Ballots are starting to arrive in the mail for the November 6 special election in Oregon. It’s pretty simple this year, with just two ballot measures and no candidates.

More Hockey Less War and Wacky Mommy endorse “Yes” votes on both measures.
Measure 49: Yes. Measure 49 would fix Measure 37, which in 2004 threw a monkey wrench in the works of Oregon’s strong land-use regulations. Measure 37 opened up the door for all kinds of development on land previously reserved for forests, farms and open spaces. Though it was billed as a remedy for old folks banking on subdividing their property to fund their retirement, it was mainly a huge windfall for commercial property developers.

Measure 49 would restore some balance to our land-use regulations, allowing grandpa and grandma to build a few houses on their land to feather their retirement nest. But it would prevent helter-skelter, large-scale commercial development.
Measure 50: Yes. Measure 50 would raise cigarette taxes to pay for children’s health insurance. I think both things on their own are good, but have issues with coupling them. But since our Democratic-controlled state house and Democratic governor can’t seem to get it together to fix our broken state revenue stream, this is currently the best hope we have for insuring the 117,000 Oregon kids who currently lack access to basic health care.

Big tobacco is spending millions to defeat this one. For some people, that’s all they need to know.

Anne T. has a nice post up on Wacky Mommy’s blog about supporting the SEIU Local 503 custodians and cafeteria workers in their contract negotiations with a seemingly intransigent Portland Public Schools that wants to drastically cut their wages. I covered this the other day, and the Willamette Week had good coverage yesterday.

In the spirit of “Remember: we’re here for the children,” I thought I’d present three parables about Portland Public Schools’ transfer policy and the Very Important Problem that it solves. Here goes.

Little LuLu and the Very Important Problem

Little LuLu lived with her Mommie and Grammie in her Grammie’s house. She had lived there since she was a baby. She went to kindergarten at the school two blocks away. She liked her teachers, especially her music teacher.

That’s why little LuLu was so sad when she started first grade and found out that her music teacher didn’t work there any more. Her music teacher was working at the coffee shop on the corner now, along with the former gym teacher. The art teacher got a job at Fred Meyer, and LuLu saw her there sometimes. She never did find out what happened to Mr. Miller, the friendly custodian who had kept her school clean.

LuLu asked her mommie, “Why don’t we have music and art and gym anymore?” and her mommie answered “Because too many people transferred out of your school, and the school board says we can’t afford those special things at such a small school.”

“But Mommie,” asked little LuLu, “Why did the school board let all those people transfer out?”

“Because,” answered her mommie, “They’re solving a Very Important Problem.”

In second grade, little LuLu noticed that some of her friends didn’t go to her school anymore. She also noticed that more and more of her classmates were being taken out of class for special help every day.

By third grade, little LuLu noticed that her teacher was spending most of her time telling her how to take tests. At the end of third grade, the school board announced that little LuLu’s school was closing, and she would have to go to a different school with more kids.

“Why are they closing my school?” LuLu asked her mommie.

“Because so many kids transferred out, and the school board can’t afford to keep such a small school open,” answered her mommie.

“But Mommie,” asked little LuLu, “Why did the school board let all those people transfer out?”

“Because,” answered her mommie, “They’re solving a Very Important Problem.”

When she started fourth grade at her new school, LuLu was very sad. Some of the same teachers were at her new school, but she didn’t feel right. All of her friends from her neighborhood had transferred to different schools, and she didn’t have any friends at this new school.

“Mommie,” she asked, “Can we transfer to a different school?”

“No,” replied her mommie, “Mommie has to work two jobs and can’t drive you across town for school. And you know Grammie is sick and can’t drive.”

Several years later, little LuLu went to register for high school. She had to choose between academies. One was for girls only, and it was miles away from the rest of the school. She liked some of the classes there, but she wanted to take some of the classes at the main high school. She also wanted to be a journalist, but her neighborhood high school didn’t have a newspaper or yearbook. One of the classes she wanted to take was only offered in the boys’ academy. She played the flute, but her neighborhood high school didn’t have a band.

Little LuLu’s adviser told her she would have to transfer to a different high school if she wanted all of these things. But her mommie didn’t think it would be safe for her to take the city bus across town into an unfamiliar neighborhood.

“Why can’t my high school have the same things high schools in other parts of town have?” little LuLu asked her mommie.

“Because so many kids transferred out, and the school board can’t afford to keep so many programs at such a small school,” answered her mommie.

“But Mommie,” asked little LuLu, “Why did the school board let all those people transfer out?”

“Because,” answered her mommie, “They’re solving a Very Important Problem.”

“I guess that must be a very, very, Very Important Problem,” said LuLu.

“It must be,” said her mommie. “Besides,” she added, “the principal of our school says we’re different, and we need different kinds of programs than kids at those other schools.”

So little LuLu went to the great big high school with a very small student body, and felt very small and unimportant compared to the kids taking French and Band and Journalism and College Prep English at the schools across town. But she knew she was helping the school board solve a Very Important Problem, so she felt better.

Mike Mackelhoody and the Very Important Problem

Mike Mackelhoody lived with his mom and dad and baby sister in a big old house in a part of town his parents called “transitional.” He always heard his dad telling relatives and family friends about what a great deal he got on the house.

There was a school three blocks away, but Mike Mackelhoody didn’t go there. His mom drove him several miles every morning to a bigger school. Mike Mackelhoody didn’t like getting up in the morning, and when he was eight, he realized that he would be able to sleep longer if he went to the school three blocks away.

So he worked up his courage and asked his mom and dad about it one day.

“Mom, Dad,” he said, “Why don’t I go to the school that’s just three blocks away? That way I could walk to school and sleep later in the morning.”

“Because,” answered his dad, “that school doesn’t meet AYP!”

Mike Mackelhoody wasn’t sure what that meant, but his dad and mom didn’t want to talk much about it.

Every day after school, Mike Mackelhoody noticed the neighborhood kids playing in the street. He didn’t know any of them, since they went to different schools. He asked his parents about this.

“Why do all the kids go to different schools?” he asked.

“Because,” said his father, “the school board is solving a Very Important Problem.”

When Mike Mackelhoody was old enough to go to high school, his parents made sure to get him transferred to a “good” school across town, one that had Advanced Placement classes and foreign languages and an instrumental music program. But his mom told him she couldn’t drive him to school anymore, since it was too far out of her way.

Instead, she got him a bus pass from the school board, and he had to take three different buses to get to school every morning. He had to get up very, very early, and he had to wait in the rain at two different bus stops along the way. If he missed one bus, he might have to wait an extra fifteen minutes. If he missed two buses, he might be very, very late to class.

“Why,” Mike Mackelhoody asked his parents, “don’t we have a ‘good’ high school in our neighborhood?”

“Because,” answered his father, “the school board is solving a Very Important Problem.”

So Mike Mackelhoody took three buses to his “good” school every day, and he took three buses home every afternoon. He never did learn the names of the neighbor kids, but he wouldn’t have had any time to hang out with them anyway, since he was always riding the bus. But at least he was helping the school board solve their Very Important Problem.

Caitlin Kurzweil and the Very Important Problem

Caitlin Kurzweil lived in a very large house in a very nice part of town. She lived there with her mummy and her daddy, her two Weimaraner dogs, and her big brothers who often Didn’t Play Nice with her.

She went to the very nice little school down the street with a very involved PTA. Her mummy told her that the school board once talked about closing her very nice little school, but the very involved PTA stopped them. So she got to stay at her very nice little school, and she learned music from Mrs. Melnaker, art from Mr. Josephson and P.E. from Mr. Jakes.

The yard of her very nice little school was always well cared for, thanks to the very involved PTA. There was a very nice playground, with a very nice play structure, built with money from the very involved PTA’s annual auction.

Everything about Caitlin Kurzweil’s school was very nice indeed, and Caitlin enjoyed playing with her friends after school.

Caitlin Kurzweil was very good at soccer. Her daddy coached her team when she was five, and as she grew older, her coaches always told her how very good at soccer she was.

When Caitlin Kurzweil was old enough to go to high school, she was excited to be on the soccer team. But when she went to try-out, she found there were one hundred girls who also wanted to be on the soccer team. Some of them were also very good at soccer. So good, in fact, that Caitlin Kurzweil didn’t make the team.

So Caitlin Kurzweil went home crying to her mummy, who called her daddy on the phone right away. “How can this be!” Caitlin Kurzweil heard her mummy say to her daddy on the phone, “Caitlin’s always been the best player on the team!”

Caitlin Kurzweil’s father called the soccer coach that evening to find out why she didn’t make the team. He was amazed to hear that there were so many girls at the school who where very good at soccer, and he tried as best he could to explain it to his dear daughter.

“But why are there so many kids at my school?” asked Caitlin Kurzweil.

“Because,” answered her daddy, “so many kids have transferred in from other neighborhoods.”

“But why does the school board let them transfer in?” asked Caitlin Kurzweil.

“Because,” answered her daddy, “the school board is solving a Very Important Problem.”

Eventually Caitlin Kurzweil got over her disappointment at not playing soccer, and focused on her classes. But many of her classes had so many students in them that kids had to sit on window ledges or the floor, and there weren’t enough text books to go around. So she asked her parents about this.

“Why are my classes so crowded?” asked Caitlin Kurzweil.

“Because,” answered her daddy, “so many kids have transferred in from other neighborhoods.”

“But why does the school board let them transfer in?” asked Caitlin Kurzweil.

“Because,” answered her daddy, “the school board is solving a Very Important Problem.”

So Caitlin Kurzweil went to her very full school, and attended her very full classes, and took pride in knowing she was helping the school board solve their Very Important Problem.

Now that the transfer and enrollment office has produced data revealing the racial and economic segregation brought on by Portland Public Schools’ open transfer enrollment policy, bolstering my earlier research (383KB PDF) showing a massive shift of public investment away from poorer neighborhoods, I have one little question for the school board. (I know some of you read this blog, so don’t be shy about responding here.)

It’s a three parter:

1. What problem is open transfer enrollment designed to solve?
2. How exactly (please cite data) do neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers solve this problem?
3. How is this unnamed problem more important than the increasing racial and socio-economic segregation and multi-million dollar annual neighborhood funding inequity caused by open transfer enrollment?

It is becoming increasingly clear, through correspondence and conversations I’ve had with board members, unpublished remarks by superintendent Carole Smith to the press, and comments by Ruth Adkins on Terry Olson’s blog, that we aren’t going to see any changes to the transfer policy for at least another year.

When the Flynn-Blackmer audit (230KB PDF) was released in June 2006, it requested that the school board explain the purpose of the open transfer policy. Vicki Phillips waved her hands around about the importance of “School Choice,” and the board punted, claiming it was too late to do anything for 2007-08. Now, over a year later, I’m hearing the same kind of murmurs: It’s too late to do anything about it for 2008-09.

And still nobody on the board can articulate, in simple, clear terms, what the purpose of the transfer policy is and why it is of such paramount importance.

Obviously there is more here than meets the eye. The board seems to be protecting some hidden constituency that is more important than public divestment and reduced educational opportunities in the red zone and overcrowding in the green zone. Either that, or it’s just entropy, and nobody on the board has the political courage to admit mistakes and propose a course correction.

The devastation caused by open transfer enrollment is clear. If the school board has to invent a purpose for this policy after the fact, isn’t it time to start dismantling it?

After being forced to rehire the custodians they illegally fired, Portland Public Schools has decided to try to cut their pay by nearly 30%.

In negotiations for a contract that expired June 30, PPS proposes reducing starting wages from $14 an hour to $10.70 and forcing employees to absorb future increases in health care costs. This is especially insulting, since many of the rehired custodians left other jobs to return to PPS based on the current wages.

This is an obvious pattern in PPS labor negotiations.

At the school board meeting last week, Linda Hush-Loomis, the wife of a PPS custodian, testified “My husband left a job paying nearly $13 per hour, the cut would leave him around $11 per hour.”

PPS just approved a bond to payoff the approximately $15 million settlement with the illegally fired custodians. Now they’re using the same tactics that eventually led to the illegal firings in the first place. Does PPS have no institutional memory? Or are they just ethically bankrupt?

There is a petition (32KB Microsoft Word document) available to print and gather signatures if you want to show your support of these hard-working, under-appreciated employees.

My talk about seriously checking out Beaverton real estate and schools continues to draw disbelief from everybody I talk to. “NoPo Parent” urges me to stay and fight for the greater good, like MLK or Gandhi did.

But how do I explain this to my children? Sorry kids, your education isn’t as important as fighting for everybody else’s. I’d really like to help you with your homework, but I’ve got to crunch these numbers to show the school board how devastating their policies are to your neighborhood.

Seriously, when my daughter enters 9th grade in six years, how much better are the course offerings at Jefferson going to be? The current policy trend is balkanization, splitting schools in poor neighborhoods into narrow academic silos. A simultaneous trend is shutting down in-transfers at comprehensive high schools in wealthier neighborhoods. I don’t want my kids to have to commute across town anyway, but that’s their only option for a comprehensive high school, and it’s being taken away.

That’s “school choice” for you, folks. If you choose to live in a wealthy neighborhood, you get good schools. If you choose to be poor, or choose to live in an economically and ethnically diverse neighborhood, you get to fight over the crumbs.

If we stop and change direction right now, we might have some comprehensive, traditional high schools in North Portland in six years.

But the school board is not changing direction. To the contrary, they don’t even seem to recognize the train wreck they’ve set in motion. If and when they finally notice, it’s going to be too late for my children. Witness the giddiness of the board at their meeting last night upon approving the expansion of a special focus program into a building formerly occupied by a neighborhood school that was forced to merge with another school to avoid closure. Board members’ words of caution about how this might affect neighborhood schools ring hollow, considering their support of policy that is diametrically opposed to support of neighborhood schools.

Given this blatantly anti-neighborhood schools atmosphere, why shouldn’t I look at Beaverton, where neighborhood schools are the norm?

Pick a high school — any high school — in the Beaverton School District, and compare and contrast to our options in North Portland. Let’s just take Aloha High, for example. Aloha is 42% free and reduced-price lunch, 11% ESL and 66% white. Hardly what you’d call a “rich” school.

But they’ve got several bands, choir, theatre arts, visual arts, film making, wood shop, and drafting. They’ve got lots of advanced placement classes. They offer French, Spanish, Japanese, physics, calculus, a newspaper and yearbook and a full suite of athletics and extracurricular activities.

Most readers of this blog know about the travesty that Portland Public Schools has foisted upon Roosevelt and Jefferson in North Portland. At Roosevelt, they’ve created three academies that are self-segregated by race — one black, one white, and one Hispanic. At Jefferson, district policies have created a segregated “black” school. As if that weren’t bad enough, they’ve made it even worse, with gender-segregated academies, two campuses miles apart, and extremely stripped-down academic offerings across the board.

Nobody — I mean nobody — on the school board is willing to honestly address the source of the problem, our free-market open transfer policy. This is the sacred cow of Portland Public Schools. We’re going to need a wholesale turnover on the board — all seven members — before this gets addressed, and that’s not going to happen in time for my kids. It’s also not going to happen as long as the corporate-dominated Portland Schools Foundation has so much influence in PPS policy and school board politics.

So it’s looking like “cut and run” is the best option for my family. It doesn’t mean I can’t still write about the problem, but the urgency will be considerably less for my family. Sorry folks, as much as I’m flattered by the invocation of MLK and Gandhi, this is not British-occupied India or the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s (even if it is a civil rights issue).

I am not in this for the fight; I’m in this for my kids. Though I am civic-minded, I don’t appreciate having to fight tooth and nail for basic educational opportunities in my neighborhood. I would much rather take my son to a hockey game or my daughter to the symphony than stay up late crunching numbers to convince the school board of the obvious: their policy is destroying the last vestiges of Portland’s crown jewels.

That’s the word from Jeff over at ClearTheCrease.net, a new Portland hockey blog. I told him, yeah, I’m sick of this shit, too. And nothing cleanses the political palette like a good hard skate or a night of hockey.

We’ve got junior action this weekend in Portland, with the Canadian Major Junior Portland Winter Hawks taking on the Everett Silver Tips Saturday night at the Memorial Coliseum, and the USA Hockey Tier III Junior A River City Jaguars hosting Tri-City at Valley Ice Arena in Beaverton. The Jags have a rematch with Tri-City on Sunday.

If you’re looking for some intense entertainment this weekend, you might want to check out some of what the Portland hockey scene has to offer. Jaguars tickets are $7, general admission. Valley Ice Arena is old school, with the hard wooden benches and disgusting restrooms, but it’s a more casual viewing experience. They’ve even got a mascot this year, and my five-year-old had fun at the season opener a couple weeks back.

Winter Hawks tickets start at $10 for the cheap seats, and go up to $21 for the best (kids’ tix are $5-$14, I think). That’s a bargain to see some of the best junior hockey players in the world.

Go Hawks! Go Jags!

Given that there seems to be little political will on the Portland Public Schools Board of Education to do anything serious about the stark inequities in funding and program offerings in Portland neighborhood schools, we’re giving serious thought to moving to Beaverton. I started looking at real estate in Beaverton yesterday, and what I saw illustrates the stark differences between how PPS and the Beaverton School District operate.

The first house I looked at is in one of Beaverton’s poorer neighborhoods. The elementary school is Beaver Acres, where 61% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The students are 51% minority, with no one group in the majority (white student have a plurality). This reflects the neighborhood demographic, since Beaverton does not have open transfer enrollment.

We all know what happens to schools like this in PPS; they are drained of their middle class students, overall enrollment drops dramatically, demographics skew, test scores drop, and they are threatened by PPS with closure and by the federal government with sanctions under No Child Left Behind. Special programs are cut, with site administrators focusing dwindling Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) budgets on literacy and testing.

Not so in Beaverton. Quite to the contrary, Beaver Acres school is getting a 14-classroom addition to accommodate growing enrollment. All special programs remain intact.

Beaver Acres feeds to traditional, comprehensive middle and high schools, just like every elementary school in Beaverton.

Our neighborhood elementary in PPS has a co-located dual-immersion Spanish program. There are numerous problems with this, too many to get into here. Suffice it to say, the administrator is far more engaged with her special focus program than with the neighborhood program. The school is transitioning to K-8, so we are no longer assigned to the special-focus middle school across the street from the 24-hour sex club, which is nice. But our assigned high school is Jefferson, which has suffered more than any school in the district under the open transfer enrollment policy. No other high school has had its programs cut as dramatically, and no school is less racially and economically diverse.

Let me emphasize something here: Not one of our assigned schools, from pre-K through high school, is a stand-alone, traditional neighborhood school.

Sure, we can apply for the lottery to transfer to one of the traditional high schools, all of which are sited in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. But why should my kids have to commute across town just to get a full range of educational offerings?

Initial murmurs from the school board on the issue indicate that we’re probably not going to see any changes to the transfer policy any time soon, if at all. Hopefully they can start addressing the funding equity issues at least, but there’s only so much they can do given that funding follows students.

Meanwhile, my kids aren’t getting any younger. When we moved to the Jefferson cluster in 2000, our oldest child was five years away from starting school, and we said to ourselves, “A lot can change in five years.” Not much did. Actually, things have gotten worse. Now our oldest is in third grade, six years away from high school. Will things get better by the time she hits high school? If recent history is any indication, things will get worse.

Look out Beaverton, here we come!

Fifteen months after a city and county audit requested a justification for Portland Public Schools’ open transfer policy, a committee of the school board will take its first look tomorrow. The student support and community relations committee, chaired by new school board member and Neighborhood Schools Alliance founding member Ruth Adkins meets tomorrow at four p.m. Dan Ryan and Dilafruz Williams are the other members of this committee.

This has been my main cause on this blog for a few months. I have crunched the district’s enrollment numbers, and shown that the open transfer policy effectively redlines the poorest neighborhoods of Portland, transferring tens of millions of dollars of public investment annually to wealthier neighborhoods.

I have reason to be concerned that the school board will attempt to tweak things around the edge of this policy, and will not consider the simplest, most reasonable response, which would immediately address the issue of neighborhood funding inequity: curtailing neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers.

Here’s an analogy for you. You’ve got a bathtub full of water. Somebody pulls the plug. You get a group of people debating how to keep the water in the tub, and they’re throwing out all kinds of ideas. Perhaps we can convince the water that it’s better to stay in the tub. Maybe we can make it more complicated to leave the tub. But as the water circles the drain, nobody suggests the obvious.

Put the plug back in the drain.

The fundamental problem is the open transfer policy. There is no justification for it. Why keep it?

Here’s another thought. We’re screwing the pooch all across the district, not just in the redlined neighborhoods, where educational opportunities are limited, and schools are left with disproportionate numbers of poor and minority students. Things are bad in the green zone, too, where overcrowding also limits and degrades educational opportunities. Things have gotten so bad, we’re verging on driving out the middle class. Which is ironic, given that open transfers (according to a popular argument) have supposedly kept the middle class in PPS schools. This is one middle class parent giving Beaverton a serious look.

We have a perfectly good example in our western suburb, where there are no special focus or magnet programs in elementary school, and no transfers, either. They have a similar demographic to Portland, but none of the problems of racial isolation or funding inequities.

It’s time to put some pressure on our school board, and particularly the members of the committee taking a first look at this problem. If you care about this, give a call or drop an e-mail to Ruth Adkins, Dan Ryan and Dilafruz Williams.