows her cards early by capitalizing the phrase “School Choice.” This is, after all, a capital idea in the corporate-funded free-market schools agenda.

Phillips notes in her response “[t]he majority of our transfer requests are for transfers from one neighborhood school to another. A major consequence of this practice is the increasingly intense competition among neighborhood schools to attract students.” She prances around the issue, asks a lot of questions we already know the answers to (“Why do students and parents make these requests? …what is the impact on neighborhoods within our city of allowing the current level of transfers?”), but leaves off the most important one. If we have strong and equitable neighborhood schools, why do we need neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers?

This question is especially poignant given that the audit report “found that there was significantly less socio-economic diversity in schools than would be the case if all students attended their neighborhood school.” (Something I’ve pointed out myself on this blog.)

There is only one reason I can come up with for the sanctity of open transfers. Vicki Phillips was hell-bent on creating a model “free market” school district in Portland, with the generous help of the free marketeers at the Gates and Broad foundations. Unfortunately, what she left behind is a segregated, uneven hodge-podge of failing experiments. Her supporters on the school board invested a lot of political capital in supporting her, and are afraid now to admit they made a mistake.

I know it’s hard to admit when you’ve got it wrong, and the further you go down the wrong road, the harder it is to turn back. But it’s never to late to do so.

You don’t have to look far to see a school district doing it right, with results to show for it. In Beaverton, there are no transfers in elementary school. Every school has the same programs. Vicki wonders why students opt for transfers? I’ll tell you why: the schools in poor neighborhoods don’t have the options the richer neighborhood schools offer. It’s so flippin’ obvious, it’s an insult to even ask the question.

My proposal: start with the elementary schools. Equalize programs across all neighborhoods. Either every school has music, art and PE (or some combination) or none of them do. Curtail all neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers immediately. It is time to finally slaughter that sacred cow. Remove any legitimate reason to transfer, and then remove the ability to transfer.

Once we have equitable, integrated elementary schools, we can work our way up to middle schools and high schools, which are admittedly harder problems. But still, the same approach should be taken. It’s time to admit that the “free market” is no way to run our public schools. Chalk it up as a failed experiment and get back to what we know can work: equal opportunities and spending across all of Portland’s neighborhoods.

Note: this entry is part of a series on school funding inequity in Portland. Here I do further analysis on the data I originally reported in PPS Divestment by Neighborhood, Illustrated.

Anybody who pays attention to Portland Public Schools and doesn’t live in the “green zone” knows intuitively that PPS is a two-tiered, segregated system. But it is shocking and shameful to dig into the numbers and realize the full extent to which district policy robs literally tens of millions of dollars annually from our poorest neighborhoods and lavishes it on the richest, whitest parts of town.

The poor and working class neighborhoods of Portland showed some serious largess last school year, sending $32 million to the finest neighborhoods in town. The biggest single chunk of that came from 97217.

In 2006-07, Portland Public Schools open transfer policy encouraged a net 1,069 students to take $8.2 million out of that neighborhood. It would look far worse, if not for the fact that Beach’s Spanish immersion program put that school in the green column by $1.2 million. Also, the numbers for Ockley Green are a little fishy, showing over $800,000 in the green and a suspiciously low looking attendance area population of 327. (I’m not sure how PPS is figuring that number, since the K-5 attendance area overlaps with Chief Joseph. Perhaps that 327 is just grades 6-8.)

But the anomalies of Beach and Ockley Green can’t stanch the rivers of cash flowing out of Chief Joseph ($770,000), Penninsula ($191,000), or the biggest single contributor to our wealthier neighborhood schools, Jefferson High.

Yes, that’s right folks, the only majority-black high school in Oregon, serving the poorest neighborhoods of Portland, is giving $9 million annually to our whiter, richer neighborhood high schools across town.

How can we live with this? I’ve heard the argument that open transfers were needed to save the district. Maybe they did, but the district that survived is horribly disfigured, and the demographic trends have radically changed in recent years any way. More and more middle class families are moving into the red zone. It’s disgraceful what they will find when their children reach school age.

We need to scrap the open transfer policy now, before our schools are disfigured beyond recognition. We have the infrastructure and demographics in place for a first class, equitable, integrated school system in Portland. The fact that we have a two-tiered, segregated system is a result of policy. That policy must change.

Source: Portland Public Schools.

Thanks to those who pointed out typos in the graphic I posted the other day documenting Portland Public Schools’ diversion of state revenue from poor neighborhoods to rich ones. I have corrected it for proper labeling of 97219 and 97266. I appreciate any other corrections people notice. (I’m a one man, in-my-spare-time operation, working without the benefit of fact checkers and info-graphic artists, so I hope you’ll excuse the sloppiness.)

A reader e-mailed me to ask about 97219, one of the only West-side areas in the red. I’ll admit this surprised me. Here’s the break-down by school:

The entire ZIP is down just $1 million (compare to 97217, down $8.2 million), but still, I didn’t expect to see Wilson high in the red at all, even if t is only by less than half a million.

I’ll highlight other ZIP codes as I have time. In the meanwhile, I encourage you to download and study the spread sheet if you can’t wait.

I’ve written before about how Portland Public Schools’ open transfer policy causes segregation and divestment of state tax revenue from poor neighborhoods and funnels it to wealthier neighborhoods. I’ve called for a New Deal for PPS that will and redirect state funding to reinvest in these neighborhoods.

My harping on these points has caused some confusion. After all, doesn’t PPS actually spend more per student in the poorer schools? Yes, of course they do. But the point is that as families take advantage of PPS’s open transfer policy, millions of dollars follow them out of poorer neighborhoods, landing in the wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. Left in their wake are segregated schools with fewer “specials”, electives and extra-curricular activities, and under constant threat of closure, No Child Left Behind sanctions, and “reorganization” (read charter schools, alternative schools, and ill-advised grant-funded experiments).

Below is a map illustrating the reverse-Robin Hood pattern of divestment in Portland’s neighborhoods. Areas of red had a net loss of funding when compared to area PPS student population in 2006-07 (that is, of all PPS students living in the attendance areas of schools in that ZIP code, fewer actually attend schools in that ZIP code). The areas of green had a net gain. The darker the color, the greater the loss or gain. The gray areas were close enough to call “gray” (+/- $200,000 per year); 97204 (in white) has no schools.

(Click map for a larger view.)

The big winner in the PPS funding switcheroo is 97232, largely due to the presence of Benson and da Vinci (which, as special focus schools, do not have attendance areas). This part of Portland gained an additional $8.9 million in state funding last school year.

Other areas of note are 97214, the beneficiary of an extra $3.1 million, 97209 at $2 million, 97202 at $1.6 million, 97212 at $2 million, and 97215 at $1 million.

The losers, as most of us not in the “green zone” are already painfully aware, are stuck footing the bill. North Portland’s 97217 has bled the most, with a loss of $8.2 million last school year. Over in St. Johns, in 97203, they lost $5.7 million. Outer Northeast’s 97213 lost $1.7 million. Out in the nether-reaches of the east-side, 97216 lost $2 million, 97206 lost $2.7 million, and 97220 lost a whopping $4.3 million. There are more.

This is the legacy of Portland Public Schools’ open transfer policy: Segregated schools and divestment from working-class neighborhoods.

It’s time our school leaders acknowledge that this policy is flawed at best. Unfortunately, recent leadership foibles have only exacerbated the problems.

We have a unique opportunity in Portland, with its thriving and integrated urban neighborhoods, to create a truly equitable and integrated system of neighborhood public schools. The first step is to correct this funding imbalance, and guarantee that every neighborhood school offers opportunities on par with every other neighborhood school. Nothing less will do.

Source and methodology notes: All statistics are gathered from Portland Public Schools 2006-2007 Enrollment Profiles. (I have extracted the PPS data to a single spread sheet in order to more easily collate the data.)

School funding loss/gain is computed by subtracting the neighborhood PPS population from the number of students attending the school, then multiplying it by the budget per student at that school. For example, at Ainsworth, there were 509 students, 317 PPS students in the attendance area, and $4334 spent per student. So (509-317)*4334 = $832,128.

Schools like Marshall High, with multiple schools within the school, were calculated as follows. First I computed the total spent in the entire school by multiplying the number of students in each sub-school by that sub-school’s budget per student. Then I calculated a per-student budget for the entire school, and used that number as a multiplier of the difference between the total school population and the attendance area PPS population.

PPS does not publish funding per student for its charter schools, so it is impossible to include them in this study.

Net losses and gains do not add up to zero, because of differences in per-pupil funding by school.

I may have made some mistakes along the way, either in extracting the data, collating them, or in putting them on the map. If you find any errors, I’d appreciate hearing about them!

Or Neoliberalism, Portland Public Schools, and the Commodification of Human Life

It’s been nearly four months since I wrote Part 1 of this essay, so I figured it’s time to let Part 2 out of my brain.

In Part 1 I focussed on Oregon’s revenue crisis, the result of a libertarian assault on the state’s ability to raise revenue in the ’90s. When discussing the state of education in Portland, one cannot overemphasize the dire effect revenue loss has had on our schools. Portland went from 15th in the nation in spending per pupil in the early ’90s to 31st in ’04-’05. We now have the fourth-worst student-teacher ratio in the nation.

In 1997, as Oregon education funding circled the drain, Jack Bierwirth departed as Portland Public Schools superintendent. What followed was a patchwork of interim leaders and failed replacements, starting with Diana Snowden who served from 1997-98. Snowden stepped down when a national search turned up Ben Canada, who turned out to be a major disappointment. Canada left in 2001, and was replaced by another interim leader, Jim Scherzinger, who ended up serving until Vicki Phillips was hired in 2004. With Phillips’ departure this year, the school board has announced the hiring of Ed Schmitt as interim superintendent while they conduct another nation-wide search. That’s six superintendents in 15 years, the same 15 years in which Portland went from top-tier school funding to bottom-tier. That’s a one-two punch we’re still reeling from.

I have detailed many of Vicki Phillips’ failures in a previous blog post. In a nutshell, Phillips brought a neoliberal philosophy of public education to Portland. This model, strongly propounded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, received strong support from the Portland Schools Foundation and the Portland business community, not to mention the school board members who hired her. (It should be no surprise to anybody who’s been paying attention that she is leaving for a job with Gates.)

So just what the hell is a neoliberal philosophy of public education? Neoliberalism is a term used by the left to criticize economic liberalism, also known globalism. The term came into wide use in the ’70s and ’80s in critiquing the way the World Bank and International Monetary Fund doled out money in the developing world, particularly Latin America. In order to qualify for aid, nations had to privatize state-owned industry and utilities and cut budget deficits, often at the expense of much-needed social programs. The US used these institutions as tools to undermine populist governments in the western hemisphere as a hedge against Soviet influence, and at the same time made them ripe for exploitation by transnational US corporations.

Neoliberalism crept into US economic policy (some would say it came home to roost) beginning with President Carter, as a response to the “stagflation” crisis. No president since, Democratic or Republican, has strayed from the neoliberal monetarist path. The Federal Reserve Bank has manipulated interest rates to favor capital exclusively, with a goal of maintaining a certain level of unemployment (with “inflation” being the code word for unemployment dipping too low). President Clinton’s sweeping “ending welfare as we know it” was perhaps the final psychological blow to Keynsianism in the US.

So “neoliberalism” has a very specific meaning with regard to macroeconomics and the regulation (or, more accurately, deregulation) of global capital. I’ve been reluctant to categorize the work of Broad and Gates as neoliberal, but there are parallels. And simply criticizing them as “right-wing” or “conservative” misses the mark.

Broadly speaking, neoliberal education policy can be thought of as creeping privatization. This comes in the form of charter and alternative schools, sometimes run by religious or for-profit organizations. It also comes in the form of setting up traditional neighborhood-based schools for failure through hard-ball labor tactics, one-size-fits-all curriculum decisions and punishment of schools that don’t meet testing standards. Market-oriented solutions are emphasized across the board. In the end, it all boils down to the commodification of human life.

The application of market theory to education is a stunningly dangerous experiment with the lives of our children, and Portland Public Schools have fallen victim to to it at the hands of Vicki Phillips, the board who hired and defended her, her friends at the Portland Schools Foundation, and her benefactors at Broad and Gates.

Portland schools are in a shambles. Many neighborhood schools have capture rates under 50%. The Jefferson Cluster is especially bleak. Obviously, something had to be done. But the neoliberal approach is to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a cynical reading of this policy mindset that it is intended to lead to failure and ultimately to vouchers. I don’t buy into that theory, but the effect is the same: Our schools and our children are worse for the wear as Vicki Phillips rides off into the sunset.

I have some hope that with the board members who supported Phillips now in the minority, we can have an honest examination of the way forward. New board member Ruth Adkins is a founder of the Neighborhood Schools Alliance, a group founded in response to the closing of neighborhood schools.

I sincerely believe that the model that worked for generations — kids going to school with their neighbors in small-to-medium schools within walking distance of their homes — can still work today. We have the infrastructure in place, we just need leaders who can visualize it and see it through. Of course, stable and adequate funding wouldn’t hurt, either. See Part 1. Sigh.