We’ve been taking baby steps toward equity for a while now, with no appreciable difference to schools and students in non-white, non-middle class neighborhoods. It’s time for some giant steps (and a little musical interlude).
If you can follow this, thank a music teacher (you won’t find many in Portland Public Schools, especially in poor neighborhoods, since the big cuts that followed Measure 5). Giant Steps, by John Coltrane:
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
With George Bush as President the only avenue to change seemed to be moral outrage. This played out not only in national affairs but in communities throughout the country. Reason, as well as intellectual arguments, seemed to be neither effective or welcomed.
Well, the times they are a changin’.
Obama’s demeanor and intellectualism create a model of calm civility and serious problem solving…. Let’s sit down and talk this out. Let’s work together to solve the obvious. We can make good things happen for all our citizens. Yes we can.
So, how should this play out in Portland Public Schools? The first step it seems is to recognize the obvious and work to bring about major improvements where they are needed. Forget selfishness, greed, and getting yours at the expense of everyone else’s kids.
Here are some of the obvious things we need to address:
In a public school system all kids should have equal offerings and opportunities based on their needs.
Middle school age students need electives, athletics, music and the arts, and activities to help build their interest in school.
Kids who can’t read should get the help they need so they can.
The main focus of all schools should be on what takes place in the classroom where most of the learning happens. This includes great support for teachers and working hard to have orderly schools and classrooms.
High stakes testing is not as important as good, solid education which prepares students for life, ncluding future schooling, the job world, citizenship, and happiness.
Kids who can read decently well should have their education broadened in the arts, the sciences, the social sciences, and technology.
Kids who don’t get good family support should get extra help from the schools in overcoming those drawbacks.
Kids who work and excel should be able to go as far as they can, both through extra course work and special programs.
In the new spirit of America (really the old spirit of many of our childhoods) let’s work together to make these deferred dreams a reality.
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.
Here’s Monday nights agenda for the Portland School Board:
PRESENTATION TO THE BOARD 6:30 pm
• MESD 2007-2008 Annual Report (information item)
STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE REPORT 6:45 pm
SUPERINTENDENT REPORT 6:50 pm
BUSINESS AGENDA 6:55pm
OTHER BUSINESS 7:00 pm
• Council of Great City Schools Annual Conference (information item)
ADJOURN 7:10 pm
So the school board can only find 40 minutes of work that needs to be done? Or should I say 40 minutes of reports to receive. This is in a school district which spends hundreds of millions of dollars of citizens’ taxes, which is beset by problems ranging from incredible school inequity, massive economic problems on the horizon, disastrous maintenance deficits, serious teacher hiring malpractices, rampant school discipline problems, incredible numbers of dropouts, a TAG program which desperately needs to be revamped, a k-8 curriculum which is the envy of no one, a student transfer program which is further segregating the school district, schools which are inundated with a culture of testing instead of education (no offense to those educators who are fighting this), schools without libraries or librarians, huge numbers of kids who can’t read or do basic math, and a myriad of other serious problems. 40 minutes?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that Superintendent Carol Smith has begun to address many of these problems and the school board does a lot of work in committees. They are good people who care about Portland and its children. But that is not enough. The school board is elected to lead, to solve problems, and work for the best educational programs it can. It needs real public input, serious public discussions about directions to take, resolutions put forth to address problems which are debated openly and sold to the public and the school district’s employees, real leadership which garners genuine support and confidence. Leadership that continues to move us in a new direction where all kids are important and which looks at education in Portland as something more than a referendum on programs which arise out of some hazy educational research done somewhere by someone for some reason we don’t understand, and which we then push on our teaching staff eating up their time in meetings instead of having them be further engaged in the teaching process.
So I call on each school board member to bring their resolutions to the table. This is the time. November and the first part of December are a slow time in education. A good time to make some progress. A good time to look at those problems which are beginning to fester. A good time to discuss those problems which need to be addressed by our city’s educational leaders –- you, the board.
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.
This is a reminder for the upcoming “TGI Thursday.” We are depending fully on email announcements these days — i.e., no paper sent out — so please help us get the word out:
Our “TGI Thursday” will be this Thursday, Nov. 6, — 4 pm social; 4:30 to 6 pm — at Westminster Presbyterian Church in the Fireside Room, 1624 NE Hancock, two blocks north of Broadway.
Our topic: “Got Equity? Stories and Conversations.” We’ll be using the Portland Area Rethinking Schools-produced report card to ask ourselves critical questions about how equitable our schools and school districts are — and reflecting on how we can use this information to make them better. It should be a lively and interesting session. — Full details at our website: www.portlandrethinkingschools.org
Also, I’m sure that we’ll want to spend some time discussing the election results and how these might influence the prospects for equity and justice in the schools. — We’ll also hear some brief reports from the recent First Annual Teaching for Social Justice Conference in Seattle, that attracted 325 educators from around the region.
Please send this announcement to friends and colleagues. We are no longer sending out paper flyers, so depend on emails and email forwards to get the word out.
Thanks.
Bill Bigelow
for the Portland Area Rethinking Schools steering committee
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
Official news that the Young Men’s Academy (YMA) at Jefferson High School will close at the end of this school year is certainly no surprise. But rather than point fingers over obvious mistakes, we should pause and reflect on the lessons to be learned.
Jefferson, Oregon’s only majority black high school, is emblematic of how Portland Public Schools treats its black students. No other high school in Portland offers as few classes as Jefferson — 34 classes currently listed (not counting dance classes), with no music, chemistry, physics, calculus, world languages other than Spanish, or a single A.P. class — and no other high school has experimented with gender segregation or uniforms.
The first lesson we should take away from the failed experiment in not just gender segregation but also “smallness” taken to the extreme, is that size matters. This is a lesson PPS needs to learn system-wide. If we are unwilling or unable to pay for it, we shouldn’t design it into the system.
The young women at the Jefferson Young Women’s Academy (YWA), though faring better than their counterparts at the YMA, are still suffering from unfunded smallness. They are the only high school campus in the district without a staffed library. They also are cut off from the after-school programs at Jefferson, with no transportation provided to and from their satellite campus two miles away.
We should also remember that both YMA and YWA have so far served mostly middle grade students — high school grades have been phased in as students age up — and that the Jefferson cluster does not have a middle school.
By far and away the most important lesson to learn from the failure of Jefferson’s YMA is one of fundamental fairness. Why is the choice of middle grade students in the Jefferson cluster between K-8 or gender-segregated 6-12? Why doesn’t the Jefferson cluster (and Madison, too) have a comprehensive middle school option, like every other cluster in Portland?
Or, to put it more bluntly: Why do we insist on treating black students so much differently (that is, worse) than everybody else?
We should know by now that endless promises, experiments and reconfigurations have only made Jefferson weaker and less desirable to the greater community — declining enrollment figures don’t lie. More of the same may be seen as confirmation of the suspicion heard frequently around the neighborhood: that PPS wants Jefferson (and its black students) to fail.
In the end, what we should take away from this particular failed experiment is that Jefferson students need what all students need: a rich and interesting curriculum, taught by experienced teachers, with opportunity in their neighborhood on par with every other neighborhood in the district.
Portland Public Schools has the facilities, and, more importantly, the neighborhood student populations, to support comprehensive high schools and middle schools in all nine clusters. But the district’s twin experiments in “smallness” and “choice” have led to a system wildly out of balance and shamefully unfair to the students most in need of a comprehensive education.
Perhaps the announcement of YMA’s demise on the day before a historic election augurs a new day, one in which black students in Portland, Ore. have the same kinds of schools in their neighborhoods as white students, and they are no longer subject to ill-conceived, under-funded experiments and second-tier opportunity.
One can only hope.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
How student transfers, “small schools,” and K8s steal opportunity from Portland’s least wealthy students, and how we can make it right
When speaking with district leaders about the glaring and shameful opportunity gap between the two halves of Portland Public Schools, it doesn’t take long before they start wringing their hands about enrollment.
“If only we could get enrollment up at Jefferson (or Madison, Marshall or Roosevelt),” they’ll tell you, “we could increase the offerings there.”
Not to pick on Sarah, but this attitude disclaims responsibility for the problem. After all, the “smallness” of schools in the PPS “red zone”* is by design, the direct result of three specific policies that are under total control of PPS policy makers:
the break-up of comprehensive high schools into autonomous “small schools”
the transition from comprehensive middle schools to K8s, and
open transfer enrollment.
Smallness is not a problem in and of itself, but it is crippled by a school funding formula in which funding follows students, and there is little or no allowance for the type of school a student is attending (e.g. small vs. comprehensive or K8 vs. 6-8).
So when you’re dealing with a handicap you’ve created by design — smallness — it’s a little disingenuous to complain about its constraints. Instead, we need to eliminate the constraints — i.e. adjust the school funding formula — or redesign the handicap.
Adjusting the school funding formula to account for smallness would be ideal, if we had the funding to do it. Since we don’t, this would mean robbing Peter to pay Paul. That is, we would have to reduce funding at other schools to pay for smallness brought on by out-transfers, the K8 transition, or the small schools high school model. This obviously hasn’t happened, and it would be political suicide to suggest we start.
So barring a new source of funding to reduce the constraints of smallness, we need to redesign smallness.
The easiest case is the “small schools” design for high schools. Where students have been constrained to one of three “academies,” with varying degrees of autonomy, we simply allow students to cross-register for classes in other academies. Instead of academies, call them learning communities. Instantly, students at Madison, Marshall and Roosevelt have three times the curriculum to choose from. The best concepts of “small schools” — teachers as leaders and a communities of learning — are preserved.
For K8s, the problem is simply that we can never offer as much curriculum with 50-150 students in what is essentially an elementary school facility as we can offer at a middle school with 400-600 students. So we offer a choice: every middle grade student can choose between a comprehensive middle school or continuing in their neighborhood K8. Reopen (or rebuild) closed middle schools in the Jefferson and Madison clusters, and bolster those in the Roosevelt and Marshall clusters. Families in every cluster then have the choice between a richer curriculum of a middle school or the closer attention their children may receive with a smaller cohort in a K8. We all like choice, right?
Which brings us to the stickiest wicket of the smallness problem: open transfer enrollment, which conspires with K8s and “small schools” to drain nearly 6,000 students from the red zone annually (that’s 27% of students living in the red zone and 12% of all PPS students). We’re well-acquainted with the death spiral of out-transfers, program cuts, more out-transfers, and still more program cuts. It has reached the point that it doesn’t even matter why people first started leaving a school like Jefferson.
What kind of “choice” is that? (Disclaimer: both the Grant and Jefferson syllabi listings may be missing courses if teachers have not yet submitted their syllabi.)
Obviously, given funding constraints, we can’t afford to have a school with 600 students offer the same number of classes as one with 1,600, as district leaders will readily point out. What they’re not fond of talking about is the budget-neutral way of offering equity of opportunity in our high schools: balance enrollment.
All of our nine neighborhood high schools have enrollment area populations of 1,400-1,600. Jefferson and Marshall, two of our smallest high schools by enrollment, are the two largest attendance areas by residence, each with more than 1,600 PPS high school students.
With a four-year phase-in (keeping in mind that transfers into Lincoln, Grant and Cleveland have basically been shut-down for a couple years anyway), you start by making core freshman offerings the same at every neighborhood high school. Incoming freshman are assigned to their neighborhood school, and they don’t have to worry about it being a gutted shell. (Transfers for special focus options will still be available as they are now.) The following year, we add sophomore classes, and so on, and in four years every neighborhood high school has equity in core sequences of math, science, language arts, social studies, world languages and music, paid for without additional funding and without cutting significant programs at schools that are currently doing well.
Once we have this balance in place, both in terms of offerings and enrollment, we can talk about allowing neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers again, but only as we can afford them. In other words, we will no longer allow a neighborhood program to be damaged by out-transfers.
It’s time for Portland Public Schools to stop blaming its opportunity gap on the smallness it has designed — by way of “small schools,” K8s, and open transfer enrollment — and it’s time for policy makers to stop transferring the costs of smallness to our poorest students in terms of dramatically unequal opportunities.
—
*I define the red zone as clusters with significant net enrollment losses due to student transfers: Jefferson (net loss of 1,949 students), Madison (1,067 students), Marshall (1,441 students) and Roosevelt (1,296 students). (2007-08 enrollment figures.) This represents, by conservative estimate, an annual loss of $34 million in state and local educational investment to the least-wealthy neighborhoods in Portland. “Small schools” were implemented exclusively in these four clusters, and the K8 transition, though district-wide, has disproportionately impacted the red zone. There are only two middle schools remaining in the red zone, one in the Roosevelt cluster and one in the Marshall cluster. By contrast, the Cleveland and Wilson clusters each have two middle schools; Franklin, Grant and Lincoln each have one.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
Just a quick update. I attended a TAG information meeting tonight where the TAG coordinators announced that all 2nd graders in Title 1 schools will be screened this year for TAG through “culturally fair, non-verbal” assessments. Kids who appear to be potential TAG candidates will then go through a more formal assessment process. Next year, all 2nd graders District-wide will be screened. I hadn’t heard this before and I know nothing about the nature of the screening tool they will be using, but it seems to me that this is a positive development that deserves some good press.
This new initiative is in addition to the existing process by which parents and teachers can nominate students for testing.
It’s a small step, no doubt a response to the state finding that PPS was not in compliance with state TAG standards, and certainly won’t redress the longstanding disparity in TAG identification, but I’m very pleased to see PPS taking to heart some of the critiques of the program.
Rita Moore has a Ph.D. in Political Science and taught at universities in the US and Europe for 18 years. She now works as an advocate for children in the child welfare system and volunteers as a mediator and facilitator. She has one child in PPS and recently ran for the zone four position on the Portland Public Schools Board of Education.
The newest member of the Portland Public Schools Board of Education is already demonstrating keen political instincts. Even as he speaks of representing minority communities, he’s falling in line with the group think of the board.
Personally, I can’t stand Kool-Aid. And I don’t think having comprehensive secondary schools in our least wealthy neighborhoods and a neighborhood-based enrollment policy is asking for magic. I think it would be equitable, balanced, sustainable public education and investment policy.
If González thinks that’s asking for magic, I think he’s being incredibly cynical.
He falls right in line with the company dogma about transfer and enrollment policy.
González said that the district’s transfer policy isn’t responsible for segregating students: Instead, parents and students are separating themselves.
“The reality is, I think, our society is still segregated,” González said.
Yes, society is segregated, and yes, people do self-segregate. I’ve written about that quite a bit, in fact.
But this doesn’t excuse the district’s policy that encourages more of it. The fact remains that our schools have become dramatically more segregated, both in terms of ethnicity and economics, than the neighborhoods they serve.
This policy González is defending, coupled with the school funding formula, divests over $40 million a year from our least wealthy, least white neighborhoods.
I can understand the perspective of wanting to keep options for poor and minority students, who are disproportionately assigned to schools that the district has not just neglected, but has actively gutted and broken into small schools with dramatically reduced opportunity.
This is why I’ve proposed a transfer policy — predicated on first providing comprehensive secondary schools in every cluster — that allows students to transfer freely, so long as their transfer doesn’t aggravate socio-economic segregation (much like the Black United Front’s 1980 desegregation plan, but keyed on economics instead of race).
This policy would allow disadvantaged students to choose from virtually any school, but keep most students in their neighborhood schools. It would balance our public investment in proportion to where students live, bring equity of opportunity to all students, and it would tend to desegregate schools in all neighborhoods. And best of all, it would cost taxpayers less than the current model with all its built-in inequities.
This isn’t magic, Mr. González, this is sound public policy. If we could do it in 1980, we can do it in 2008.
Platitudes about bringing a new voice to the table and tracking individual student achievement don’t mean much when the policies of Portland Public Schools continue to drain enrollment and public investment from our poorest neighborhoods and deprive the students there of basic opportunity available to students living in the wealthier, whiter parts of Portland.
It’s looking like the school board and their patrons got exactly what they were looking for. A minority male, which changes the balance of the board from 85% female and 71% white to 71% female and 57% white, making the board look more like the 55% white school district they lead.
But best of all, the powers-that-be manage to keep their own white asses covered with a seemingly representative board defending policies which disproportionately hurt poor and minority neighborhoods and students to the benefit of wealthier, whiter ones.
You’ve got to hand it to them; they know exactly what they’re doing. And it sounds an awful lot like class war to me.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
What’s the current status of the K8 Action Team these days? As I recall, there was supposed to be a model K8 curriculum developed by now, but I don’t think I’ve seen it. Does anybody have an update on that?
I’ve also been looking at the information on the amount of “enrichment” — a term which I truly detest — offered at each school. I was dismayed to see that in the K8 FAQs (144KB PDF) they are using Winterhaven and MLC as examples of K8 (or K12 as the case may be) enrichment done right. I beg to differ.
Both schools rely very heavily — almost exclusively — on parent volunteerism and fundraising to provide anything beyond the three Rs. MLC has been at it for much longer and has a more elaborate system, with many more classes, including some taught by pros, but the principle is similar in both schools.
As much as I appreciate the efforts of the parents, these “interest classes” cannot be considered equivalent to a real class. For one thing, they tend to be very short term, typically 5-6 weeks. Obviously, that limits the the kinds of topics that can be tackled and the ability to explore anything in-depth. In fact, a lot of these special interest classes are, in fact, pretty fluffy in my opinion. (No criticism of the parents intended. You can only do what you can do. And this comment applies to my elective, too.)
Winterhaven does a lot of things right, don’t get me wrong. But “enrichment” isn’t one of them. The principals, staff, and parents have done, I think, a remarkable job providing these kids with what they can, and I am deeply grateful to them.
But when you compare the offerings at Winterhaven against the offerings at Sellwood, West Sylvan, or other middle schools, our kids are clearly being shortchanged. (It should be noted that doing this kind of comparison is exceedingly difficult, since there is no centralized source of information on offerings at all schools in PPS. The PK8 page includes a link to a document that lists “enrichment” in all those schools, but there are no details and no comparisons with middle schools.)
For example, my kid gets 5 “enrichment” periods a week, half of the recommended number for 6-8. Winterhaven has an accelerated math/science focus, so presumably extra time is devoted to those subjects. But I question the quality of even the few “enrichments” that the kids get.
Every middle schooler at Winterhaven gets one period of PE and one period of technology a week. The PE consists, as far as I can tell, of exercises (e.g., sit-ups) and running around the gym. His friend at West Sylvan gets a daily PE consisting of yoga, Pilates, and weight lifting, among other things.
In addition, kids in grades 6-8 can choose one among three official, year-long electives offered: Spanish, theatre, and study hall. The Spanish class (offered only in the last 2 years) is taught twice a week by a non-certified teacher hired with Run for the Arts cash. My son has never had what I would consider to be a real foreign language class. After one year of this elective — plus a year of after school Spanish that I paid for — he can barely say hello in Spanish. And he’s good at languages.
A theatre elective is also offered, but only because two teachers are doing it out of the goodness of their souls, giving up their prep time. That’s probably not sustainable. The third elective is a study hall. Hardly qualifies as an “enrichment” in my book.
Meanwhile, there’s no music at all for middle schoolers. (There is some singing offered for K-5 kids in a Run for the Arts-supported musical once a year, but no instruments, no reading music.) There are usually parent-run arts classes that the kids like, but, again, they’re short-term.
And there you have it. Not exactly an impressive array of “enrichments” if you ask me. In fairness, there is a fairly robust list of after school clubs, (most free and run by parents, some paid), but most of the students do not or cannot take advantage of them. (Winterhaven is, after all, an all-city focus option school, not a neighborhood school.)
The problem is that Winterhaven just plain doesn’t have enough FTE to provide what I would consider a full curriculum and supports. Why? Because we have only about 340+ students (not sure of this year’s latest numbers). But the reality is that we can’t have more because the building is too small; we are already overcrowded. [Some of you may recall that this prompted an ill-conceived scheme in 2006 to relocate Winterhaven to a larger building that was, unfortunately, utterly inappropriate to support the program and, oh by the way, landed on the demolition list a year later.]
I go into this detail only because I want to make sure that Winterhaven is not used as evidence that the K8 model is fully elaborated and just swell. It’s not. That doesn’t mean it can’t be, but I’d like to see some progress on that sooner rather than later. In fact, this K8 model is long overdue. For those who aren’t familiar with Winterhaven, it is now in its 13th year as a K8 program/school. Any curricular deficits, therefore, cannot be attributed to the more recent reconfiguration chaos.
More to the point, given that there were two K8 schools (Winterhaven and Sunnyside) and one K-12 school (MLC) already in existence when the decision was made to do a wholesale conversion of vast swaths of the city, it was at the time and remains a mystery to me why the District didn’t consider their experiences in planning for the reconfiguration. Now it appears that the District is simply declaring them cases of K8 done right without acknowledging that even in these “successful” schools there are some significant curricular deficits.
While I’m at, can we come up with a better word than “enrichment?” To my ear, this makes the subjects in question sound like luxuries that are, by definition, easily dispensable in hard times. The term strikes me as positively Rovian. I think we should come up with a term that implies that the subjects are not fluff, but essential to a child’s development with proven beneficial effects on both academic achievement and student retention. Any ideas?
Rita Moore has a Ph.D. in Political Science and taught at universities in the US and Europe for 18 years. She now works as an advocate for children in the child welfare system and volunteers as a mediator and facilitator. She has one child in PPS and recently ran for the zone four position on the Portland Public Schools Board of Education.
Funding 2-4 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) positions to fill this gap (a half time or full time classified library assistant for each of the eight schools) from a half a billion dollar budget, didn’t seem too onerous at the time.
Another meeting was suggested for the summer, but it never materialized.
Now, as we begin the new school year, we find five K8 schools still have no library staff. We also continue to see many schools with only one class (if that) of a given middle grade year, which means staffing is bare-bones at best.
Many eighth grade students, whom we are supposedly trying to prepare for the high school transition, are spending their days in a single elementary school classroom, with a single teacher for most subjects, and a cohort of 25-30 students. They are not choosing electives, managing their time between classes, learning to deal with varied teaching styles, or learning to deal with other types of students (K8s, since they draw on much smaller geographic attendance areas, are significantly more segregated by class and race than middle schools).
K8s that were created out of middle schools appear much better off — middle grade students have lockers, change classes, and have a variety of electives to choose from. But that’s only a small number of K8s. Most of the K8s created from elementary schools simply don’t have — nor will they ever have — the economies of scale to offer the kind of breadth and depth of curriculum that a middle school can offer.
So even if we pour some real money into making K8 schools work (something we’re certainly not doing, and there doesn’t seem to be any money coming), we’re still looking at a model that is clearly not well-suited to preparing all students for high school.
Some students may benefit from a smaller cohort and the closer attention of a single teacher to get them through the difficult middle school years. But there is something fundamentally broken with a model that sees radically reduced opportunity at most K8s, and the distribution of middle schools, offering significantly more opportunity and high school preparation, mainly in middle class, white neighborhoods.
School board director Ruth Adkins has spoken of having a middle school option in every cluster, something I have advocated for here (the Jefferson and Madison clusters do not have middle schools). But other board members seem hesitant. One told me privately that this idea was premature, since “we don’t know how many clusters there are going to be.”
The lack of urgency on this crisis is troubling. Superintendent Carole Smith has correctly identified the transition from middle school to high school as a critical phase of a student’s career. But at the same time, her administration has pushed a middle school model that can clearly make this transition more difficult for many at-risk students.
There are school board members like Adkins, who was not on the board when the K8 transition was approved, and Sonja Henning, who voted against the K8 transition, who could take the lead on making sure we have a comprehensive middle school option for every student in every cluster. Since K8s seem to have fallen off the radar, now would be a good time for them to step up and push on this.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
