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.

I don’t know what took so long, but somebody in the local media finally pulled back the curtain surrounding the Vicki Phillips corporate foundation funding agenda—just a smidge—and asked her a couple tough questions about her insult-to-injury snark about her critics and her predilection for corporate bucks.

Willamette Week reporter Beth Slovic, denied an “exit interview” with Phillips, went all Michael Moore and stalked Phillips on her victory lap.

Local broadcast and print media have generally fawned over Phillips for wooing the business community, raising test scores and balancing the budget, convincing many citizens that she’s just a good, caring administrator. The real work of journalism has fallen to activists at the Neighborhood Schools Alliance and bloggers like Terry Olson, who have consistently worked to expose the fraud of corporate reform that lurks behind the caring face of Phillips and the Gates and Broad foundations.

So now comes Slovic, asking Phillips to clarify her snarky remarks about the critics of her screw-up at Jefferson. “I’m not going to name names,” says Phillips. “Shouldn’t you clarify what you meant?” asks Slovic.

That’s a nice opening to say something like “You know, it’s been really frustrating all around. I made some mistakes in the process; we should have listened more to the community members who were already engaged at Jefferson.” And those two little words wouldn’t hurt: “I’m sorry.” As in “I’m sorry we didn’t welcome them into the process, and I’m sorry I made that remark in the Tribune.” Hell, she couldn’t even manage a George W. Bush-style passive-voice non-apology. “Mistakes were made. I’m sorry people felt excluded.” Nope, not even that.

Instead, she throws some more gasoline on the fire:

I always prefer to put my energy in those people who are willing to come to the table and be appropriately critical but also supportive and problem-solving…. I think it’s pretty public who’s been critical or not supportive, and I think there’s always people who are on both sides of an issue and my point is that Jefferson has a lot of really positive things going on and it’s time to get in there and problem-solve and help. And I think that’s an appropriate point to make.

Right. I don’t even know where to begin with this. She seems to be saying, “I welcome criticism, but only on my terms.” Appropriately critical but also supportive? In other words, we’re going to cram this process down your throat, and if you don’t like the terms, your not being appropriate. The point of departure for dialectic in Vicki’s world is acceptance of all her preconditions, else you are not being appropriate.

Listen, that’s what I say to my 5-year-old when he’s— oh never mind… That’s something you say to kids, not grown-ups. Certainly not grown-ups who were already engaged at Jefferson when you came in a bulldozed them with your top-down, Eli Broad-sponsored redesign scheme that was broadly rejected by the community. Talk about inappropriate!

Anyway, I’m glad The Willy Week sent someone out to toss a few hardballs at Vicki. I can only hope the national media are a little more curious about the Gates agenda than the local media have been. (So far, they haven’t been; witness Robert Siegel’s April 25, 2007 softball interview with Melinda Gates on NPR.)

There is some good discussion over at Terry Olson’s blog about Doug Morgan’s swan song that turned at times into a paean to Vicki Phillips. (You really should pay attention to Terry, if you have any interest in PPS reform issues. He’s an actual educator and expert on school reform, unlike so many pushing market-oriented reform at PPS.)

I tossed off the casual remark “The election of Ruth Adkins and comments on this entry by die-hard public schools supporters indicate a fraying patience with ‘business’ as usual in our public schools. If the board still hasn’t got that message, perhaps it’s time for a recall campaign or two. Or Three.” Which prompted the question from “blueteeth”: Can we do that? Even without malfeasance or dereliction of duty?

And my answer: Yes we can. According to Article II, Section 18 of the Oregon Constitution, recall drives merely have to “set forth in the petition the reasons for the demand.” You need to gather signatures totaling 15% of voters in the last regular governor’s election. See also ORS Chapter 249.

Blueteeth suggested the trigger point for such a campaign would be the promotion of a Vicki Phillips minion, say Cathy Mincberg, to superintendent.

The obvious and most vulnerable member of the board is David Wynde, who nearly lost reelection to virtual unknown Michelle Schultz. He may not fare so well in a rematch. Bobbie Regan is also vulnerable, but doesn’t have such a convenient populist opponent waiting in the wings. Who else is vulnerable?

Is it foolhardy to even consider such a move? I don’t think so.

Whatever we do, it is important to keep up the pressure on the PPS board. We may think a message was sent by the election of Ruth Adkins and the near miss on Wynde, but it sure is smelling like business as usual over at BESC. Thanks again to Terry Olson for keeping such good tabs on things.

Once in a while it’s fun to check the server logs and see the search terms that bring readers to a blog. On the one hand, it brings your not-so-humble blogger down a few pegs to see that his recipe for cholle or his review of Judy Park’s performance of Rach 3 with the Portland Youth Philharmonic is of much greater interest to the world than any of his views on hockey or politics.

That’s okay, because when it comes right down to it, I’m probably more passionate about food and music anyway (I just don’t have as much to say about them).

But when I noticed my piece about Vicki Phillips yesterday got at least one visit from someone at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I had to smile. (I extend a sincere welcome to the folks at Gates, and invite them to participate in the discussion if they care to refute anything written here.) They didn’t get here by way of Google, but I decided to check my Google juice on some key search terms, like “Vicki Phillips Gates”. Hey, not bad! I’m the fourth result, just after Gates, PPS and the Oregonian, well ahead of metblogs, the Portland Tribune and Willamette Week. Sweet!

But it’s even better when you search for “Vicki Phillips Gates Broad”: this blog is the first result.

It must drive the spin doctors absolutely bonkers that they can’t control their image any better than that.

They seem to be learning, though, at least on the local level. Witness comments here and on Terry Olson’s blog by the likes of PPS PR person Sarah Carlin Ames, PPS school board member David Wynde and Portland Schools Foundation executive director Connie Van Brunt. I personally welcome them to this exciting and new (to them) arena for democracy in action, and hope their friends at Gates will join in as well.

Nothing probably makes me madder in this whole amount of work than the fact that a very small few can continue to destroy Jefferson’s image.

—Vicki Phillips in the Portland Tribune, June 26, 2007

Uh, Vicki, is that a dig at all the folks you excluded from your charade of community involvement in the Jefferson redesign? That’s like blaming Bush’s failure in Iraq on those who opposed the adventure in the first place. Vicki, your planning process for the Jefferson cluster was flawed. It’s no surprise the results were, too. The only people making Jefferson look bad lately have been Leon Dudley (and the people who hired him) and the people who foisted the “Jefferson Cluster Fuck” on the people of North Portland. That would include you, Vicki Phillips.

Somewhat ominously, Phillips said “Jefferson hasn’t seen the last of me yet.” I’ve heard the speculation that in her job at Gates, she will be assigned to Portland. That is a very frightening proposition. Is Portland to be the test bed for Gates’ policy of cramming millions of dollars down the throats of urban school districts, simultaneously dismantling our neighborhood schools in favor of charter schools and stifling the cries of protest?

What really irks me about Gates and Broad is that they push “reform” philosophy that is opposed by actual educators. Since they’ve got the dough, school districts are more than happy to fall in line as a condition of picking up some crumbs. But why should we listen to an uneducated scofflaw like Bill Gates, or anti-teacher businessman Eli Broad? Just because they got rich in the “free market” doesn’t mean the schools should operate like corporations.

A note of clarification: in my post about the PPS survey, I talked about “accountablity”, “achievement” and “performance” as if they were bad things. They are not, of course, but they have been co-opted by Gates, Broad and their ilk as code words to bash teachers and push standardized testing. They are also used to argue against stable and adequate school funding.

Our School Board, in a rather dismal display of engaging its constituents, is using an unscientific Web-based “poll” to solicit input on community priorities for hiring a new superintendent. (To call this kind of thing a poll is an insult to researchers and statisticians who know something about scientific polling and sampling.) Of course, the ultimate poll in this matter was the recent school board election, in which Vicki Phillips supporters were thrashed (Doug Morgan) and brought down a peg (David Wynde) by community-based, neighborhood schools advocates Ruth Adkins and Michele Schultz, respectively.

The constituents of the School Board spoke loudly and clearly against the corporatist reform style of Vicki Phillips, her supporters on the board, and her patrons at the Broad and Gates foundations. Yet the board still floats a scientifically meaningless “survey” in which market-based school reform buzzwords are dangled tantalizingly before the unwary public. And the results, meaningless as they are, become very useful to these folks when they show that we want “accountability”, “achievement”, “school choice”, “tough decisions” and “performance”. These words and phrases come up repeatedly in the survey, mixed in with a few nods to “neighborhood schools”, “funding” and “diversity”. Art and music get lumped in with P.E. and technology in one item.

If it turns out the survey doesn’t show what they want, who cares! It’s unscientific anyway, and all us loud mouth critics probably stuffed the ballot box anyway. Hint: it’s trivial to “vote” numerous times, hence the absurdity of using such a piece of marketing quackery (what’s next? focus groups?) for such a serious issue. And again: we already voted, and the results were overwhelming: no more of this Gates/Broad reform crap. Give us strong neighborhood schools and adequate, stable, and equitable funding.

Most of the “survey” asks the respondent to rate issues on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “Not at all important”, 3 being “Neutral or don’t know” and 5 being “Extremely important”. (They start out with a couple throw-away short answer questions basically asking you to list three strengths and three concerns about PPS. I listed “teachers, students, families” and “Gates, Broad and school closings”. As if they’re even going to read those!)

Then it’s on with the 1-to-5 push polling. Buzzword number one is “achievement”. It comes up in the first question, then comes up six more times. “Accountability” only gets one, but there’s also one on teacher “effectiveness”. (These have always been a code words used to attack the teachers’ professional autonomy — and collective bargaining agreements.) “Performance” or some variant comes up twice. “School choice” comes up three times.

“Neighborhood schools” only comes up twice, but the second mention is a trap: in order to rate it as important, you have to also rate “school choice” the same! Seriously, I’m not making this shit up. Here’s the actual survey question: “Maintaining student enrollment through a variety of approaches including school choice, full-day kindergarten, and strong neighborhood schools.” This is also the only time full-day kindergarten is mentioned. Funding gets two mentions, but there is nothing about “equity” or “equality”.

Finally, the survey ends with the somewhat ominously worded question: “Are you affiliated with any particular community group you would like to name?” I ain’t namin’ names! *Cough*NSA*cough*cough*

Of course this is just another sign of Portland Public Schools, through its board, trying to behave like a corporation. This is not community involvement, folks, this is marketing. With the Portland School Board behaving like a startup corporation at the outset of the superintendent search, what do you think we should expect at the end of the search? Insulting though it is, please take a few minutes to fill out their survey. And don’t forget my little hint earlier. Heh heh heh.

Speaking of Vicki Phillips, she showed up at my children’s school today, NPR reporter in tow. You probably know how we feel about Vicki in my wacky household. (If not, you might want to look here.)

Ain’t it grand? Like she hasn’t pissed me off enough, she’s going to use my children, on the last school day of the year, as a backdrop for an NPR puff piece before she vanishes in a cloud of smoke and fire. I’m sure they’ll be extolling the virtues of the Gates and Broad foundations and all the great work they’re going to be doing promoting charter schools and other means of school privatization. Or maybe — just maybe — they’ll actually do a little background and talk to people who know something about education and are a bit concerned about Gates and Broad pushing their neoliberal education agenda nation-wide.

One can only hope. Then again, it might have been for a story on the local NPR affiliate, OPB. (The principal said NPR, but lots of people get confused about this type of thing.) Should be airing some time in the next couple weeks.

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.

(Not counting Wacky Mommy, of course.) I recently stumbled across the Dingleberry Gazette, written by a “middle-aged guy with the heart of a twelve-year old” who works nights in a 24×7 convenience store in downtown Portland. This is some good, funny stuff. Quoth the author, “The running commentary in my head needs a place to rest, so I chose here.” Check it out.