One of my favorite alto players, showing his range as a musician and band leader. Paquito D’Rivera!

All of us at Chez Wacky are sending our good thoughts for a speedy recovery to Alex Trebek.

One of my favorite songs from one of my favorite movies… The Band with the Staple Singers, for your enjoyment.

It is refreshing to be on the same side of an issue with the entire school board. The Portland Public Schools board of education unanimously voted down all four charter applications in the current cycle last night (with Sonja Henning absent).

Following a rhetorical lead by David Wynde, who enumerated the myriad choices already available in the district and explicitly rejected an absolute free market approach, several board members made sweeping statements in opposition to increasing the competition for our neighborhood schools. One might get the sense (if one were an optimist) that the pendulum has reached its maximum free-market position and could conceivably begin to swing back.

In the interest of equity, let’s hope so.

At several points during the discussion of the four proposals, board members expressed concern about the schools being able to provide “comprehensive” education to their students. I hope the irony isn’t lost on the board members that this is a concern for the students of Jefferson boy’s academy, not to mention all the other “small schools” that were carved out of the formerly comprehensive Jefferson, Roosevelt, Madison and Marshall.

Also on the agenda was the facilities plan, and some prep work for floating a capital bond.

Here’s a preview of my position on any new construction bond: I will not support any PPS bond unless and until the board articulates a goal of a comprehensive high school in every neighborhood. I will actively campaign against a bond that sets in stone the narrowly-focused academies at schools in our working class neighborhoods.

I seriously hate to sound like a libertarian, but until this board and administration demonstrate a commitment to equitably distributing what they’ve already got, I will fight against any further revenue.

Before I had kids and became obsessive about school politics and hockey, I used to play music. The last group I played with before laying down my saxophone was Poli Chavez y Sus Coronados. The Coronados were an innovator of the “Tex Mex” sound in San Diego, and Poli brought the band’s cumbia, ranchera and conjunto rhythms with him to Portland in 1978.

I met Poli through his son in 1996 or 1997, and played a few Quinceañeras, weddings and anniversary parties with the band. Poli’s book was thick; there were probably a hundred or more well-worn charts in the alto sax book he handed me at my first rehearsal. Most of the songs were standards, but I’d never played any of them. After one rehearsal and one gig basically sight reading, I begged him to let me take the alto book out of his sight and photocopy some of the songs I really needed to practice, like the classic Rico Mambo. He grudgingly let me take it, and I still have my copies.

The Portland version of the Coronados was a family band. I replaced his son on alto sax. Another son played tenor sax, and his son-in-law played trumpet.

Though Poli was something of a legend in the world of Tex Mex music, few in the Portland Anglo community knew about him. Their best chance to have heard him was the annual Cinco de Mayo festival at Waterfront Park, where he was a mainstay. The last time I worked with him was on the main stage there in 1997.

Napoleon “Poli” Chavez passed away in 2003. I missed it at the time, and only found out when searching for some of his recordings online the other day. My sincerest condolences go out to his large extended family, especially the guys I worked with. Poli was a larger-than-life figure, and touched the lives of many people, myself included.

After the break, there’s a photo montage tribute, featuring songs from his 1976 LP “Mi Nueva Ilucion.”
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PPS area directors and principals of Vernon Elementary and Jefferson High will meet tonight with community members who petitioned the district to change attendance area boundaries to take them out of the Jefferson cluster.

Jefferson cluster families have been calling attention to the inequities in our cluster for three years, and have been met with absolute silence from the district. So it’s a bit of an affront that the district would only feel compelled to address this fundamental issue when confronted by residents of Beaumont-Wilshire. Not to denigrate these people, who are just trying to get what’s best for their kids, but don’t the rest of us matter?

This is a great opportunity for all Jefferson cluster families to come out and see what kind of excuses and promises the district will make.

Here’s a letter from Carole Smith announcing the meeting.

The meeting is tonight at 6:30 at Vernon Elementary School, 2044 NE Killingsworth.

And why not a little Poncho Sanchez to liven things up…

I don’t think so… but I definitely want some of what Nigel Jaquiss is smoking.

More thoughts on that over at Metroblogging Portland.

Let’s forget about the Portland Public Schools’ radical transfer policy for a moment. I know I’m sick of talking about it, and we know the school board has delegated their policy-making responsibility to their brand-new superintendent to ponder for a few months. (In other words, nothing’s happening on that any time soon.)

Let’s forget about race, too, since prominent members of Portland’s black community don’t have a problem with a certain level of racial isolation in our schools. It’s never been about race for me anyway (but race is an indicator of economics, the real issue).

I’m also really bored with the charter schools debate. This is about policy, not personal choices.

So let’s talk about equity. If certain elements of Portland insist on a little piece of privilege at the expense of not only the working poor, but also an increasing segment of the middle class, let’s just take that economic issue head-on.

Portland Public Schools are grossly inequitable.

At the macro level, we have nine neighborhood high schools, spaced relatively evenly across the district. Of these, five are traditional, comprehensive high schools. The other four are split into small academies with extremely limited educational opportunities.

All of the comprehensive high schools are located in the wealthiest parts of Portland. All of the limited high schools are located in the poorest parts of Portland.

At the micro level, neighborhood elementary schools have dramatic differences in program offerings, sometimes within the same ZIP code. One school may have all the “extras” — PE, music, counseling, library, technology specialists — while the next school over has none of these, and more kids in the kindergarten room, too.

Of course school choice is supposed to address this problem, giving parents the “right” to attend a school across town if their neighborhood school doesn’t have the programs every child needs. We know that choice has instead exacerbated the problem, but I promised I wasn’t going to talk about that.

Any policy maker without a tin ear to equity would insist on a policy that seeks to reduce inequity in Portland Public Schools. If we are going to keep a radical transfer policy that causes inequity, we are going to have to invest in remediation in the form of much higher spending per student in the clusters with high out-transfers.

We’ve got to insist on an equitable school in every neighborhood. That means all nine clusters have a traditional, comprehensive high school, and equivalent enrichment programs at all neighborhood elementary schools. If anybody thinks they can do this without seriously reforming the transfer policy, I would give them my full support in trying.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers need to be seriously curtailed, if not banned entirely, to sustain equitable schools in every neighborhood. But evidently that’s too farsighted for some to grasp.

So I’m up for putting some pressure on Carole Smith to propose a plan to remedy the gross inequities the transfer policy causes as a part of her report to the board in January. (I will be writing a letter to Smith soon, and posting it here.)

Thelonious Monk “Rythm-a-ning”, 1961

I’m working on a post about school equity, and a map of closed public schools, charter schools and private schools in north and northeast Portland. While you’re waiting for that, listen to this.