Category: Middle Schools
January 28, 2010
by Steve Buel
I couldn’t believe the Starbase program so I called Beth Slovic at Willamette Week and said, “Beth, have you seen PPS Equity today?” She said she wrote about the Starbase program in 2006. (Not many PPS issues I haven’t heard about – once in awhile Lynn Shore slips one by me. But somehow I missed this one.) So I thought to myself: Why hasn’t this been addressed? Then I remembered the PPS Law of Lousy Outcomes.
I first discovered this law about 15 years ago when I became concerned about kids at the middle school where I was teaching who could hardly read at all. So I called down to the administration building and got one of the best administrators who really knew her stuff on the line. I told her about my idea for a program to fix this and pitched how important it was. After all, did anyone expect kids reading at 1st and 2nd grade level in the 8th grade to learn to read in high school? Her answer was, “Well, we need to work on the reading in the lower grades.” Her answer to the problem was that we had another problem.
Just recently I saw a great example of the law used when I was standing behind a teacher waiting to talk to another top administrator following a high school redesign meeting. The teacher was talking about having 40 kids in her class with a number of ESL kids, a lot of behavior problems, a number of special ed. students and a tough topic to teach. She thought it was impossible and implored the administrator to take the problem seriously (i.e. work to fix it). The administrator’s answer: I know how difficult it must be, but “We don’t do anything well.” In other words, the reason we can’t fix your problem is because we have so many other problems.
Portland Public Schools is like a person who owns a house and his or her in-laws come over and say, “Geez, your roof is leaking. Why don’t you fix it?” And the person says, “I would but the back porch is falling down, the kitchen needs new plumbing, the house needs to be painted, and I need a new rug. I would fix it, but I have so many other problems.” If you watch you can see PPS leaders do this all the time. And I imagine it has something to do with why we are letting the army recruit our elementary kids. And the libraries are a mess. And the middle grade education is a mess. Etc., Etc., Etc.
So here is the PPS Law of Lousy Outcomes: THE WILL TO FIX A PROBLEM IS THE DIRECT INVERSE OF THE NUMBER OF PROBLEMS WE HAVE.
Finally, it all becomes clear.
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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January 25, 2010
by Carrie Adams
In 1998, I joined a multiethnic activist group called the Community Monitoring Advisory Coalition (CMAC). The group was led by longtime activists Ron Herndon, Richard Luccetti and Halim Rahsaan.
My first CMAC committee assignment was writing the history of the struggle to improve public education for minority children. That was quite an assignment for me considering that I come from a poor white background. I’d rarely left my neighborhood. Needless to say the paper was a collaborative effort.
I’m in the process of updating the Two Decade Struggle for Public School Children because it is now over a decade behind.
I get pissed when I read through the history now because so much of what was fought for has been lost. Here’s an excerpt from the paper:
In 1979 the Black United Front began working against a school desegregation plan that was very harmful to Black children and discriminatory in its implementation. Using a study by the Community Coalition for School Integration, the Front protested the forced busing of Black students from their communities while White students were allowed to attend neighborhood schools. School district policy prevented Black teachers from teaching at schools in the Black community.
There were no schools serving grades 6-8 in the Albina neighborhood where the majority of Portland’s Black children lived. All middle school aged children were mandatorily bused into other neighborhoods. School officials tried to put as few Black children as possible in as many White schools as possible. In 1977, 44 students from the Eliot neighborhood were bused to 20 different schools. This abusive practice of busing and scattering Black students occurred at every elementary school in the Black community.
The Front sponsored two successful boycotts of Portland Public Schools in 1980 and 1981 to press demands for a new desegregation plan and a middle school in the Black community.
Tubman Middle School was opened in 1983 but only after the firing of Superintendent Blanchard (BESC is named after him), partially because of his unwillingness to work with Black parents and intervention by a mediator from the US Department of Justice.
Sadly Tubman closed in 2006. Where is the Albina neighborhood’s middle school now?
One of my favorite poems is a long poem called The Intervals by Stuart MacKinnon. In it MacKinnon talks about not letting the effort of generations drop.
Portland Public Schools has taken advantage of the fact that some communities have been asleep. PPS has changed school boundaries and reconfigured, consolidated and closed schools in poor communities with little resistance.
By just about every measure (achievement gap, dropout and discipline rates, under and over representation in TAG and SPED, teacher diversity, and equitable opportunities) Portland has gone backwards. Hard fought gains have been lost.
PPS is about to change school assignment policy at the high school level, redraw boundaries, and close schools. They say that they’re making the changes in an effort to create equity. Nothing in their history makes me believe that.
PPS administrators can’t be trusted to do the right thing for kids unless forced. Hell, they don’t even know it’s about kids. They think it’s about them. Parents and community members need to get involved now. Before it’s too late.
Sourced from: Cheating in Class. Used by permission.
Carrie Adams blogs at Cheating in Class.
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January 8, 2010
by Carrie Adams
I’ve never forgotten my first visit to Whitaker Middle School in June 2001. It was shortly after Willamette Week broke the story The Poisoning of Whitaker. The Willamette Week story exposed a long history of radon poisoning along with other indoor air quality concerns at the school. For about 10 years, PPS administrators failed to adequately address building conditions or to inform staff or students of the health hazards.
The first thing I noticed when entering Whitaker School (Pictured in the Cheating in Class banner) was that the cove base had been removed from along the bottom of the walls exposing mold. There was a solid, thick, black line that ran parallel to the walls. I realized as I got closer that it was a trail of dead ants which ran the full length of the hallway. It looked as if someone had sprayed for ants but didn’t bother to clean up the dead ants.
It was during that visit that a staff member gave me a sample of what appeared to be a mushroom scraped from the wall in a special education classroom. The building smelled awful. I later learned that the smell was probably coming from a squirrel that had died in the basement.
I am not an environmental health and safety expert. I’m a mom. A mom who recognizes mold when I see it. Whitaker clearly had a mold problem.
Still, PBS Engineering and Environmental who had been on contract with PPS for years, had produced report after report stating that there wasn’t an indoor air or mold problem. They even produced a report the same month of my visit saying that “ventilation of the spaces tested appears to be adequate with respect to the ventilation parameters monitored and the particulate identified in the laboratory reports.”
In July 2001, Whitaker was vacated and later determined to be too toxic to renovate. After spending $700,000 on maintenance for the vacant building over the next few years, PPS administrators decided to demolish the building.
The PPS board voted to borrow $2.1 million for the demolition in August 2006.
Well PBS may have missed the boat on the mold problem but they weren’t going to miss out on their share of the demolition dollars. PBS oversaw the decommissioning of several underground storage tanks, hydraulic lifts and water wells. They also developed erosion control and grading plans.
According to the PBS Engineering and Environmental project website:
“The Whitaker School project is a good example of how PBS incorporates their multi-disciplinary structure into a successful project. Led by the Sustainable Design Group, all four PBS service areas - Engineering, Environmental, Health and Safety, and Natural Resources – brought this project to successful completion.” It sure did!
You’d think that PBS would count their winnings and move on but no…they’re still providing services to PPS. Their annual contract was amended on 10/12/09. They continue to receive about $450,000 annually.
The Whitaker situation raises a question about potential conflicts of interest. But that’s not new for PPS.
In 1998, PPS contracted with KPMG to conduct a comprehensive performance audit. At that time, the district claimed to have solicited four firms to submit bids to perform the audit but only two firms responded. KPMG’s proposal was incomplete. The only mention of costs was a handwritten note at the bottom of a letter. The note estimated costs at $300,000 – $350,000 with formal cost estimates to be sent at a later time. The district didn’t follow their own Request for Proposals policy.
KPMG came up with 230 audit recommendations. The most controversial being the recommendation to close 13 schools. An Oregonian analysis conducted shortly after the audit found KPMG’s numbers to be inflated. Many of KPMG’s findings are still in dispute today.
Research into KPMG’s background suggests that KPMG might have been motivated by their desire to profit from PPS closures. KPMG was a partner in a for-profit education management company. They used public school system audits to gain entry into schools.
KPMG was actively involved in pushing charter school legislation, vouchers and privatization. It makes you wonder why the PPS board would have approved a contract with a company hostile to public education.
Now we have Magellan. The Magellan website states:
Magellan K-12 is a specialty consulting firm providing services to education clients nationwide. The firm is focused solely on the K-12 marketplace and provides Educational Adequacy and Suitability Assessments. The firm develops educational standards and specifications, architectural programs, site selections, enrollment projections, geographic information systems, economic models, bond programs, and construction implementation plans.
Once again…one stop shopping. Magellan can identify problems with PPS facilities, make recommendations about renovations and new construction, and manage all projects.
Not surprisingly many of the PPS staffers involved in today’s questionable contracts are the same people who brought us PBS Engineering and Environmental and KPMG.
I agree with the little girl. There’s a fungus among us. What do you think?
Sourced from: Cheating in Class. Used by permission.
Carrie Adams blogs at Cheating in Class.
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January 3, 2010
by Steve Rawley
Lili Taylor has been busy over break at Cheating in School, with new and informative posts on Title I and No Child Left Behind, some history on the closure and demolition of Whitaker Middle School, the history of PPS’ ongoing noncompliance with Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, and more.
Steve Rawley is the father of two PPS students and is publisher and editor PPS Equity.
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November 2, 2009
by Steve Rawley
As Portland teachers approach 500 days without a contract, and as discontent bubbles to the surface over a failing experiment in K8 schools and an ill-conceived “surplus” auction, senior management of Portland Public Schools spent last week at the downtown Hilton, enjoying seminars and speakers, not to mention complimentary breakfast and lunch.
They were there as hosts of the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) fall conference, with a headlining keynote address by former PPS superintendent Vicki Philips. Philips, now director of education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was the architect of Portland’s devastating experiments in K8s and “small schools” high schools.
She openly acknowledges that small schools were a failure (as does PPS, at least as implied by the proposed high school redesign). The latest trend being pushed by Gates — not to mention the Obama administration — is merit pay. Only we can’t call it that. “This has been the third rail,” Philips told Willamette Week’s Beth Slovic.
Instead, much as fundamentalists have re-clothed creationism as “intelligent design,” Philips and other merit-pay proponents dress up their union-busting with terms like “performance” and talk about ways of measuring it, like videotaping teachers, sampling student work and surveying students.
According to Oregonian education blogger Betsy Hammond, Gates “will award millions to several pioneering urban districts that agree to hire, place, train and pay teachers differently…..”
So while bargaining team members from the teachers’ union report intransigence on the part of the school district in resolving their contract dispute, while a second generation of middle graders begins a middle school career in contained classrooms, and while parents report no homework due to a paper shortage even as the district auctions “surplus” paper, our superintendent and at least ten administrators spent last week taking tips from the very person responsible for a great deal of the morass our district faces today.
Portland Public Schools spends $35,000 a year in dues to the CGCS, and it spent at least $1,750 on conference fees (the superintendent and board members attend at no additional fee), not to mention the much greater cost of 11 person-weeks spent away from the district’s business of (ahem) educating our children. On Facebook, a senior PPS administrator defended attendance at the conference as a “relative bargain.”
But what’s the value to our students in sending so many senior administrators to a week-long conference (at a luxury hotel) touting the latest corporate foundation-driven trends in urban education? Under Carole Smith, our district has taken a welcome turn away from trend-hopping, instead proposing a bold, homegrown vision for our high schools, firmly repudiating the bad Gates medicine we swallowed under Philips.
Why should we blow good money to listen to Philips now?
Steve Rawley is the father of two PPS students and is publisher and editor PPS Equity.
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November 2, 2009
by Steve Rawley
Download audio, subscribe to the podcast, or listen here:
“It is a civil rights violation of the worst kind in the city of Portland when based on race and zip code roughly 85% of white students have access to opportunity in rigorous college prep programs, curriculum and resources compared to 27% of black students. We are a better state than this. We are a better city than this.” –PPS Deputy Superintendent Charles Hopson
This week in PPS, we feature sound clips from the Urban League of Portland’s presentation to the Portland City Club on the State of Black Oregon.
Steve Rawley is the father of two PPS students and is publisher and editor PPS Equity.
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October 21, 2009
by Steve Rawley
Beth Slovic documents the obvious inequities between K8s and middle schools for middle grade education.
Steve Rawley is the father of two PPS students and is publisher and editor PPS Equity.
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October 14, 2009
by Sheila Wilcox
Amidst unstable funding for education and a lingering recession, Portland Public School teachers like me are stuck in the middle of contentious contract negotiations, one year overdue. Much information that is available to the public is filtered through Portland administrators, namely Carole Smith, who seems very much out of touch with the day-to-day workings of most teachers.
As news stories broke about $500,000 spent on Blackberries for “higher ups”, and $80,000 spent on hotel meetings for the same, one starts to wonder how much more is being spent on “non-classroom” items. One such story saw Matt Shelby, district spokesperson, say something to the effect that these items were very minor compared to the overall budget. And this got me wondering, “If these items were just “drops in the bucket” so to speak, how many drops in the bucket do there need to be, before the bucket gets filled, and people get mad?”
Drops in the bucket. There are 80+ schools in the Portland district. If each of these schools received $1,000, then that $80,000 spent on hotels takes on greater significance. I have had to scrounge for materials each and every year I have taught. $1,000 to buy the novel sets I desperately need to teach 7th grade. Wow, what a luxury. How many drops is that $80,000 now?
Not to mention $500,000. As I think about the computer lab our school was promised, but then denied, because we didn’t have the room, I wonder. Would half a million buy a lab? Or how about an addition to our cramped, “only suitable for elementary students but made to serve middle school students as well” library? A place to house our nurse and counselor and special ed. teachers, who currently have to share small quarters? This would not go far to fix all of our K-8s that are sorely lacking in facilities and resources. But, what if even one school got the treatment it deserved? How many drops in the bucket is that worth?
As we see the district move forward with its grand high school redesign, one cannot help but wonder what happened to the K-8 redesign. Did we miss it? And can we really trust a district that feels as if several hundred thousand dollars are just drops in the bucket?
Sheila Wilcox is a PPS parent and K8 teacher.
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July 7, 2009
by Steve Buel
With the coming of the newly designed high schools it is even more imperative PPS fixes its middle grade education. Here is my proposal:
Put four 7th and 8th grade junior high schools, one each, into the Roosevelt, Madison, Jefferson, and Marshall attendance areas. If there are about 1400 students per high school in each attendance area that would be close to 700 students in each school. We leave the 6th graders in K-6s. Middle school for them is not much different than grade school anyway and society already pushes kids ahead too fast. Then let’s focus on making these schools attract and engage kids that age and use what we know about child development. I mean let’s really focus on it.
Art, band, electives (including hands-on shop and computer engineering, dance, and drama), PE every day, huge numbers of computers that are accessible, a comprehensive education in the social sciences, science, and health. A truly outstanding library. Advanced classes as well as a strong support system for struggling students. A no sugar, no junk food lunch program. Appropriate and extensive counseling. A yearbook. A school newspaper. Close ties to state, county, and city programs designed to help low-income families. Athletic and other programs such as debate and academic teams which compete against the other three schools with paid teacher coaches. A full intramural program at noon. Speakers, field trips, special programs with outside artists etc.
Then let’s couple a no nonsense discipline policy with an embracing of teen culture. Hats? Fine. Ipods? Fine. Cell phones? OK out of class. Xbox tournaments. A liberal dress code. But a take no prisoners class or program disruption discipline policy using a system which doesn’t eliminate the kid from school but holds them responsible for their actions.
Let’s free up teachers to be creative and add interest to their classes. Encourage and celebrate teaching that is dynamic and engages students, while understanding what we are trying to do is broaden the background of each child.
Expensive? Somewhat, but not as much as you might think. And with only four schools to focus on, PPS could really draw on community partners and grants for support.
It is time we stopped short-changing our most vulnerable students and perpetuating an economic and educational underclass n Portland. It is these kids’ turn.
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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June 30, 2009
by Sheila Wilcox
Everyone’s a critic, it’s true. It is easy to point fingers, but try to fix something? This takes more effort than most people can muster.
I have been a witness, for the last four years, to Portland Public Schools’ fiasco known as K-8 schools. I have tried to shed light on the problems created by this policy and had hoped to, as they say, be part of the solution, not part of the problem. The district has a history of not accepting blame when it is due, continuing with programs proven not to work, and trying to spin it all in a positive light. As PPS entrenches itself deeper into this hole it has dug itself, I cannot help but throw in my two cents, both as a K-8 teacher in PPS, and as a parent to two children in a K-8 school.
Perhaps the most obvious problem with K-8s is that the facilities housing them are woefully inadequate. My school this year, as of June 12, is losing its staff room to a classroom and the nurse will be in the hall. We were promised a brand new computer lab, but alas will have to settle for a mobile cart of computers to be wheeled from classroom to classroom. There is no science lab, our library is extremely small, and the counselor has to share a room with several other programs. Already, there is a portable on the playground. It is true that some schools have enough space, but many do not.
Indeed, some schools have scaled back their K-8 plans due to space constrictions. However, this policy is not applied consistently. Several times, in other K-8s I have taught, facilities people have gone on walk-throughs to plan for the upcoming years. Never have I seen staff asked for input. Indeed, I have seen several staff members give input, only to have it ignored. This resulted in configurations that then had to be changed once the school year started.
Even if facilities for K-8s were sufficient, the content taught and the approach to this content is not at all up to the standards of most middle schools. Many middle schools in K-8s are taught using a self-contained model. This means that one teacher teaches almost all subject matter. The problem with this is that the higher the grade level, the more complex the subjects become, and most teachers, no matter how gifted they are, cannot adequately teach every subject.
Most middle school teachers teach one or two subjects. They are experts in those subjects. As a parent, I want my children to learn from experts. Additionally, electives are taught, usually, by those same teachers. So, on top of teaching 4-5 academic subjects, middle school teachers in K-8s are required to teach an additional elective. Hence, lots of knitting, badminton, and study halls are offered. No music, no home economics or languages, as these would require actually hiring additional teachers.
Lastly, in addition to lacking satisfactory facilities and academic support, K-8s have no one steering the boat, so to speak. Most administrators are trained in elementary protocols and procedures, not middle school models. I have called several people in the district who were supposed to be “in charge” or helping those in charge, and have gotten nowhere.
The last phone call I made, on June 12, was to a facilities person. She got irritated with me asking “Why do we not have adequate room for our programs?” She then started asking me what my solutions were. I offered two or three, and she said each one had already been considered and thrown out. But it left me wondering. If you really wanted my opinion, as a teacher in a K-8, why didn’t you ask me four years ago?
Sheila Wilcox is a PPS parent and K8 teacher.
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