July 29, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The story of “small schools” in Portland Public Schools is one of desperation, hope, good intentions, bad will, and, ultimately, bitter irony.
PPS turned to the model when it had run out of ideas on ameliorating the “achievement gap.” Put aside for a moment the fact that schools are just one small input in the equation that yields abysmal school success rates for children affected by poverty. Under pressure from the federal government to raise test scores, PPS leaders turned to grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to split comprehensive high schools into autonomous schools-within-schools.
Originally conceived as “small communities,” with teachers as leaders and principals as teachers, the “small schools” movement had already gained a toehold in PPS, thanks to committed teacher-leaders like David Colton, who saw them as an opportunity to bring a private school atmosphere to the kinds of students least likely to have access to it.
There was never an intention to constrain students in narrow academic “silos,” to place artificial barriers between small schools, or to introduce more administrative bureaucracy. But this is exactly what happened at the four high schools torn asunder by the PPS interpretation of “small schools.”
Each of the three small schools at Madison were given their own “small school administrator,” at a pay grade ($91,140 – $101,092) one step above vice principal. At least one of these administrators had no classroom teaching experience. Despite an unworkable master schedule within the small schools, students were prohibited from crossing over into other academies to fill out their schedules.
The net effect is that for considerably more money, mostly due to the cost of extra administrators, students at these small schools get considerably less opportunity than they could be getting, if only PPS would make small modifications to their small schools implementation.
The obvious solution at Madison, without backing out of the small schools model entirely, is to allow students to fill out their schedules by crossing over into the other academies. It would also make sense to get rid of the three small schools administrators, and hire a vice principal. Use that money to put teachers in the classroom, and have senior teachers and counselors lead the small schools.
This is what the teachers who originated the concept wanted, but when counselor David Colton helped students fill out their schedules by crossing over into other small schools, he was placed on probation and threatened with involuntary transfer out of Madison.
Colton has the overwhelming support of his students and colleagues, as evidenced by the mass student walkout and the vote of no confidence in Madison principal Pat Thompson at the end of the school year in June.
The situation at Madison could be a watershed moment for Carole Smith. Her initial reflex was to side with administrators against the students and teachers, calling their actions “very disappointing.” Colton’s involuntary transfer is rumored to be proceeding.
But will students at Madison continue to be denied cross-over? There can be no legitimate reason for this. Even school board member Bobbie Regan, at Madison’s commencement exercises, acknowledged that students want to be able to do this.
The only reason to deny students the ability to fill out their schedules across small school lines is for Carole Smith and her administration to save face. Scapegoating David Colton for the problems at Madison, despite overwhelming support for his vision of small learning communities, not iron-clad, top-heavy small school silos, only further limits the educational opportunity of Madison’s students.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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July 24, 2008
by Steve Rawley
In an interview with The Oregonian‘s Kim Melton, incoming Portland Association of Teachers president Rebecca Levison puts equity at the top of the list of teacher concerns.
“We need equity across the entire district,” said Levson. “It should be part of what we do.”
When the word “equity” is thrown around by district leaders, too often it’s no more than a buzzword. But most teachers, especially those who, like Levision, have taught in North Portland, get what it really means.
Levison also talks about teacher workload, top-down decision making, and getting “teachers at the table at every level of decision-making.”
Here’s wishing her luck in all these very well-placed priorities.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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July 23, 2008
by Steve Rawley
…and the winner is…
Toni Myers!
During the 2007-2008 school year, Antoinette “Toni” Myers was often the most direct and most transparent member of Portland Public Schools’ Board of Education. She was also the youngest—by nearly 30 years. As the non-voting student representative on the board, Myers, an 18-year-old 2008 graduate of Grant High School, didn’t face the political pressures to stay “on message,” guard her thinking on a controversial topic or censor her words.
Read the rest in print or at wweek.com.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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July 16, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The biggest problem with Carole Smith’s “equity administration” is that no leaders in Portland Public Schools are willing to define a base level of curriculum that every child is entitled to, in every neighborhood school.
This is fundamental to working toward equity.
Without this definition, district leaders are free to talk about equity at every opportunity, but can avoid actually taking meaningful steps toward it.
Equity immediately achievable
This much is true: it is immediately possible, with available funding, to offer equal educational opportunity in every neighborhood school, simply by having kids go to school in their neighborhoods.
I’m not talking about cookie cutter schools, or replicating programs like Benson in every neighborhood. I’m talking about every child guaranteed an education with a common K-12 core curriculum, ideally including library, music, art, science, math, language arts, social studies, health and world languages.
This is what our neighbors in Beaverton get, through a combination of an extremely strict transfer policy, relatively large schools, and a clearly defined core curriculum. You can walk into any neighborhood school in Beaverton and find a common level of what PPS calls “enrichment,” regardless of the income level or ethnic makeup of the neighborhood.
Contrast this with Portland, where schools vary dramatically, and race, income and address are the best predictors of the kind of opportunity available to students.
We don’t need 2000-student high schools to do this, but we clearly can’t do it in 600-student high schools with the existing funding formula.
While the size of Beaverton’s schools may rankle many idealists, I personally would rather have a large institution with smaller and more classes than a smaller institution with larger and fewer classes.
Details can vary, of course. But we must have a centrally-defined core curriculum, or we will never see equity. And we need to return to neighborhood-based enrollment to achieve the economy of scale necessary to pay for this.
Baby steps not working
Ask yourself how much equity we’ve gotten since it was declared the “over-arching” goal of current leadership.
So far, the “baby steps” approach has seen continued enrollment drains and FTE cuts in our poorest schools. There has been neither talk nor action on addressing the enrollment drain, i.e. the transfer policy, or the FTE cuts, i.e. the staffing formula.
Our schools continue to become more segregated, with dramatic differences in curriculum between white, middle class schools and poor and minority schools. These differences become especially stark and intolerable at the secondary level.
Poor and minority middle school students are disproportionately likely to be assigned to PK8 schools, where they are more likely to be deprived of libraries (nearly a third of PK8 schools completely lack library staff) and the kind of curriculum breadth available at comprehensive middle schools, where white, middle class students are more likely to be assigned (and which all have at least some library staff).
This pattern continues in high school, with white, middle class students generally assigned to comprehensive schools with broad curriculum, and poor and minority students overwhelmingly assigned to “small schools” with far less opportunity.
District leaders refuse action for fear of alienating middle class
By taking the transfer policy off the table, leaders seem to have convinced themselves that we can’t afford a common curriculum. To speak of it would be to acknowledge that we indeed have the means to solve the equity crisis, but won’t, for fear harming the neighborhoods that benefit when district policy siphons enrollment, funding and opportunity out of North, Northeast and outer Southeast Portland.
This unspoken fear — that we will alienate a few hundred middle class white families if we take bold steps toward equity — is unfounded and ironic, especially considering the number of families I personally know who have pulled their children from PPS, or plan to for secondary school, precisely because they cannot receive a fair shake in their neighborhood schools.
It is unethical to maintain current policy based on this fear. How can we deprive at least half of our students of opportunity to benefit the other half?
I don’t believe there is anybody currently on the school board who has both the conviction and the courage — it takes both — to come to the table with policy proposals that will even begin to address this issue.
Terry Olson is right; we need to start working toward electing three strong leaders to school board zones four, five and six in May. We need bold leadership in times of crisis, and we’re not getting it from the current crop of school board directors.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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July 14, 2008
by Terry Olson
The school board is the crucial leadership body for effecting real change in the way the Portland Public Schools District does business. Therefore it’s urgent that school equity activists start now in seeking out and campaigning for three new board members who will represent the interests of the vast majority of parents and district stakeholders who believe that a public school district should offer equal educational opportunities to all students regardless of family background and economic status.
As Steve Rawley pointed out in a recent post, “In other words, despite the demonstrable harm [district leaders] are doing to at least half the students of Portland, the perceived risk to their constituency outweighs the clear benefit to the greater common good.” They refuse, he says, to even talk about it.
Community members can’t change district leadership, but they do have a say in electing the representatives who can — the Portland Public Schools Board of Education. The school board chooses the district superintendent, it develops district policies, and it ratifies — or rejects — policies proposed by the district administration. It also can be a powerful bully pulpit for change. In other words, the real power lies with the men and women who are chosen to represent the interests of the broader community.
I say it’s time for a change.
As most of you know, the board this summer will pick a replacement for departing board member Dan Ryan. PPS Equity has urged the board to replace Ryan with either Jefferson activist and teacher Nancy Smith or with former board member and teacher Steve Buel. In addition the terms of Trudy Sargent and Sonja Henning are up in the spring. I’ve argued that both should be replaced with candidates willing to confront the district policies that have led to a two-tiered school system of schools with resources and those without.
We in the activist community need to start now. I speak from experience. I ran for the board in 2003, but didn’t make my decision until the February before the May election. Despite the late start, I still managed to finish second in a field of eight to Doug Morgan. If had to do it over again, I would have started much earlier.
So here’s my challenge. First we need to make every effort to see that the board appoints either Nancy or Steve B. to the board this summer. Then we need to find and recruit at least two good candidates from the Madison cluster and the Marshall and Franklin clusters, respectively. As I wrote in a comment to Steve Rawley’s post, I know that the Madison area is a hotbed of district discontent. Surely some good “equity” candidates are available to fill that seat.
I know less about Zone 6, the seat held by Trudy Sargent. But that’s where you come in. Send your ideas, meaning the names of potential candidates, to this site.
Let’s see if we can get something going, maybe start a mini-uprising for equity and democracy. Let’s take back the school board!
Terry Olson passed away in October, 2009. He was a retired teacher and a neighborhood schools activist. His blog, OlsonOnline, was a seminal space for the discussion of educational equity in Portland.
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July 12, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Portland Public Schools’ student transfer system transfers public investment out of our neediest neighborhoods and hands it to the wealthiest.
The poor are the biggest public school philanthropists in Portland, to the tune of 40 some million dollars a year.
The solution: rebalance enrollment. The Jefferson cluster alone had a net loss of 1,949 students to out-transfers last school year. At a conservative estimate of $5,800 per student, that’s over $11 million of public investment drained from the Jefferson cluster alone.
That’s a lot of money, but more importantly, it robs the cluster of the economies of scale that allow other clusters to offer more curriculum at lower cost.
The other clusters with significant net losses to out-transfers are Marshall (1,441), Roosevelt (1,296) and Madison (1,067).
If we put these students in schools in their neighborhoods, we would not only be able to return comprehensive education afforded by economies of scale, we would also relieve significant overcrowding at schools like Grant, Cleveland and Lincoln.
This solution has been staring district leaders in the face for a long, long time, but they refuse to even speak of it. Why? As far as I can tell, the reasons are two-fold:
- fear of losing enrollment (they hear from their affluent white friends that they would send their children to private school if this happened) and
- fear that balancing enrollment and opportunity would mean equalizing downward in white middle class neighborhoods.
In other words, despite the demonstrable harm they are doing to at least half the students of Portland, the perceived risk to their constituency outweighs the clear benefit to the greater common good.
Make no mistake, this is class war, and the only Robin Hoods are the reverse type.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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July 9, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Make no mistake, talk of converting Benson High School to a two-year, part-time CTE (Career Technical Education) center means that Benson is the first of Portland’s ten high schools to go on the chopping block.
District leaders have broadly hinted that they will close two high schools. If they convert Benson to a CTE center, would they only need to close one cluster school? Or are they considering closing two schools in addition to the Benson conversion? Any guesses which remaining high schools they would close or “merge”?
Logic, demographics and building conditions may indicate Lincoln and Wilson merging in a new facility. East side schools could rebuild or remodel, but continue to serve their neighborhoods (and be in place for the expected population boom coming in the next 15-20 years).
More likely, of course, they’re eyeballing east-side schools like Marshall and Madison for closures and mergers. Or Roosevelt and Jefferson. And rebuilding Wilson and Lincoln to the satisfaction of the west-side elites, of course, perhaps moving Lincoln and giving the land to Homer Williams in the process.
Get ready to fight for your high school, Portlanders.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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July 1, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Sixty-one years after Mendez v. Westminster, 54 years after Brown v. Board of Education, 51 years after the Little Rock 9, 48 years after Ruby Bridges, 45 years after George Wallace caved to the national guard at the University of Alabama, 28 years after Ron Herndon stood on the school board desk and demanded equal opportunity for Portland’s black school children, and two years after city and county auditors demanded justification for effectively segregationist enrollment policies, Portland Public Schools have become more segregated than the neighborhoods they serve.
The school board refuses to answer the auditors, and shows no intention of changing the policies that have created the situation.
The segregation (or “racial isolation,” as the district calls it) would not be so objectionable, if it weren’t for the fact that schools in predominantly white, middle class neighborhoods have dramatically better offerings than the rest of Portland.
The desegregation plan hatched by Herndon’s Black United Front and pushed through by then-school board members Steve Buel, Herb Cawthorne and Wally Priestley in 1980 did away with forced busing of black children out of their neighborhoods, added staff to predominantly black schools, and created middle schools out of K-8 schools to better integrate students within their neighborhoods.
For several years, things clearly got better for non-white, non-middle class students in PPS. Then the nation-wide gang crisis hit Portland in 1986, with white supremacist, Asian and black gangs wreaking havoc and contributing to a wave of white flight from Portland’s black neighborhoods and schools. This was followed by the draconian budget cuts of Oregon’s Measure 5 in 1990, which ended the extra staffing brought by the 1980 plan.
Under inconsistent funding and unstable central leadership throughout the 1990s, central control over curricular offerings devolved to the schools, and the gravity of a self-reinforcing pattern of out-transfers and program cuts became virtually insurmountable.
The devolution of curriculum was formalized under the leadership of Vicki Phillips in the early 2000s. Her administration pushed market-based reforms and “school choice” as a salve for the “achievement gap,” and used corporate grants to extend reconfiguration of high schools in poor neighborhoods into “small schools” which severely limited educational opportunities available to Portland’s poorest high school students.
(Small school conversions were tentatively under way at Marshall and Roosevelt when Phillips took office, but didn’t become the de facto model for non-white, non-middle class schools until Phillips pushed it through at Jefferson, against community wishes, and finally at Madison, casting aside the designs of veteran educators who had initiated the concept.)
A bond measure whose revenue was intended to restore music education to the core curriculum was instead frittered away in the form of discretionary grants to schools. Principals in poorer neighborhoods continued to put teaching resources into literacy and numeracy at the expense of art and music, while schools in white, middle class neighborhoods continued to offer a broad range of educational opportunity.
The Phillips administration also began to dismantle middle schools in poor neighborhoods, including, notably, Harriet Tubman Middle School, which was created under the 1980 desegregation plan. This move back to the K-8 model added significantly to the resegregation of middle school students.
It also turns out that middle schoolers in K-8 schools, who are disproportionately non-white and poor, get fewer educational opportunities at greater cost to the district. Predominantly white, middle class neighborhoods have, by and large, been allowed to stick with the comprehensive middle school model, which allows them to offer a much broader range of electives, arts and core curriculum at no additional cost.
So in 28 years, we have moved from a reasonable semblance of equal opportunity, with schools’ demographics reflecting their neighborhoods’, to a demonstrably “separate and unequal” system, with schools more segregated than their neighborhoods.
Current policy makers like to blame Measure 5 and the federal No Child Left Behind Act for the wildly distorted educational opportunities in the district, and they generally refuse to examine district policy in the context of the advances in equity that were realized 28 years ago.
PPS has managed to maintain pretty good schools in white, middle class neighborhoods through years of stark budget cuts, but they have left poor and minority children fighting over crumbs in the rest of Portland. Even as the steady march of gentrification makes our neighborhoods more integrated, our schools are more segregated than they were in the early 1980s.
When today’s school board speaks of “school choice,” the “achievement gap” or “equity,” they appear to speak in a historical vacuum. I hope to remind everybody of the context of PPS’s policies, and the continuum of institutional racism they are a part of. These policies are indeed racist in effect, no matter how they are rationalized or how they were originally intended.
And no matter how much they complain that their hands are tied, or how much they claim to be making progress by “baby steps,” the school board has total control over district policy. They could start rectifying this immediately if they wanted to. Yes, it’s hard — ask Steve Buel or Herb Cawthorne about their late-night sessions trying to push the 1980 desegregation plan through — but it can be done.
I know there are school board members who care deeply about equal opportunity. They may even be in the majority, depending on who is appointed to replace Dan Ryan.
But nobody on today’s school board has demonstrated the political courage or vision necessary to stand up for all children in Portland Public Schools.
With baby steps, we will never get where we need to go. Bold, visionary action is required.
Edited January, 2016: For more background on Ron Herndon and the Black United Front, watch OPB’s Oregon Experience Episode “Portland Civil Rights: Lift Ev’ry Voice.”
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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