I’m very happy to see that the Portland Public Schools Board of Education has hired from within for the next superintendent. Not only did Carole Smith grow up in Portland, she hasn’t pissed off the community in her tenure at PPS. This is a very good starting point for our next leader, something certain other candidates did not have in their favor.

I don’t know much about her, but I’m cautiously optimistic and hopeful that she will value community input in her policy making.

The school board will meet tomorrow morning to formalize the hire, and there is a press conference scheduled later today at Franklin High School to formally introduce our next superintendent.

If it wasn’t bad enough for Portland parents to choose a school, what with open transfers, totally uneven implementation of educational programming across the district, and a flood of money pouring with students out of our poorest neighborhoods into our richest, here comes the Oregonian with an online tool to help encourage this flow.

According to an e-mail leaked to this blogger in advance of the debut,

As part of The Oregonian’s continued efforts to evolve beyond the printed word and provide web savvy readers with more expanded coverage, Steve Suo has created a comprehensive school guide on OregonLive.com – a feature Oregonian editors have long been wanting to create in print.

…the Oregon Schools Guide offers readers a comprehensive report card on public schools in Oregon grades K-12, with two easy search functions that let viewers search by school name or to compare school rankings by grade and district.

Not to leave out the hard working folks in the real estate community, who pay a lot of bills at the Big O, they also include homes for sale near schools.

The site doesn’t quite live up to its hype, but there it is.

The crappiest Web presence in the Portland media universe now includes a school choice promotional site.