Do the Math on PK-8
April 6, 2008
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.
