Budget bright side: time for a reset

For two years I have argued that Portland Public Schools needs to balance enrollment in order to pay for programmatic, geographic equity in our schools. With poor schools already cut to the bone, the budget crisis may force the issue.

Carole Smith has now acknowledged to the school board, in a roundabout way, that we may no longer be able to afford the “smallness” we’ve designed into our schools: K8’s and small high school academies.

“In recent years, we’ve … supported small high schools with additional staff, and added assistant principals, algebra teachers and counselors for most K-8 schools. Can we afford to continue those initiatives?”

What she didn’t say is that even with this extra funding, students in small high schools and K8s have dramatically less opportunity than students in comprehensive high schools and middle schools.

As implemented in PPS, “smallness” is massively inefficient and more expensive than comprehensive schools, where cohort sizes in the hundreds afford significantly more opportunity for less money.

These failed experiments have contributed to the ill-effects of another failed experiment: the free market student transfer policy. This policy entered a death spiral years ago; now comprehensive secondary education has been virtually eliminated from the poorest half of the district, while transfer slots into comprehensive schools have all but dried up.

Students left in these schools suffer a general and wide-spread dearth of electives, instrumental music, college prep classes, civics, after school activities, and even science, math and literature.

Just as the free market banking crisis has succeeded in nothing more or less than transferring massive amounts of wealth upwards, the PPS transfer policy continues to transfer thousands of students and tens of millions of dollars out of our poorest neighborhoods each year.

We can’t fix the transfer policy without a coherent, equitable and balanced system of PK-12 schools. But we can’t afford comprehensive programs without the enrollment to pay for them.

And no matter what we do, the district faces large budget cuts.

So what can we do?

Just as with the global banking system, it’s time for a reset. We need to imagine a system that, no matter how lean, is no leaner in one part of Portland than another.

The budget crisis may force the district to do what I’ve been asking them to do for two years: restore comprehensive high schools at Jefferson, Madison, Marshall and Roosevelt. Re-open closed middle schools in those clusters, too.

More importantly, the district may be forced to balance enrollment — that is, curtail neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers — to pay for programmatic equity in every part of Portland.

It is a budget-neutral way to increase programming — or stave off cuts — for our schools serving our most vulnerable students. We must imagine a system where the poor don’t bear the greatest brunt of budget cuts, as they have in Portland since Measure 5.

The bright side of this budget crisis is that we have the opportunity to design a balanced system of schools, where you cannot tell the wealth of the neighborhood by the number of classes in the high school’s catalog.

Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.

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Run Sonja, run!

Zone five is shaping up to be a dud.

First, it was Vicki Phillips’ number one fan Scott Bailey. Now it’s Portland Business Alliance’s Pam Knowles.

I’ve been critical of Sonja Henning, but now I’m hoping like hell she runs for re-election. Run, Sonja, run!

Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.

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Libraries on the school board agenda

The “Initiative for 21st Century Libraries” is on the agenda for this Monday’s school board meeting, with district library staff presenting their case for what our school libraries should look like.

If last month’s community forum was any indication, expect to hear a call for a staffed library with media literacy instruction available to every PPS student. (That last part is particularly critical; some PPS high school principals are under the mistaken impression that students don’t need instruction in research and the evaluation of information in the age of the Internet.)

Friends of libraries are asked to attend and wear red to show their support. The meeting starts at 7pm, the library update is scheduled for 7:55, and citizen comment is scheduled for 9:45 (since this is an informational item — no vote — there will not be citizen comment immediately following the staff presentation).

Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.

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In the news: Recess improves student discipline

A new study in the journal Pediatrics finds that school recess ameliorates student behavior problems, and that children with limited recess time are more likely to be black, poor and urban.

There is anecdotal evidence in Portland (PPS does not keep track of recess time centrally) that schools with high poverty and minority concentrations tend to limit recess time in order to maximize instructional time, ostensibly to improve test scores.

(Thanks to reader Buzz for the tip.)

Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.

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