November 12, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Word is that President-elect Obama is considering notorious union-busting, test-obsessed, NCLB-defending, school-privatizer Joel I. Klein (New York City’s public school boss) for Secretary of Education.
While Obama’s election may provide a new attitude and sense of comity, his actual administration may do just the opposite if it includes divisive figures like Klein.
I’ve been concerned that Obama would tap our old friend Vicki Phillips, but Chicago school reform activist Michael Klonsky (no fan of Phillips) thinks Klein would be the worst possible choice for Secretary of Education.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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November 12, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The amount of a $5.2 million federal grant lost by the Vicki Phillips administration is now approaching $2 million, according to the Willamette Week (where the story originally broke in September, 2007). The funding of the grant, which was intended to create magnet schools in the Jefferson cluster to ease segregation, was lessened by at least $1.7 million due to the rushed closures of Applegate and Kenton, and by poor grant management.
In separate news, the State of Oregon has been ordered to pay $3.5 million to a computer testing company for breach of contract.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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November 10, 2008
by Steve Buel
With George Bush as President the only avenue to change seemed to be moral outrage. This played out not only in national affairs but in communities throughout the country. Reason, as well as intellectual arguments, seemed to be neither effective or welcomed.
Well, the times they are a changin’.
Obama’s demeanor and intellectualism create a model of calm civility and serious problem solving…. Let’s sit down and talk this out. Let’s work together to solve the obvious. We can make good things happen for all our citizens. Yes we can.
So, how should this play out in Portland Public Schools? The first step it seems is to recognize the obvious and work to bring about major improvements where they are needed. Forget selfishness, greed, and getting yours at the expense of everyone else’s kids.
Here are some of the obvious things we need to address:
- In a public school system all kids should have equal offerings and opportunities based on their needs.
- Middle school age students need electives, athletics, music and the arts, and activities to help build their interest in school.
- Kids who can’t read should get the help they need so they can.
- The main focus of all schools should be on what takes place in the classroom where most of the learning happens. This includes great support for teachers and working hard to have orderly schools and classrooms.
- High stakes testing is not as important as good, solid education which prepares students for life, ncluding future schooling, the job world, citizenship, and happiness.
- Kids who can read decently well should have their education broadened in the arts, the sciences, the social sciences, and technology.
- Kids who don’t get good family support should get extra help from the schools in overcoming those drawbacks.
- Kids who work and excel should be able to go as far as they can, both through extra course work and special programs.
In the new spirit of America (really the old spirit of many of our childhoods) let’s work together to make these deferred dreams a reality.
Steve Buel has taught in public schools for 41 years. He served on the PPS school board (1979-1983) and co-authored the 1980 School Desegregation Plan. He has followed PPS politics since 1975.
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November 8, 2008
by Steve Buel
Here’s Monday nights agenda for the Portland School Board:
- PRESENTATION TO THE BOARD 6:30 pm
• MESD 2007-2008 Annual Report (information item)
- STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE REPORT 6:45 pm
- SUPERINTENDENT REPORT 6:50 pm
- BUSINESS AGENDA 6:55pm
- OTHER BUSINESS 7:00 pm
• Council of Great City Schools Annual Conference (information item)
- ADJOURN 7:10 pm
So the school board can only find 40 minutes of work that needs to be done? Or should I say 40 minutes of reports to receive. This is in a school district which spends hundreds of millions of dollars of citizens’ taxes, which is beset by problems ranging from incredible school inequity, massive economic problems on the horizon, disastrous maintenance deficits, serious teacher hiring malpractices, rampant school discipline problems, incredible numbers of dropouts, a TAG program which desperately needs to be revamped, a k-8 curriculum which is the envy of no one, a student transfer program which is further segregating the school district, schools which are inundated with a culture of testing instead of education (no offense to those educators who are fighting this), schools without libraries or librarians, huge numbers of kids who can’t read or do basic math, and a myriad of other serious problems. 40 minutes?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that Superintendent Carol Smith has begun to address many of these problems and the school board does a lot of work in committees. They are good people who care about Portland and its children. But that is not enough. The school board is elected to lead, to solve problems, and work for the best educational programs it can. It needs real public input, serious public discussions about directions to take, resolutions put forth to address problems which are debated openly and sold to the public and the school district’s employees, real leadership which garners genuine support and confidence. Leadership that continues to move us in a new direction where all kids are important and which looks at education in Portland as something more than a referendum on programs which arise out of some hazy educational research done somewhere by someone for some reason we don’t understand, and which we then push on our teaching staff eating up their time in meetings instead of having them be further engaged in the teaching process.
So I call on each school board member to bring their resolutions to the table. This is the time. November and the first part of December are a slow time in education. A good time to make some progress. A good time to look at those problems which are beginning to fester. A good time to discuss those problems which need to be addressed by our city’s educational leaders –- you, the board.
Steve Buel has taught in public schools for 41 years. He served on the PPS school board (1979-1983) and co-authored the 1980 School Desegregation Plan. He has followed PPS politics since 1975.
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November 4, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Forwarded from Lakeitha:
Dear Portland Area Rethinking Schools friends,
This is a reminder for the upcoming “TGI Thursday.” We are depending fully on email announcements these days — i.e., no paper sent out — so please help us get the word out:
Our “TGI Thursday” will be this Thursday, Nov. 6, — 4 pm social; 4:30 to 6 pm — at Westminster Presbyterian Church in the Fireside Room, 1624 NE Hancock, two blocks north of Broadway.
Our topic: “Got Equity? Stories and Conversations.” We’ll be using the Portland Area Rethinking Schools-produced report card to ask ourselves critical questions about how equitable our schools and school districts are — and reflecting on how we can use this information to make them better. It should be a lively and interesting session. — Full details at our website: www.portlandrethinkingschools.org
Also, I’m sure that we’ll want to spend some time discussing the election results and how these might influence the prospects for equity and justice in the schools. — We’ll also hear some brief reports from the recent First Annual Teaching for Social Justice Conference in Seattle, that attracted 325 educators from around the region.
Please send this announcement to friends and colleagues. We are no longer sending out paper flyers, so depend on emails and email forwards to get the word out.
Thanks.
Bill Bigelow
for the Portland Area Rethinking Schools steering committee
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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November 3, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Official news that the Young Men’s Academy (YMA) at Jefferson High School will close at the end of this school year is certainly no surprise. But rather than point fingers over obvious mistakes, we should pause and reflect on the lessons to be learned.
Jefferson, Oregon’s only majority black high school, is emblematic of how Portland Public Schools treats its black students. No other high school in Portland offers as few classes as Jefferson — 34 classes currently listed (not counting dance classes), with no music, chemistry, physics, calculus, world languages other than Spanish, or a single A.P. class — and no other high school has experimented with gender segregation or uniforms.
The first lesson we should take away from the failed experiment in not just gender segregation but also “smallness” taken to the extreme, is that size matters. This is a lesson PPS needs to learn system-wide. If we are unwilling or unable to pay for it, we shouldn’t design it into the system.
The young women at the Jefferson Young Women’s Academy (YWA), though faring better than their counterparts at the YMA, are still suffering from unfunded smallness. They are the only high school campus in the district without a staffed library. They also are cut off from the after-school programs at Jefferson, with no transportation provided to and from their satellite campus two miles away.
We should also remember that both YMA and YWA have so far served mostly middle grade students — high school grades have been phased in as students age up — and that the Jefferson cluster does not have a middle school.
By far and away the most important lesson to learn from the failure of Jefferson’s YMA is one of fundamental fairness. Why is the choice of middle grade students in the Jefferson cluster between K-8 or gender-segregated 6-12? Why doesn’t the Jefferson cluster (and Madison, too) have a comprehensive middle school option, like every other cluster in Portland?
Or, to put it more bluntly: Why do we insist on treating black students so much differently (that is, worse) than everybody else?
We should know by now that endless promises, experiments and reconfigurations have only made Jefferson weaker and less desirable to the greater community — declining enrollment figures don’t lie. More of the same may be seen as confirmation of the suspicion heard frequently around the neighborhood: that PPS wants Jefferson (and its black students) to fail.
In the end, what we should take away from this particular failed experiment is that Jefferson students need what all students need: a rich and interesting curriculum, taught by experienced teachers, with opportunity in their neighborhood on par with every other neighborhood in the district.
Portland Public Schools has the facilities, and, more importantly, the neighborhood student populations, to support comprehensive high schools and middle schools in all nine clusters. But the district’s twin experiments in “smallness” and “choice” have led to a system wildly out of balance and shamefully unfair to the students most in need of a comprehensive education.
Perhaps the announcement of YMA’s demise on the day before a historic election augurs a new day, one in which black students in Portland, Ore. have the same kinds of schools in their neighborhoods as white students, and they are no longer subject to ill-conceived, under-funded experiments and second-tier opportunity.
One can only hope.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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October 29, 2008
by Steve Rawley
In a must-read story in today’s Willamette Week discussing the Portland Public Schools board of education resolution in opposition to Bill Sizemore’s Measure 60 (merit pay for teachers), Beth Slovic writes that Measure 60 supporter Sonja Henning, who cast the lone vote in opposition to the resolution, didn’t return several phone calls.
A reliable source has filled us in on the rest of the story: Henning did eventually respond, but not to comment on the story. Henning’s response to legitimate requests for comment on her public policy position calls into question her suitability to serve in public office.
After several calls to her office and home seeking comment on her dissenting vote went unreturned, Slovic attempted to contact her in person at her home. She left a note on her door requesting a call back.
Henning reportedly responded with a voice message accusing the reporter of “crossing the line” and ultimately admonishing her not to attempt any further contact for any reason.
This message was followed by a call from PPS communications boss Robb Cowie, who reportedly reiterated Henning’s message, and also said all future contact with Henning must go through his office. Furthermore, Cowie is reported to have said, Slovic is not to approach Henning at public school board meetings.
Think about that.
Word is that Henning is also not returning calls to the Portland Tribune. (Reporters at The Oregonian did not immediately return e-mails requesting comment on Henning’s refusal to return calls requesting comment. Wheels within wheels!)
It is not clear whether Cowie’s reported decree will affect other reporters, or if singles out Slovic, a reporter who has covered PPS policy and politics more closely than any other reporter currently on the beat.
It is also unclear whether this is intended to apply to other board members, who have made themselves available to the public and the press in varying degrees (new board director Martín González is already becoming notorious for not returning calls and e-mails), or just to Henning.
Cowie was not immediately available for comment.
Given how rare dissent on the current school board is, it’s disappointing that it should come in favor of a poorly designed assault on teachers which would result in lower pay at schools serving poor and minority students (who statistically score worse on tests, which would lead to lower pay for their teachers). Coupled with the PPS teacher transfer policy, Measure 60 would surely aggravate the existing dramatic inequity in teacher experience between poor and rich schools.
The school board took the right position on this measure, and Henning’s dissent borders on bizarre. It’s certainly in the public interest to learn more.
And that’s what’s even more disappointing, even disturbing: that an elected public official would attempt to place herself and her policy positions above public scrutiny.
A reporter’s job is to act as a proxy for the public, and the public has a right to know how and why public policy is made. Henning could have simply returned the first call and offered a brief explanation. Or she could have simply said “no comment.” But to treat a reporter — and the general public she represents — with such contempt is beyond the pale.
If Sonja Henning wants to put herself off-limits to the public at public meetings, it’s time for her to retire from public life. She’s already announced she won’t seek a second term. If she’s so uncomfortable in the public eye, she should take the easy way out and resign now.
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Update, October 30, 8:53 pm: Robb Cowie, while declining to comment on private conversations between him and individual reporters, sent me this comment via e-mail:
…[S]chool board meetings are public meetings and any reporter can attend. Reporters or members of the public are free to approach school board members and ask questions (school board members are also free to decline to answer those questions, if they choose). Portland Public Schools has not placed any restrictions on any journalist’s access to school board meetings.
Either my source misunderstood Cowie (or I misunderstood my source), or PPS is backing off from an untenable position. In either case, it is now clear that Beth Slovic is, in fact, free to approach Sonja Henning at school board meetings.
Next public board meeting: This Saturday, November 1, 8 a.m. at McMenamin’s Kennedy School, in the Agnes Kennedy White Library.
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Update, October 31, 10:30 a.m.: Beth Slovic clarifies that Cowie relayed a request from Sonja Henning that Slovic not approach her at board meetings. She also said that he told her this does not apply to other journalists, just her. In other words, this was not an edict from the district. (Since the district’s chief spokesman was the one delivering the message, one can see how this may have been perceived as something more than an individual board member’s request.)
It is unfortunate that the district’s communications office was put in the awkward position of relaying Henning’s legally unenforceable (without a restraining order) request to Slovic.
The focus of this story remains on Henning. I regret if anyone thought I was trying to portray Robb Cowie or the PPS communications office as the bad guys.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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October 24, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The Emerald Charter School will receive its first hearing at the school board’s charter school committee on Halloween (scary stuff, kids!).
There will be a whopping ten minutes available for public testimony, scheduled during the first 30 minutes. The meeting is Friday, October 31, 9-11 a.m. in the Willamette Conference Room at BESC, 501 N. Dixon St.
As usual, letters and e-mail to the board are appropriate in lieu of public testimony.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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October 12, 2008
by Steve Rawley
How student transfers, “small schools,” and K8s steal opportunity from Portland’s least wealthy students, and how we can make it right
When speaking with district leaders about the glaring and shameful opportunity gap between the two halves of Portland Public Schools, it doesn’t take long before they start wringing their hands about enrollment.
“If only we could get enrollment up at Jefferson (or Madison, Marshall or Roosevelt),” they’ll tell you, “we could increase the offerings there.”
Or, as PPS K8 project manager Sara Allan put it in a recent comment on Rita Moore’s blog post about K8 “enrichment”: “All of our schools that are small … face a massive struggle to provide a robust program with our current resources.”
Not to pick on Sarah, but this attitude disclaims responsibility for the problem. After all, the “smallness” of schools in the PPS “red zone”* is by design, the direct result of three specific policies that are under total control of PPS policy makers:
- the break-up of comprehensive high schools into autonomous “small schools”
- the transition from comprehensive middle schools to K8s, and
- open transfer enrollment.
Smallness is not a problem in and of itself, but it is crippled by a school funding formula in which funding follows students, and there is little or no allowance for the type of school a student is attending (e.g. small vs. comprehensive or K8 vs. 6-8).
So when you’re dealing with a handicap you’ve created by design — smallness — it’s a little disingenuous to complain about its constraints. Instead, we need to eliminate the constraints — i.e. adjust the school funding formula — or redesign the handicap.
Adjusting the school funding formula to account for smallness would be ideal, if we had the funding to do it. Since we don’t, this would mean robbing Peter to pay Paul. That is, we would have to reduce funding at other schools to pay for smallness brought on by out-transfers, the K8 transition, or the small schools high school model. This obviously hasn’t happened, and it would be political suicide to suggest we start.
So barring a new source of funding to reduce the constraints of smallness, we need to redesign smallness.
The easiest case is the “small schools” design for high schools. Where students have been constrained to one of three “academies,” with varying degrees of autonomy, we simply allow students to cross-register for classes in other academies. Instead of academies, call them learning communities. Instantly, students at Madison, Marshall and Roosevelt have three times the curriculum to choose from. The best concepts of “small schools” — teachers as leaders and a communities of learning — are preserved.
For K8s, the problem is simply that we can never offer as much curriculum with 50-150 students in what is essentially an elementary school facility as we can offer at a middle school with 400-600 students. So we offer a choice: every middle grade student can choose between a comprehensive middle school or continuing in their neighborhood K8. Reopen (or rebuild) closed middle schools in the Jefferson and Madison clusters, and bolster those in the Roosevelt and Marshall clusters. Families in every cluster then have the choice between a richer curriculum of a middle school or the closer attention their children may receive with a smaller cohort in a K8. We all like choice, right?
Which brings us to the stickiest wicket of the smallness problem: open transfer enrollment, which conspires with K8s and “small schools” to drain nearly 6,000 students from the red zone annually (that’s 27% of students living in the red zone and 12% of all PPS students). We’re well-acquainted with the death spiral of out-transfers, program cuts, more out-transfers, and still more program cuts. It has reached the point that it doesn’t even matter why people first started leaving a school like Jefferson.
If you look at Jefferson now, compared to Grant, for example, It’s shocking what you see. Not counting dance classes, Jefferson offers 38 classes. Grant offers 152.
What kind of “choice” is that? (Disclaimer: both the Grant and Jefferson syllabi listings may be missing courses if teachers have not yet submitted their syllabi.)
Obviously, given funding constraints, we can’t afford to have a school with 600 students offer the same number of classes as one with 1,600, as district leaders will readily point out. What they’re not fond of talking about is the budget-neutral way of offering equity of opportunity in our high schools: balance enrollment.
All of our nine neighborhood high schools have enrollment area populations of 1,400-1,600. Jefferson and Marshall, two of our smallest high schools by enrollment, are the two largest attendance areas by residence, each with more than 1,600 PPS high school students.
With a four-year phase-in (keeping in mind that transfers into Lincoln, Grant and Cleveland have basically been shut-down for a couple years anyway), you start by making core freshman offerings the same at every neighborhood high school. Incoming freshman are assigned to their neighborhood school, and they don’t have to worry about it being a gutted shell. (Transfers for special focus options will still be available as they are now.) The following year, we add sophomore classes, and so on, and in four years every neighborhood high school has equity in core sequences of math, science, language arts, social studies, world languages and music, paid for without additional funding and without cutting significant programs at schools that are currently doing well.
Once we have this balance in place, both in terms of offerings and enrollment, we can talk about allowing neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers again, but only as we can afford them. In other words, we will no longer allow a neighborhood program to be damaged by out-transfers.
It’s time for Portland Public Schools to stop blaming its opportunity gap on the smallness it has designed — by way of “small schools,” K8s, and open transfer enrollment — and it’s time for policy makers to stop transferring the costs of smallness to our poorest students in terms of dramatically unequal opportunities.
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*I define the red zone as clusters with significant net enrollment losses due to student transfers: Jefferson (net loss of 1,949 students), Madison (1,067 students), Marshall (1,441 students) and Roosevelt (1,296 students). (2007-08 enrollment figures.) This represents, by conservative estimate, an annual loss of $34 million in state and local educational investment to the least-wealthy neighborhoods in Portland. “Small schools” were implemented exclusively in these four clusters, and the K8 transition, though district-wide, has disproportionately impacted the red zone. There are only two middle schools remaining in the red zone, one in the Roosevelt cluster and one in the Marshall cluster. By contrast, the Cleveland and Wilson clusters each have two middle schools; Franklin, Grant and Lincoln each have one.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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October 5, 2008
by Steve Rawley
PPS Equity has learned that staff in the Portland Public Schools transfer and enrollment office told the parents of at least one incoming 9th grader at the Jefferson Young Men’s Academy that the beleaguered academy would be closing.
“It’s not going to exist,” the family was told approximately two weeks before the start of the school year. It was strongly suggested that they should withdraw and go to one of the other schools where they’d been accepted.
The family, feeling like they had no choice, settled on their neighborhood high school, which the district employee told them “gets just as bad a rap as Jefferson,” so why not go there.
This could certainly explain why there were no incoming sixth graders at the Young Men’s Academy this year, if families were told to go elsewhere.
Were other incoming students told by transfer and enrollment to go elsewhere? If the district is planning to close the Young Men’s Academy, what does this say about their commitment to the 33 students who remain there? Were they also told their school would cease to exist? And what does this mean for the future of the Young Women’s Academy?
If we are giving up on the Young Men’s Academy, it is time to come clean for the good of the students. Slow death by strangulation can’t possibly be in anybody’s best interest.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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