After kvetching about it on my blog for the last several months, I finally put all my enrollment and transfer data research into a report and presented it to the Portland Public Schools Board of Education last night. The report, Charting Open Transfer Enrollment and Neighborhood Funding Inequities (261 KB PDF), was still in draft form, but I wanted to get it out in advance of the board’s work on the topic, scheduled to begin at the Student Support and Community Relations Committee meeting October 4.

Already, I’ve received valuable feedback from board members and the community. One thing I intend to incorporate soon is a different way of looking at the numbers. The study currently charts divestment and excess investment in a cluster based on individual schools’ budget per student. This figure includes local grants, Title I money, etc., money which does not go with students when they transfer.

I knew this when I put this study out, and in a certain sense, it is a good way to look at the numbers, since when students leave Title I schools for non-Title I schools, it represents lost federal money. On the other hand, some grants are given to schools regardless of enrollment, so the amount per student increases as students transfer out. Tubman is a prime example, where dwindling enrollment has left a budget of $12,133 per student.

So I intend to run the numbers using a consistent dollar amount for each transfered student. It is important to note that the patterns of red and green on the map will likely be unchanged, but the loss from the red zone added to the gain in the green zone will add up to zero.

Thanks to all who have already contributed feedback to this report. I didn’t intend it to be my personal manifesto; I just ended up cranking it out on my own due to time constraints. More feedback is encouraged and welcome.

Update, January 2008: In the final version of this report, published in January 2008, I used a consistent figure of $6,800 per student to calculate the net gains and losses of each cluster.

Portland Talented and Gifted advocate Margaret DeLacy stopped by today and picked a few nits with Flynn-Blackmer.

For those of you just joining the discussion, Multnomah County Auditor Suzanne Flynn and Portland City Auditor Gary Blackmer published an audit of Portland Public Schools’ open transfer enrollment policy last June, titled Portland Public Schools Student Transfer System: District objectives not met (230 KB PDF).

The salient points of this audit were:

• the transfer system does not mitigate racial and economic segregation, and in fact contributes to it via a “skimming” effect
• the system is increasingly complex and not transparent
• open transfers are at odds with other district policies such as strong neighborhood schools and investing in poor performing schools
• in light of these conflicts, there is no clear rationale for allowing such radical policy.

DeLacy wants to ding the authors for confusing the reason students transfer, though this is not a focus of the study.

She also constructs a straw man: “…high achieving students are being pushed out of local schools by a lack of instruction appropriate to their needs. Forcing them to stay there without addressing this issue merely makes the problem worse by further reducing any incentive for the local school to improve its instruction.”

Nowhere in Flynn-Blackmer do they recommend a course of action such as this. My own recommendations to the school board, which will be released tomorrow, as well as my writings on the topic here, clearly state that we must equalize educational opportunities before we curtail neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers.

I can’t argue with DeLacy’s critique of the way testing is used, but she imagines “high-achieving students who transfer to a school with more high-achieving students would prove to be more successful in the long run.” Why? Well, “These schools simply offer more advanced classes.”

She doesn’t stop to ask why that is, or wonder if it might be better if all schools had equal educational offerings. But here comes the real zinger.

DeLacy believes lower-achieving students are better off at their lower-achieving schools. That’s right. “An analysis I did of Jefferson test scores a couple of years ago showed that it was doing a better-than-average job with lower-achieving students, so I would be surprised if they got a better deal elsewhere,” writes DeLacy.

Which leaves us with what we have: a segregated, two-tiered system, with advanced academic offerings in middle and upper middle class neighborhoods, and “special” schools with reduced offerings in our working class and poor neighborhoods, under continual federal sanction with No Child Left Behind. Evidently this is just fine with DeLacy.

Missing in her analysis is any place for high-achieving poor and minority kids. Or maybe there’s just not a place in her world view for them.

Ultimately, DeLacy concludes that Flynn-Blackmer “was not a properly conducted analysis and should not be used as the basis for making policy decisions.”

Evidently she reaches this conclusion simply because she dislikes hearing its unassailable central points, which she somehow fails to address: the PPS transfer system contributes to racial isolation, it is overly complex and not transparent, it competes with strong neighborhood schools and investing in poorly performing schools, and there is no policy rationale for it.

All of our children will do better if they all are offered a full range of academic and extracurricular opportunities in their neighborhood schools. It is incredibly cynical to argue that poor kids do better in poor schools, and rich kids do better in rich schools, so let’s just keep it that way. Or am I missing something in DeLacy’s argument?

In thinking more about the open transfer policy at Portland Public Schools, I feel like I’m starting to understand the mindset that has kept it safely in place, despite the lack of any legitimate policy rationale.

I felt a little icky after my exchange with Amanda Fritz on her blog yesterday. Partly because I think I upset her, which is never my intent, but mostly because she represents a common middle class liberal attitude about open transfers. She’s seen the numbers and maps; she knows that open transfers cost our poorest neighborhoods nearly $40 million a year in lost public investment. But evidently that’s worth it to her.

“PPS’s transfer policy has likely kept many wealthier families in Portland’s public schools, rather than going to private schools,” she wrote yesterday.

That’s the old saw that folks trot out every time this issue comes up. The fallacies here are many. The threat of white flight is extremely overblown, and nobody ever produces statistics to back the claim. Even if it were true, how much should our poorest neighborhoods pay to keep them from fleeing? Is $40 million a year enough? Or should we be paying more? This no way to run a school district. You can’t justify such a radical upward redistribution of wealth by saying it’s “likely” that it’s helped in some way.

She’s voiced this attitude a couple of times, and refuses to take even a moderate stand like the Flynn-Blackmer audit (230KB PDF) took: “the transfer policy competes with other Board policies such as strong neighborhood schools and investing in poor performing schools.”

I think what we’re really looking at here is that open transfers are an escape clause for the middle class. They’re the ones who use the policy, and they’re the ones who run the board. They’ll never say it in polite company, but it is implicit that this policy lets them have their kids go to school with kids “like them”, even if they can’t afford a house in the “better” parts of town. They’re just as happy to not talk about this in a broader policy context, because their arguments in favor of it simply don’t hold water, especially in light of its cost to our poorest neighbors. Which explains why the conversation keeps getting pushed back by the board. We’re just not willing, in our polite white society, to discuss the twin elephants in the room: race and class.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on Amanda Fritz. I like her as a public figure (though I’ve never met her, and, as she pointed out, “evidently you don’t know me very well”).

I voted for her when she ran for city council as a pioneer of public election funding in Portland. I’d like to endorse her if she runs again, but that is contingent on her taking a stand, even a moderate stand, on this radical PPS public investment policy that has a huge impact on the future of Portland and is absolutely the business of the city council and those seeking a seat there.

Amanda Fritz got her hands on the proposed visionPDX report, and correctly dings the authors for its wishy-washy statement on education: “The public and private sectors jointly provide a K-20 educational enterprise that serves the intellectual, cultural and economic needs of the region, the city and its people.”

VisionPDX is an initiative started by mayor Tom Potter. According to its Web site, “visionPDX is a City-supported, community-led initiative to create a vision for Portland for the next 20 years and beyond. The project provides an opportunity for all Portlanders to share their hopes and ideas for the future.”

Sounds real warm and fuzzy, but the process has been criticized for being light on statistical methodology and heavy on the feel-good factor.

I am not surprised by the lack of a strong statement on education in this report, since our city leaders have consistently spoken platitudes about our public schools while consistently failing to hold our school board to account for its policies that threaten our public neighborhood schools, even as they refer to them as our “crown jewels”.

I don’t mean to be rude or take Amanda’s discussion too far off track, but I had to call her out about this. I support her in her drive to fix the visionPDX document, and hope to nudge her — and any other potential city council candidates — to take a hard look at PPS policy and to at least take a stand as firm as the Flynn-Blackmer audit (230 KB PDF).

Obviously, this is an issue that impacts the entire city, and the silence of our city leaders (and would-be leaders) about our radical school transfer policy is puzzling, to say the least.

A discussion of Portland Public Schools neighborhood divestment has turned into a debate about charter schools. I don’t mind, really, since it’s a tightly related subject. But it is a topic I was pointedly not addressing. People feel very strongly about this issue, myself included, but for the moment, it is a little distracting from my point about how district policy is disproportionately distributing the public revenue it is trusted with.

But now comes Heather Straube, founder of a new North Portland charter school, getting very defensive about the relationship of charter schools to the teachers union.

As a “daughter of two teamsters and activists,” Straube insists “we are very pro-union,” but later explains that it wouldn’t make sense to have a union with only seven staff members.

What she doesn’t recognize (or chooses not to mention) is that these seven staffers, employees of Portland Public Schools, would otherwise be members of their respective unions. While her one little school may not seem a threat, the movement toward shutting down neighborhood schools and opening charters is a serious threat to union security in any school district.

Assurances to pay union wages “[i]f we can” ring hollow to anybody who has worked both with and without a union contract.

Straube catalogs some of the myriad problems in schools in PPS’ poorest neighborhoods, and goes to great lengths to demonstrate her “liberal” credibility. It’s not a “conservative” movement, she assures us.

Indeed, it is a libertarian movement, geared toward solving problems of small groups of families in isolation, without regard for the greater good. “Local control” is invoked without any context of how that term has been used historically to justify segregation. Those of us trying to make a difference for everybody are derided as playing “politics”.

While I have no doubt that New Harvest will be plenty “liberal”, I have to place it in the greater milieu of the charter school movement. It is indeed a form of privatization, and even if individual schools are “cool”, they are tools used by a movement with a nefarious project: the dismantling of our traditional, neighborhood-based public schools, and the unions that come with them. It bodes poorly for teachers and students alike.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Steve Buel (not to be confused with me, whose name also happens to be Steve). For more on this story, see today’s Oregonian.

Something is amiss at Benson Tech. Benson has the reputation of being one of the best technological high schools in the country. Surely, you would think, the school board would want to protect and hone this reputation, particularly in a city where there is such widespread criticism of the way it educates its lower economic neighborhood students. But that does not seem to be the case.

When I was a teacher at Lane Middle School in the far out SE, which was loaded with struggling students, Benson High School was one of the bright spots in the future education of many of these kids. It was a legitimate first step in getting out of poverty and making something of themselves. It was also a great path for those kids who wanted an avenue to success outside of a purely academic road.

But you just couldn’t up and go to Benson. You had to earn it. You needed a teachers recommendation and enough academic skills to write an essay stating why you wanted to go there. This did two things. It helped weed out the kids who were not interested in putting in the effort required in Benson’s programs and put pressure on the kids to do well in middle school. A great help in teaching kids what it takes to get along in the world.

But the school district, in their infantile wisdom, eliminated these requirements and also has refused to fund Benson at the level necessary to maintain all the programs it had developed and to upgrade the school and its programs in the manner such an outstanding school deserves.

Yes, it costs more to have a school such as Benson in your district but it is worth it to make sure you have genuine opportunities for the students Benson helps. Of course, there are undoubtedly few Benson kids from parents in Stand for Children (SFC) or the Portland Schools Foundation (PFS), who run Portland Public Schools and control the board, so I guess it is not surprising this is the direction the district has gone.

But you have to ask yourself what is really amiss. This district treats its lower economic neighborhood students like they are outsiders, and it has demonstrated this over and over. Is this just another example of what is happening in PPS and America today, the rich and powerful making sure they are taken care of first and foremost, more nonsense from SFC and PSF, or is something else at work here?

I think it is legitimate to explore if institutionalized racism is rearing its ugly head again. I hope not.

Steve Buel is in his 41st year of teaching, presently in the Evergreen School District in Vancouver. He is a former PPS school board member and has followed PPS politics since 1975.

Former PPS school board member Steve Buel notes in comments on this blog that all school board members elected in the last two elections promised to “strengthen neighborhood schools”. Indeed, “preserving strong neighborhood schools” is not just a campaign pledge of board members, but a stated policy of Portland Public Schools. Buel asks the critical question: “How are they doing?”

The answer: Not very well, Steve.

The trouble is, this policy is consistently and thoroughly undermined by another policy of PPS, “School Choice” (note the capitalization). Open transfers, allowing students to transfer from any school to any school (space allowing) drain tens of millions of dollars out of our poorest neighborhoods each year. This is not only devastating to the learning environment, it also has a profound impact on property values.

Over a year ago, the Flynn-Blackmer audit (230KB PDF) pointed out (in no uncertain terms) that the transfer policy is at odds with strengthening neighborhood schools and decreasing racial isolation. It has significantly set back both of those district policies. In light of this conflict, Flynn and Blackmer “urge[d] the Board to clarify the purpose of the school choice system.”

The board has pushed this back repeatedly, and now, over a year since the audit was released, they have scheduled their first discussion of the issue for this October.

I too am dying to know “the purpose of the school choice system.” I’ve repeatedly heard it justified as a way to keep middle class families in Portland, but recent demographic changes put the lie to that rationale. So, school board members, what is the purpose of our radical open transfer policy?

I’m working hard to get the school board to consider this not only from the educational perspective, but also as a matter of public investment policy. The PPS board controls an annual budget of nearly half a billion dollars. Can a city with progressive bona fides like Portland tolerate the kind of leadership that that divests nearly $40 million a year from its poorest neighborhoods?

A significant subtext to the story is that the current board seems unwilling to listen to past board members like Buel or Sue Hagmeier, or take cues from the Beaverton school district, which has managed its budget in a notably more equitable manner. There they are, sole experts in the field, inventing this great new thing called the wheel.

This funding inequity story has already been picked up by reporters Beth Slovic at Willamette Week and Jennifer Anderson at the Portland Tribune. Oregonian education reporter Betsy Hammond is late to the party, but hopefully will pick up the story soon.

Jennifer Anderson wrote a good piece in today’s Tribune about Humboldt Elementary, and how well it is doing, despite Portland Public Schools’ radical transfer policy.

You might be looking for this map, showing how this policy is robbing tens of millions of dollars a year from Portland’s poorest neighborhoods and reinvesting it in the richest. Or you might be interested in the archives of my research and writing on public schools.

That’s how I read the maintenance workers’ contract (762 KB PDF) to be voted on by the Portland Public Schools board of education tonight.

The members of the District Council of Unions (DCU) have been without a contract for three years. It looks like they’ve finally squeezed a token raise out of the district, with one-time payments of $1000 and $1120 this year and next, followed by a 1% increase in ’09 and a 2% increase in ’10. Am I reading that right?

If so, the district gave a little over their “final offer” of exactly nothing from earlier this year, and the unions gave a lot.

But to be honest, I’m in the dark on this. None of Portland’s non-union papers does much coverage of collective bargaining negotiations (unless someone is kicking the union out — they’re all over that), so I have no clue if or when this deal was actually struck, if DCU’s rank and file have approved it, or what. It’s being voted on by the board tonight as part of the business agenda, so I assume this has already been offered to the DCU. I’ll let you know what I find out. If you know details, I’d be happy to hear them!

Updated: Headline should read “Seven Years, $2120 + Three Percent?” The contract has been ratified by the rank and file and approved by the board tonight. It is a four-year contract, amounting to about 7%. Considering the DCU has been without a new contract for three years, that’s about 1% a year.

Updated 9/11/07 10:30 p.m.: I almost forgot to mention, Dan Ryan was very gracious after the vote, and thanked the DCU members who testified at the July meeting. He said it really made a difference. Thanks, Dan, for listening to these guys. (I don’t think there were any DCU members were present.)

Try not to gag when you read this. Ed Week’s Eric Robelen didn’t have to look any farther than the good ol’ Portland Business Alliance to kick off the hagiography.

“Vicki is very focused on creating opportunities for all kids, and reaching out to less advantaged populations,” said Sandra McDonough, who heads the Portland Business Alliance, which advocates for the city’s business community. “It’s in her DNA.”

Robelen did manage to get a couple sound bites from Portland Association of Teachers president Jeff Miller, who called Phillips’ approach “trendy and shallow” and dinged her for “lip service” to the idea of collaboration without any follow through. He also put in a call to Portland Schools Alliance president Martin Gonzalez who took Phillips to task for not taking public input seriously and not sticking around to finish what she started.

But not a word from the Neighborhood Schools Alliance, the most important and visible grass roots group to rise up in opposition to Phillips’ devastating policies, which often exacerbated the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Robelen had no problem finding someone from the much less visible (and much less challenging) Community and Parents for Public Schools, the group that founded the annual school choice fair. President Doug Wells calls Phillips “action-oriented” (ooh!) and “found her style refreshing” (ah!). He also notes “some found it challenging.” (Those of us who live in the red zone found it especially “challenging”.)

Robelen seems bent on assuring his readers that Phillips is actually quite mainstream. First he quotes Eugene Hickok, former deputy U.S. secretary of education under President Bush, who naturally doesn’t think she goes far enough: “I don’t think she’s a dramatically different thinker.”

Then he turns to Jeanne Allen, president of the charter school advocacy group Center for Education Reform, who also doesn’t find Phillips’ privatization efforts bold enough: “She’s pretty much ‘in the box’ and representing a conventional way of thinking.”

Lost in all of this (as it was in Portland), is that Vicki Phillips is an ideologue, who fits perfectly with the Gates Foundation’s market-oriented schools reform agenda. The biggest tool in her shed is “School Choice”, and with this hammer in hand, every problem that she sees looks an awful lot like a nail.

She bludgeoned the hell out of Portland Public Schools with it, and left a segregated, two-tiered school system in her wake. Too bad Education Week couldn’t sniff out the real story here.