A federal judge signed off on the class action settlement today. Do you think this might serve as a lesson learned for PPS as it refuses to continue negotiations with the DCU?

Don’t count on it. Portland Public Schools negotiators seem to be doing everything they can to break the union in this one.

Steve Brand’s Op-Ed in the Oregonian last week (covered here, on Terry Olson’s blog and on Amanda Fritz’ blog) spurred quite a bit of community discussion on the issue of segregation in our Portland Public Schools. But why aren’t our civic leaders weighing in on this critical issue of Portland’s future?

For the school board, race seems to be one of those topics that aren’t discussed in polite company. Anyway, if they did, they might have to admit that their open transfer policy has encouraged segregation. Make no mistake; this is not an issue of demographics. No neighborhood in Portland is majority black, yet some schools are. This situation is a direct result of public schools policy. If we want to change the situation, we must begin by examining that policy.

Tom Potter, who ran for mayor as a supporter of public education, has been silent on this. So has the rest of the city council.

I engaged erstwhile city council candidate Fritz on her blog, and she still wants to blame families who take advantage of district policy for the problem. She also wants to blame No Child Left Behind, but refuses to go far in discussing the open transfer policy that goes well beyond what NCLB mandates. “School transfer policy is a question of degree,” writes Fritz, “and of where to draw the line with giving choices that keep families in Portland Public Schools instead of private or suburban ones.” (I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that someone who “studied Ayn Rand thanks to Rush” would be loathe to take a position against “free choice”.)

This harks back to the original rationale for opening up transfers to keep the middle class from fleeing Portland for the ’burbs. But recent demographic changes, with massive influx of middle class families to the inner North and Northeast neighborhoods, cry out for reexamination of this policy.

This policy has resulted in divestment from public schools in neighborhoods now teeming with middle class families. As an example of this divestment, there are 655 students at Jefferson, and 662 students living in the neighborhood going to different neighborhood high schools. With funding at Jefferson averaging $5547.14 per student annually, that represents a public divestment of over $3 million dollars a year at Jefferson alone. This figure more than doubles, to more than $7 million, when you figure in the 457 students in special programs/focus options and 232 students in “Community Based Alternatives”*.

Fritz writes “I’m confident Ruth Adkins will provide needed rebalancing on the School Board, with her stance that every neighborhood school should be good enough for parents to want to send their kids there as their first choice – while also recognizing that some magnet and specialty programs can enrich the city’s educational menu offerings.”

Well, first of all, I’m a big supporter of Ruth, but I’m not so optimistic that she alone can change the strategic direction of the board, which has repeatedly and consistently shown itself to be enamored with foundation-sponsored, market-based school reform.

Secondly, this is exactly what I’m talking about in my New Deal for Portland Public Schools. (I’m going to publish a second draft soon, ammended to include a place for magnet and special focus programs.) But the only way to get there is to take a look at the open transfer policy that has taken us away from this sort of school system and continues to divest millions of dollars annually from our poorest neighborhoods.

Why won’t our civic leaders talk about this?

*Source: 2006 PPS School Enrollment and Program Data for Jefferson – Academy of Science and Technology and Jefferson – Academy of Arts and Technology. The $5547.14 figure is an average, since the two academies are funded separately.

(Sort of.)

It’s not exactly breaking news (I covered this a week and a half ago and they’ve been without a new contract for years), and it’s not in the print edition (yet?), but at least the Willamette Week is burning some electrons on the Portland Public Schools contract impasse with the District Council of Unions.

Can’t expect much coverage of labor issues from all the non-union papers in this town, but it’s better than what the O and Trib are doing.

Thanks Beth Slovic for covering both schools and labor in one piece.

Chapman Elementary teacher Steve Brand has an opinion piece in today’s Oregonian about how school transfers are segregating our schools. He correctly identifies this problem, but doesn’t go very far in identifying a solution. Mostly he just chides middle class families for buying homes in up-and-coming neighborhoods but not sending their kids to the neighborhood schools.

But he stops short of calling for an overhaul of the self-reinforcing transfer policy that encourages this middle class flight and progressively damages our already struggling schools.

Brand is absolutely correct that high-quality teaching is available at schools tagged “low-performing”. But until the district identifies it as a priority to reinvest in lower-income neighborhoods, no amount of cajoling is going to fix the problem. As I wrote yesterday, we need a New Deal for Portland Public Schools.

Portland Public Schools (like the Winter Hawks) are at a turning point. In many ways, the Portland District seems near collapse. Glaring funding inequities plague the poorest neighborhoods of Portland, with public schools closed and merged and buildings leased out to the highest parochial school bidder. Schools are segregated economically and racially — especially in middle and high schools — to a degree disproportionate to neighborhood populations.

The causes of this are threefold and self-reinforcing. Funding, which I’ve addressed at some length here before, has been largely out of PPS policy makers’ hands. But available funding is not distributed equally among neighborhoods.

Second is the district’s liberal school choice policy, which allows middle class families to flee their “failing” neighborhood schools. Since schools are funded on a per-student basis, this means that over time district funding has shifted dramatically to wealthier neighborhoods. Capture rates of under 50% are common in poor neighborhoods, while schools like Grant and Lincoln are packed to the gills.

As schools in working class neighborhoods become disproportionately filled with poorer children, whose families can’t afford to transport their children across town, test scores go down, and even more families transfer out. Principals use what discretionary money they have not for music and art, but for literacy help, since their populations have a disproportionate need. Better-off families see schools in other neighborhoods with art, music and P.E. and see little choice but to transfer. Hence the cycle fuels itself, leaving many schools in a death spiral they cannot escape without major transfer policy change.

Finally, recent grant-funded efforts to “fix” the schools in poorer neighborhoods in the mold cast by the Gates and Broad Foundations have done nothing but encourage this flow of students and funding out of neighborhoods in North and Northeast Portland. Rushed closings and reconfiguration have particularly fouled up the Jefferson cluster, making it even less likely to attract neighborhood families. (Again, I’ve covered this before).

Forget K-8; there’s no way we can offer our middle schoolers the choices they need in K-8 schools. Vicki Phillips’ assertion that K-8 would lead to more music for middle schoolers is absurd. Unless she means sixth, seventh and eighth graders sharing a half-time general music teacher with the elementary kids.

Forget “academies”.

We need to turn quickly and decisively away from the recent failed experiments in corporate foundation-sponsored reconfiguration. This direction has only made the problem worse. (If we keep trying the same thing and expect different results, what does that say about us? I’ve written about foundation-funded “neoliberal” school reform at PPS here.)

The result of all this is a two-tiered public school system, segregated by neighborhood, race and economics.

It is time for a New Deal for Portland Public Schools. We need to reinvest in the neighborhoods and families that have suffered years of divestment due to statewide tax policy, self-destructive school choice policies, and recent closures and reconfiguration. This reinvestment must be guided by principles of city-wide equity and fairness.

My New Deal imagines a system where every neighborhood has a first rate elementary school, with functional buildings and small classes. Middle and high schools all offer a full slate of electives and extra curricular activities, including art, instrumental and vocal music, athletics, a newspaper, a year book, and a theatre program.

How can we do this? What if funding and students couldn’t freely flow from working class neighborhoods to upper middle class neighborhoods, but was allocated in proportion to eligible neighborhood populations? Transfers could be possible for extenuating circumstances, but there would be little incentive to transfer.

There are no magnet schools. Every school is a magnet, because it has no less than any other school in terms of facilities, staff or funding. If we can’t afford all of the “extras” at all of the schools, nobody gets them. I’m talking about total equality of funding, facilities, and programs in proportion to neighborhood population.

That’s my New Deal for PPS: reconsider school choice, and reinvest in our neighborhood schools. Focus first on the North and Northeast neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by school choice. Make these schools shining examples of fundamental good neighborhood schools. As much as possible, roll back the recent damage wrought by over-dependence on corporate grant money and work at the state and local levels to insure stable and adequate funding.

Of course, it’s not such a “new” deal. This is what I had growing up. It’s really not radical at all. And best of all, it works!

The PPS school board is searching for a new superintendent and soliciting community input for hiring criteria. Now would be a very good time to let them know if you support a change of policy to create fair, equitable neighborhood school funding: A New Deal for PPS.

Word up, Gates! From Steve Linder, who seems to have captured everything I’ve been ranting about in one small picture (Click on image for the full-size version):

Karol Collymore has a good post over at Blue Oregon about her ideas for the next superintendent. There’s some good discussion in the comments, too.

As reported in the LA Daily News, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just granted $7.9 million to a private charter school group in LA to transform a public high school in Watts into ten charter schools. As messed up as things have become in Portland, at least it’s not as bad as in LA.

Is there any doubt that Melinda Gates is being disingenuous when she says “We’re not trying to dictate a solution. We don’t think we have all of the answers…”?

Of course, California has fourteen year head start on Oregon in their public schools disinvestment. It’s not too late for us to come to our senses.

Update: here’s a more in-depth article in the LA Times about the school in question.

So I went to the Portland Public Schools board meeting tonight, and sat through such things as interim superintendent Ed Schmitt singing praises of all the corporate advertising swag Nike is unloading on our kindergarteners, and human resources big dog Richard Clarke sprinkling his PowerPoint presentation with big-dog words like “systematize”, “preliminarily”, “dialoguing” and “evaluative”. It was Ruth Adkins’ first board meeting, so that was exciting, but the most interesting thing came at the end of the meeting, during the public comment session.

Teacher contract negotiations always get a lot of press, but not so for the skilled blue-collar tradesmen and craftsmen that literally keep our schools running. A dozen members of the District Council of Unions—steam fitters, carpenters, electricians and plumbers—came to plead their case to the board. They spoke movingly about their plight, a plight you will not read about in the Oregonian, the Tribune, the Willamette Week or the Mercury.

Having worked without a contract for over three years, these guys have reached an impasse with the district, which is refusing even a cost of living raise. That’s an effective pay cut over those three years. Final offers were exchanged and rejected on both sides, and a cooling-off period expired in early June.

It’s clear from their testimony that they like their jobs (even though staffing has been cut so severely that the district no longer does preventive maintenance and they’ve basically been doing nothing but emergency repairs for years), and they don’t want to go on strike. But they’re out of options, hence the direct appeal to the school board. Hopefully the board has learned from the debacle of outsourcing custodians, and will lean on their labor relations team to throw these highly-trained, dedicated guys a bone.

They actually seemed to have some support on the board, and I would encourage everybody who gives a rip about working people and the often appalling physical condition of our schools to contact the members of the school board and encourage them to deal with the DCU, offer a stinkin’ cost of living raise, and avert a strike. Considering all the money the district blew buying off Steve Goldschmidt, I don’t think this is too much to ask.

Contact information for the board can be found here.

Renee Mitchell’s column in thee O today bubbles over with enthusiasm for new Portland Schools Foundation executive director Connie Van Brunt.

Mitchell mentions that “blogger Terry Olson began an online debate about whether Van Brunt—described as a ‘high powered charter school proponent’—was the right fit,” and reprints Van Brunt’s comment from that blog to the effect that Terry‘s got it all wrong. Mitchell completely fails to check up on what Terry was saying—Van Brunt is a big-time charter schools advocate; she was chief education officer at the Chicago Charter School Foundation—and breezes through the rest of her hagiography of Van Brunt without giving his valid concerns another thought.

This is what irks me about public schools politics in Portland. Everybody wants to talk about personalities; nobody wants to talk about policy. This is very convenient for those with a corporate schools agenda, since they can bring in these smiling faces who spew platitudes about closing the achievement gap and supporting our public schools while peddling policy that hurts students, teachers… and neighborhood public schools. Vicki Phillips got a pass on this for three years, and now we’ve got Renee Mitchell greasing the skids for Van Brunt.

I don’t know if Mitchell is a stooge for this agenda, or if she’s just fooled by the happy talk. But make no mistake, what the Portland Schools Foundation is pushing is not in your interest if you want strong neighborhood public schools in Portland.

Welcome to Portland, Connie.