April 13, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Still touted as a way to close the achievement gap, the “small schools” model that has gutted the high schools in Portland’s poorest neighborhoods is proving to be not just unpopular, but also impotent in retaining students.
Seven of ten of the schools with the worst graduation rates in the metro area are in PPS, and all seven were split into small schools under the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored Office of High Schools, headed by outgoing chief Leslie Rennie-Hill.
Rennie-Hill wants to pretend that there hasn’t been massive community resistance to the the small schools model, which constrains students to narrow choices of curriculum and strips much of the richness of curriculum common in traditional comprehensive high schools like Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln and Wilson.
This model was so roundly rejected at Jefferson, the community seems to have prevailed in convincing the district to reunite the two main academies there for the 2008-09 school year.
Instead of acknowledging their popular rejection, Rennie-Hill blames No Child Left Behind for having drained the small schools of their higher-achieving students. This from the Thursday, April 10 Oregonian:
Several factors may have influenced the low numbers, said Leslie Rennie-Hill, the district’s chief of high schools. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, students at schools that don’t meet federal benchmarks in math and reading have the option to transfer to a higher-achieving school.
The exodus left Marshall and Roosevelt with “a harder population to teach, a population with more academic challenges,” she said.
The administrator of the grants, also funded by the Meyer Memorial Trust, is quick to the defense, claiming the small school transition simply needs more time to work.
But the truth is that graduation rates are indicators of poverty. Portland Public Schools are increasingly segregated by poverty, and moves like splitting up comprehensive high schools into narrowly focussed academies simply encourages more socio-economic segregation. The answer to schools with problems of poverty is integration; that is, bring back the middle class that has fled these disastrous experiments with our childrens’ lives.
And the way to bring back the middle class is simple: bring back comprehensive high schools, so students don’t have to transfer to get what students take for granted in the other half our city.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 13, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The candidates for Portland City Council and Mayor are starting to talk about schools, and already there has been some interesting talk.
Willamette Week is posting video of their joint endorsement interviews, which have so far included candidates for commssioner #1 and #2, as well as mayoral candidates Sho Dozono and Sam Adams.
Jim Middaugh, a candidate for commissioner #2, raised some eyebrows at PPS with his response to the PPS Equity candidate questionnaire, in which he claims city staff of the Schools, Families, Housing Initiative helped avert a school closure. This prompted Matt Shelby from PPS to note “I’m not aware of closure plans, or even discussions for that matter, involving any of our schools.”
(Middaugh, like all other candidates who have responded to the questionnaire except Fred Stewart, carefully avoids talking about holding the district accountable to the Flynn-Blackmer audit.)
In the Willamette Week interview, Middaugh declares that schools are his top priority, and he cites his work on the Schools, Families, Housing Initiative as an example of how the city can help schools.
What he doesn’t mention is that in the first of two rounds of this grant, only one small project was funded that will actually be school-based. I’m not saying the other projects aren’t worthy, but there’s only so much a million dollars could do even if all of it were spent on our schools. One $14,000 grant isn’t much to crow about.
But I don’t want to pick on Midaugh. The fact that he has kids in PPS is one positive he would be wise to play up.
The mayoral candidates are also jumping on the schools bandwagon, and also tip-toeing around any serious issues, like the glaring inequity documented over several years by the Neighborhood Schools Alliance, and more recently by me and the Jefferson PTSA.
Sho Dozono is vague about schools, as he is with pretty much everything, but thinks businesses and non-profits should be more involved. Sam Adams is all about “fundraising” (how about revenue raising?), and seems to have tuned in to the Jefferson High School “charrette” fiasco, with no awareness of the community fallout that followed this top-secret plan to demolish Jefferson and essentially cede the property to PCC.
In the Willamette Week interview, Adams talks glowingly of a Jefferson High fully integrated with PCC.
It’s surely not be a bad thing for some students to earn college credit while they go to high school. But this demonstrates how out of touch Adams is with his constituents in North Portland, who have been cool to the idea of demolishing Jefferson High and rebuilding it as an extension of the PCC campus.
Of course, this idea is consistent with the developer-centric ethos of Adams, much of City Hall, and PPS, so we shouldn’t be terribly surprised.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 8, 2008
by Steve Rawley
“We’ve been overstaffed. We’re working real hard on figuring what the right staffing level is.” — Cathy Mincberg in today’s Tribune, justifying deep staffing cuts at Jefferson, Madison and Ockley Green, and effective cuts at Peninsula.
The Trib article, by Jennifer Anderson, notes that Peninsula is getting an additional 1.27 FTE next year, but doesn’t mention that this increase will need to cover not just the added eighth grade class, but also the new “enrichment” requirement, as reported here last week.
Peninsula parent (and PPS Equity participant) Nicole Leggett understands this, even if district administrators and board members do not. “The increase is so teensy,” she says in the Trib, of Peninsula’s FTE budget. “That’s just one little thing, a crumb, not the darn cookie. We don’t have what we need.”
Board member David Wynde is also quoted, basically blaming declining enrollment and saying things are tough all over, which has a kernel of truth.
But things are especially bad in the Jefferson, Madison, Marshall and Roosevelt clusters, where enrollment has been artificially drained by the transfer policy, not demographics. The cost of this transfer policy is thusly born, in terms of reduced opportunity, by the students who do not transfer, and who have dramatically fewer middle school options than students living in wealthier clusters.
How does this look through the equity lens?
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 6, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Portland Public Schools allocates teachers for middle school students at a ratio of 23.5:1. Take a PK-8 school like Beach, for example, with 68 students enrolled in grades 6-8.
Not accounting for SES, Title I, grants or adjustments, that would be just under 3 FTE positions dedicated to teaching the entire middle school curriculum. (Keep in mind that middle school teachers require extra certification, so you can’t just shuffle, say, a third grade teacher to teach middle school algebra or science while his kids are in reading groups.)
Even assuming some of Beach’s additional FTE from SES, Title I, etc. is used for middle school, they’ve still got fewer teachers than subjects.
There is a limit to how small a middle school environment can be and still be reasonably expected to provide the “basics” — not to mention the arts, industrial education, independent living, or any of the other great things children once got in middle school.
In our rush to reconfigure, this fundamental fact has been ignored. If we are to provide our students with a comprehensive middle school education in PK-8 schools, it is going to be vastly more expensive than in 6-8 schools.
Look at a middle school like Beaumont, with 460 middle school students and over 20 FTE positions. You can see how the concentration of students in these age bands would allow the school to offer quite a range of both core curriculum and electives, which simply isn’t possible with the smaller numbers of students in these age bands in PK-8 schools.
I’m not saying PK-8 simply won’t work. With more support (i.e. money), one could imagine a functional PK-8.
But the district isn’t acknowledging this cost, much less moving toward paying it. Instead, just like with open transfer enrollment, they are shifting this cost onto students in the form of reduced educational opportunities. And further echoing the transfer policy, the students who are paying this cost are disproportionately poor and minority.
If we are to plunge ahead with this PK-8 experiment, the district must start bearing some of the cost. We also need to maintain middle school options for all students in every cluster, since they can simply offer more curriculum, more cost-effectively, and are better equipped to prepare more of our students for high school.
Once again I ask: What is the purpose of the PK-8 transition? If it is to cut options for poor and minority students, it is succeeding wildly. If it is to offer more “enrichment” to more students at lower cost (as was stated by the previous administration), it is a demonstrable failure and needs to be reversed. If there’s some other reason, it needs to be articulated.
Our children are too important to play this kind of game with.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 6, 2008
by Steve Rawley
This letter to the editor, from Jefferson High PTSA members Nicole Breedlove, Lakeitha Elliott, Shei’Meka Newmann and Nancy Smith, was published in the Oregonian on Saturday, April 6 [I’ll link it on the press page when it shows up in the archives. -ed.]:
To the Editor,
Commemorating the life of Martin Luther King is important, but it’s not enough. During the Mayor’s Week at Jefferson in January, the Jefferson PTSA presented a resolution to the Portland School Board and City Council which began with:
“WHEREAS, Portland Public Schools policies have resulted in increased racial and socio-economic segregation in our city’s public schools and discriminatory access to educational opportunities for Portland’s children and youth, in direct conflict with local, state, and federal education policies as well as the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The PTSA’s document detailed specific examples of inequitable and discriminatory school district policies and actions, and concluded with almost five pages of recommendations for addressing those issues. How many of our school district and city leaders even read the document? If they did, they certainly didn’t respond.
[But just like 40 years ago, it’s not just the policy makers who are responsible for discriminatory policies. The folks who felt entitled to sit at the front of the bus, or who did it just because they could, were also responsible. It’s no different today.]
It doesn’t matter how many people participate in a civil rights march, if we continue to allow discrimination to exist in our public schools, the justice system, and throughout our society. Martin Luther King may have reached the promised land, but we still have a lot of work to do.
Nicole Breedlove, North Portland
Lakeitha Elliott, Northeast Portland
Shei’Meka Newmann
Nancy Smith, North Portland
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 4, 2008
by Steve Rawley
This just in from Peter Campbell:
I just spoke to Richard Clark in the central office. It’s official: Judy Elliott, Barbara Adams, and Leslie Rennie-Hill are all out of work as of June 30th. The new Chief Academic Officer will take over all of the responsibilities associated with these 3 divisions. The future of the underlings at the Office of Teaching and Learning — the 4 directors — is not clear. Once the CAO is in place, he/she will review these positions and determine if a further shake-up is in order.
The CAO is expected to be hired and in place before school starts back in the fall.
I see this as very good news. PPS is very top-heavy and needs pruning. We also need new leadership, especially in the Office of Teaching and Learning. Carole Smith’s tenure continues to show good signs.
Superintendent Carole Smith sent an e-mail yesterday announcing the new position of Chief Academic Officer, and the merging of the Office of Teaching and Learning, the Office of Schools and the Gates Foundation funded Office of High Schools under this new leader. Elliot, Adams and Rennie-Hill headed these offices, which were created by former superintendent Vicki Phillips. The departure of Adams was previously announced.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 3, 2008
by Steve Rawley
I’ve made a minor update to the front page of PPS Equity, to include recent blog post excerpts and make it easier to find active blog discussions. (You may need to hit “reload” or “refresh” to see the new layout correctly.)
I plan to add recent forum discussion to the mix soon (as soon as there is a reliable RSS feed available for the forum software). Hopefully this will encourage forum use; things have been very quiet over there!
This change is the result of reader input. I want to make it as easy as possible to find new material here. Please let me know if you have any complaints about usability here, or if you have any ideas for improvement. I know things aren’t perfect, and I won’t take it personally, I promise.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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April 2, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Tuesday, April 8th, McMenamin’s Kennedy School (5736 N.E. 33rd Ave.) benefit for Faubion Elementary School.
When you dine in the Courtyard Restaurant between 5pm and midnight, McMenamin’s will donate 50% of the proceeds (from food and drinks) to Faubion PTA
Faubion’s PTA is raising money for a rock-climbing wall and sign board. You gotta eat anyway!
Saturday and Sunday, April 19 and 20, Lloyd Center Barnes & Noble benefit for Jefferson High (including the Young Men’s Academy and the Young Women’s Academy).
Shop from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. both days. Purchase anything in the store – Books, DVDs, Starbucks Coffee and Jefferson will receive a portion of the total sales for the weekend.
Live entertainment provided by our students! Artwork, projects and information on display.
Please print out and bring in this flier (305KB PDF) to make sure your purchases benefit Jefferson High.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
4 Comments
March 24, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Now that we’re supposedly examining every policy move through the “lens of equity,” you might expect there to be some changes to the FTE formula to help out the schools that have suffered dramatic program cuts under the radical PPS student transfer policy and a decade of failed market-based experiments.
But if you expected that, you’d be sorely disappointed.
Reports are trickling in from all around the district of real and effective cuts in FTE budget, even as schools are faced with new mandates to offer more “enrichment.” At Madison High, they are facing a cut of 2 FTE positions, even as they add eighth grade. This adds up to an effective cut of 3-4 FTE positions for 9-12.
At Jefferson, it is rumored that they will be losing upwards of eight FTE positions, with more positions shifted away from the (supposedly) merging 9-12 school to the gender-segregated academies.
At Peninsula Elementary, they’re getting an addtional 1.27 FTE positions. But one of those is used up for the “enrichment” requirement, and they’re also adding eighth grade. Adding a middle school grade with .27 FTE is tricky, to put it in the most charitable light.
Now comes word, from a parent e-mail list, that Ockley Green is losing nine positions next year:
Those positions include the Vice Principal, the Disciplinarian, one secretary, one physical education teacher, 2 educational assistant positions, 2 retiring teacher positions not being filled, 1/2 of the counselor and 1/2 of the librarian’s position.
A true focus on equity would assure that the real cost of open transfers would no longer be shifted in terms of reduced opportunities onto students who chose not to (or are unable to) transfer. The district, if they intend to keep the transfer policy in place, needs to bear its full cost and quit cutting programs in our poorest schools.
PPS needs to step up and define, implement, and guarantee a comprehensive educational experience for all students in every neighborhood of Portland. Then we can talk about equity. Until then, it’s just an empty buzz word.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
1 Comment
March 24, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The school district has proposed a time line and process for parental involvement in the PK-8 transition. Here is the text of an e-mail sent from PPS administrator Sara Allan to PTA representatives:
Dear PTA representatives,
As announced by Superintendent Smith in early March, PPS has kicked off an action team to develop a consistent model and set of standards around what successful PK-8 and middle schools need to look like within the PPS system. This team, led by Harriet Adair, Area Director of the Grant Cluster and interim head of the Office of Schools, has been charged with the development of a district wide plan for PK-8 education by June. The goal of the plan is to ensure that all PK-8 and Middle Schools are building a robust program that enables all students to leave 8th grade ready to be successful in high school. The team is comprised of principals from all levels of PK-12, as well as representatives from district support services. See the attached slides (36KB PDF) which outline our team’s charter in more detail.
We greatly appreciated hearing your thoughts regarding the current strengths and challenges facing your PK-8 schools back in February, and your input has helped to shape the team’s workplan. We would like to set up a process to have parent representatives from the PK8 and middle schools engage in the
development of the plan as the team moves forward. The PPS internal team is meeting to specify the beginning elements of the plan in the next few weeks. As such, we want to set up several points for parents to respond and give input. We hope to develop a rough strawman of a PK-8 program model in the next couple of weeks which we could then share in written format online by the end of the first week of April. We could then set up a parent input session in mid to late April to gather specific comments on it. We’d then go back and do more work and do another session, likely in mid-late May.
Stay tuned for more information about upcoming meetings. In the meantime, any ideas or feedback you have before we get together face to face about the
process or the focus of the team’s work are welcome. Feel free to contact me by email, or phone at 503 916 3047.
We look forward to working together with you.
Sincerely,
Sara Allan
Sara Allan
Director
HR Operations
& Organizational Development
Portland Public Schools
sallan@pps.k12.or.us
p. 503 916 3047
f. 503-916-3110
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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