Category: Equity
September 23, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Neighborhood middle schools no library staff: 0
Of 30 neighborhood K8 schools, number with no library staff: 4
High schools with no library staff: 1 (Young Women’s Academy)
High schools with no certified media specialist (librarian): 3 (Marshall campus, Roosevelt campus, Young Women’s Academy)
Library staff at each of Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln High Schools: 3
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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September 21, 2008
by Steve Rawley
Lest the casual reader believe PPS Equity is solely focused on the things Portland Public Schools is doing wrong (we’ve been described as “scathing” by Sarah Mirk at the Merc), we should pause and take note of the things that are on the right track.
In Carole Smith’s September 5 speech (58KB PDF) to the City Club of Portland (reviewed by Peter Campbell here and by Terry Olson on his blog), she highlighted what I see as a significant policy shift from her predescessor. In her prepared remarks, she says
…our high school campuses with the lowest enrollment — the ones usually suggested for closure — each have at least 1,400 high school age students living in their neighborhoods. As a city, we have a choice: We can declare defeat, shut down those campuses and tell 1,400 students they have to take a long bus ride every day to a high school in a more affluent part of town — sacrificing their ability to participate in athletics, after-school programs at those schools that meet families’ needs and are attractive to students.
I’m not ready to give up on those schools and on those neighborhoods.
Hey, I could have written this! In fact, I have, many times.
(The next step is to figure out how to pay for it. I’ve long suggested balancing enrollment through a combination of equalizing opportunities across the district and a neighborhood-based enrollment policy. Carole Smith and her staff haven’t made that next step yet, but unless they have a 50% increase in funding or want to cut programming in wealthier neighborhoods, balancing enrollment is the only way we’re going to get there.)
Finally, we’re hearing talk of “equity of access,” which sounds pretty darned close to the “equity of opportunity” I’ve been calling for.
The significant question about “access” is whether we will continue to have a two-tiered secondary school system — comprehensive middle and high schools for the wealthier half of the city and K8s and “small schools” high schools for the rest — or whether we’re going to work toward eliminating the ability to know the wealth of a neighborhood by the type of school you find there.
Smith is taking the first steps on the path to what I call equity; to that end, her staff, “by the end of this school year, … will define the core educational program to be offered at each of our high school campuses, as well as a plan to fund it within existing resources.”
You have to assume this will be a pretty low bar, as it has been with K8s. (The minimum 6-8 curriculum being defined for the K8 transition is significantly less than what was already available at every middle school in Portland before the K8 conversion.) But we’ve got to guarantee that students are at least able to graduate with the classes available, something that isn’t necessarily possible at some of Portland’s poorest high schools, a problem aggravated by the district’s rigid implementation of the “small schools” model at Madison High School, for example.
Nevertheless, these implementation details, along with a continued focus on assessment, do not detract from the fact that Carole Smith is on the right track in significant, broad stroke ways.
Talking about high schools before talking about facilities. Talking about “equity of access”. Talking about where students live (as opposed to where they’ve transferred to) as a critical element in the design of the high school system.
It’s easy to point to missed opportunities to take immediate action and show a real commitment to equity of opportunity: Madison High, K8s, Libraries, etc. But it seems to me the winds have shifted, and if we actually put some of Carole Smith’s words into bold action, we’re going to see a turn-around from the laissez-faire, two-tiered, self-segregated “system” of education we currently have.
Then it just becomes a question of urgency. Every year we wait, we lose another class of students.
It wouldn’t hurt if the school board put a little more wind at Carole Smith’s back in this regard.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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September 14, 2008
by Steve Rawley
As the newest member of the Portland Public Schools board of education, I would like to extend a cordial welcome to Martín González in the form of a challenge on a number of critical issues, in no particular order.
- High schools: advocate for comprehensive high schools in every neighborhood, with the schools offering the best variety of courses and the most qualified teachers sited in the poorest neighborhoods. This policy, the inverse of the current high school system, would rebuild enrollment and public investment where it is most needed. “Small schools,” as currently implemented, may be offered as a special focus, but should never be substituted for comprehensive schools.
- Facilities: advocate for building new facilities based on where students live, not where they’ve transferred, a policy of investing in proportion to local student population and encouraging families to stay in (or return to) their neighborhood schools.
- K8 transition: advocate for a comprehensive middle school option in every neighborhood. K8 schools may be the best option for some students, but they offer dramatically less educational opportunity and are more segregated than middle schools. (Before this transition, every middle school student in PPS had access to a staffed library. Now many do not.) PPS middle grade students assigned to K8 schools are significantly more likely to be non-white and poor than those assigned to middle schools. If any student has a middle school option in their neighborhood, all students should.
- No Child Left Behind: bring a resolution to the board calling for the repeal of the punitive aspects of this law that unfairly target poor and minority students, and introduce policy directing district administration to de-emphasize assessment in favor of a more rounded, whole-child educational focus.
- Student transfer and school funding policies: advocate for a school funding policy that would reinvest in schools that have been gutted by out-transfers as a way to bring enrollment back. Introduce policy that would shift our public investment back to where families live, and guarantee a minimum core curriculum (including the arts) in every neighborhood school. If you really want to be bold, propose policy that would limit neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers to those that would not adversely impact socio-economic segregation. That is, students who qualify for free or reduced lunch could basically transfer anywhere, but other students could only transfer into Title I schools, much like the transfer policy in place during the 1980 desegregation plan (but keying on income instead of race).
- Charter schools: come out strongly for neighborhood schools. Learn from charter school applications what’s missing in our neighborhood schools, and advocate for policy to provide these things in neighborhood schools. The most recent PPS charter school proposal suggests nothing we shouldn’t already be doing in every neighborhood school.
González has a unique opportunity to “audition” for the seat that he will have to win by popular vote in May. How he performs on each of the above issues will signal where he stands with those of us who want school system based on equity of opportunity, where the wealth of a neighborhood does not correspond to the wealth of offerings in its schools.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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September 14, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The latest charter school to rear its head in north or northeast Portland represents a clear challenge to Portland Public Schools, a challenge they have so far refused to meet.
Nothing proposed by the Emerald Charter’s organizers is anything we shouldn’t get in our neighborhood public schools: community building, respect, excellence, and diversity. (In fact, the charter schools movement by its very nature goes against community building and diversity and will likely never come close to neighborhood schools in those areas.)
But you don’t have to read very far into Emerald’s Web page to see a perfectly reasonable rationale to break away from PPS. “Are we teaching students how to learn,” ask the organizers, “or are we giving them a series of rote exercises to get them through the next series of tests?”
This is exactly the question that many activists have asked, and some have pointed out that the PPS obsession with assessment predates No Child Left Behind. The more recent obsession with the “achievement gap” has ensured that Portland schools, especially in neighborhoods that are not predominately white and middle class, have increasingly focused on preparation for assessment to the detriment of “enrichment” (art, music, P.E., world languages, recess etc.).
Whether or not this focus does anything to help bridge the “achievement gap” (some schools that have done away with test prep entirely have actually shown better progress), it is clearly driving white, middle class families away from their inner north and northeast neighborhood schools. The resulting self-segregation reflects the contemporary sociological phenomenon of people tending to associate almost entirely with people who think, act, and look like them.
I cannot criticize anybody for doing what they think is best for their children — that’s their job as a parent. I want nothing to do with name calling and angry debates about personal choices, but people who believe their charter somehow won’t be part of a regressive social movement — with race as a significant aspect — are sorely misguided and misinformed.
Charter schools are, in fact, a regressive social movement; their promise is illusory. I wrote about this in a Portland Tribune op-ed last winter. Nothing has changed since then.
There is a notion that since PPS has historically failed poor and minority students, these communities should be allowed to take their state education money and take care of themselves. It’s hard to argue with the success of the Self Enhancement Academy’s work with its almost entirely African-American student body (five of 137 students were non-black last year).
But the fact that more black students are enrolled in Self Enhancement than in the other six PPS charter schools combined tells the story of “diversity” in charter schools. Every recent charter school application has promised diversity; none have delivered. Portland’s charter schools represent another form of the self-segregation encouraged by the district’s student transfer policy.
Postmodern identity politics is no way to run a public school system, and it is certainly not what we should be teaching our children.
The PPS board of education must be made to understand this latest charter school as a shot across the bow of the district’s assessment obsession. At least three of the current board (Adkins, Williams and Wynde) appear opposed to new charter schools on principle. But Carole Smith’s administration seems entirely sold on the current edu-speak lingo that says we need to focus on “closing the achievement gap” and “equity of outcomes,” goals that have put us into the vicious cycle of stripping “enrichment” as we chase “achievement” as measured by standardized tests.
If school board members want to head off this kind of challenge to the common schools model, they need to create policy that pulls the district away from assessment mania and creates neighborhood schools that consciously focus on the simple things the Emerald Charter’s organizers talk about.
There is nothing revolutionary in turning away from educational trends that have been disastrous for poor and minority children, not to mention the middle class children who would be their classmates. The PPS board needs to quit waffling on this. They should proclaim NCLB a bad law, and declare assessment obsession a detriment to whole-child learning and a significant contributor to inequity and segregation. It makes no sense to continue creating fertile ground for more charter schools that will drain more families from neighborhood schools.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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September 5, 2008
by Steve Rawley
In an e-mail sent to staff and some community members, Carole Smith expresses great enthusiasm and joy in her work on the first day of school. As a parent, I find this encouraging.
What I find discouraging is how she frames the issue of equity.
“…[W]ith every decision,” writes Smith, “we must ask ourselves about equity. All too often, a student’s family income and ethnicity predict his or her eventual success in school.”
This is true, sad, and terribly unjust.
But this defines equity exclusively in terms of outcomes. It omits two critical facts. The first is that as a school district, we control only a small portion of the inputs that lead to unequal outcomes.
Secondly, by focusing on outcomes, we conveniently avoid the inconvenient fact that a student’s race and income are also extremely accurate predictors of the wealth of curriculum and the level of teacher experience on offer at that student’s school.
The problem with striving for equity in outcomes is not that it’s a bad goal. It’s imperative that we improve things for our poorest students. The problem is that it is impossible for any school district to do this alone. We need a concerted federal, state and local anti-poverty program to make a serious dent in this problem.
“Closing the achievement gap” is a logical fallacy, in fact, and it’s perpetuated by the a breed of “reformers” we’re all familiar with: the Gates and Broad foundations, and our old friend Vicki Phillips. As they have pursued this false, unattainable goal, they have driven public investment out of Portland’s poor and minority neighborhoods and have set up schools for failure. This has led to increased out-transfers and decreased opportunity, and is a logical path to school closures. There can be no question that as a national movement, this is opening the door for more charter schools, and from there it’s just a small step to vouchers.
I don’t believe Carole Smith wants to convert our schools to charters or give out vouchers for private Christian schools. But I do believe her concept of equity is unduly influenced by those who are doing active harm to the institution of the common school.
It is a fundamental truth that we as a school district can never attain equity in terms of “success in school.”
Success, or “achievement,” are terms that boil down to extremely crude metrics (standardized tests and graduation rates), and they invariably have led to a narrower, shallower curriculum with a focus on “core” academics (numeracy and literacy) in Portland schools that serve disproportionate numbers of poor and minority students.
I’ve documented repeatedly how secondary students in the Jefferson, Madison, Marshall and Roosevelt clusters have been systematically robbed of comprehensive high schools (0 remain) and middle schools (3 remain). The predominately white, middle class students in the Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln and Wilson clusters have preserved their comprehensive high schools (all 4 remain) and middle schools (6 remain, including two each in the Wilson and Cleveland clusters).
It’s not hard to see how this reduction in the breadth and depth of curriculum would actually be detrimental to “achievement.”
Instead of tilting at windmills trying to shape outcomes while controlling only a small portion of the inputs that contribute to a student’s success or failure, Portland Public Schools needs to focus on the inputs it does control: equity of opportunity. This we can achieve, with existing funding, city-wide, today. We can end the equity “debate,” and I’ll gladly shut down this blog tomorrow, and start hammering on the state for better funding.
Let’s talk about equity in terms of not being able to tell the wealth of a neighborhood by the wealth of course offerings at the local high school.
Until we first see it in this light, and as a greater societal issue of poverty, it’s hard to take seriously the conflation of “equity” with the the logically false goal of “closing the achievment gap.”
Don’t get me wrong. I like Carole Smith, especially her energy, enthusiasm, and her desire to work with stakeholders to find solutions. She ends her e-mail with a quote from Ron Heifetz: “Solutions are achieved when ‘the people with the problem’ go through a process together to become ‘the people with the solution.'”
It is my goal to help our superintendent recognize the problem of approximately half of Portland as one of dramatically unequal opportunity. If you stand on the eastern boundary of PPS and look west, it’s hard to miss that students on the fringes of PPS (and of society) have been getting a progressively worse and worse deal as we strive to “close the achievement gap,” a process which has systematically widened the “opportunity gap.”
Instead of focusing on crudely measured outcomes, largely determined by inputs we have no control over, we need to focus on the inputs over which we have total control.
I firmly believe that if we first address the opportunity gap, gains in closing the achievement gap will follow.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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August 25, 2008
by Steve Rawley
In a broadly expected move, and for the expected reasons, the Oregonian has endorsed Martin Gonzalez for school board zone 4.
Citing his familiarity with Portland Public Schools, his life experience and (most importantly) his support for the district’s student transfer policy, the editorial board of the O show that they want the same thing that the school board wants: an ethnic minority who won’t challenge the one policy they most fear being challenged.
It is a demonstrable, shameful fact that neighborhood-to-neighborhood student transfers have increased ethnic and socio-economic segregation in our city’s schools, and, in combination with the funding formula and teacher transfer policy, have left disproportionate numbers of poor and minority students in second-tier schools. This policy also shifts tens of millions of dollars in public investment out of poor and minority neighborhoods every year (261 KB PDF).
I can understand the transfer policy being viewed as an way for disadvantaged students to escape sub-par schools. I’ve even suggested a modification to the transfer policy to allow poor students to transfer out of poor schools. But this can only be a short-term solution until a comprehensive policy to reinvest in our poorest neighborhoods is implemented.
Otherwise it’s nothing but a fig leaf for an effectively classist and racist policy of public divestment from neighorhoods that most need public investment.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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August 21, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The Portland Public Schools Board of Education office has released notice and agendas for two meetings next week, including a Thursday meeting with one item on the agenda: “Resolution to Appoint Zone 4 Board Director.”
The process, approved earlier this summer, was intentionally left open-ended. But this agenda would appear to indicate the board is ready to appoint one of the five applicants.
With equity as the defining crisis of the current board, an idealist would hope they will appoint the only candidate with direct experience, not to mention the courage and conviction to actually come to the table with practical, immediate solutions: Steve Buel.
No, Buel wouldn’t make the existing board’s life any easier. In fact, you can bet he would make them pretty uncomfortable at times. But they weren’t elected to a social club. The gross inequities in our district simply aren’t being solved by the board’s tack of politely ignoring them, or of speaking in generalities and proposing only baby steps.
Current board members seem mortified of anybody who speaks boldly of the elephant in the room, so you can pretty well rule out Buel.
Safer money is on the appointment of Martin Gonzalez, who is believed to favor “school choice” as an escape valve for poor and minority students. (Never mind that the district’s transfer and school funding policies have actually trapped disproportionate numbers of poor and minority students in second-tier schools with dramatically less opportunity and “choice” than white, middle class students get in their neighborhoods.)
Gonzalez may challenge the board on their policies regarding English language learners, but he does not appear likely to rock their boat with regard to the transfer policy. Plus, he satisfies their rumored desire for a “black or Hispanic male.”
The Oregonian interviewed the candidates this week, and will likely run an endorsement soon. They have been historically hostile to Buel, so it will be interesting to see who they go with (I’m betting on Gonzalez, for the same reasons listed above).
Of course, I’m happy to be proven wrong. Maybe — just maybe — there are four board members who are ready to actually do something bold, and can see the wisdom of appointing a passionate firebrand like Buel to help them really address the equity crisis.
Or maybe they’ll just keep kicking this problem down the road.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
Comments Off on On the fast track
August 10, 2008
by Terry Olson
I think it can be safely said that the goal of PPS Equity is to ensure that all public school students in Portland, regardless of skin color or family background, have access to decent schools in (or near) their own neighborhoods. They shouldn’t have to travel halfway across the city to find schools with a competent principal, good teachers, a library, and programs that include music, art, foreign languages and physical education. (Note: PPS Equity actually has a mission statement now, which pretty well matches this description. –Ed.)
Unfortunately that goal will never be realized as long as the district keeps judging (and demonizing) schools by the relative wealth of their students (that’s essentially what standardized test scores reveal); and if it refuses to shut down the conveyor belt that empties poor neighborhoods of students and money.
The conveyor belt is the district’s transfer policy, a policy that both enables and encourages school choice. Portland Public Schools leadership, including the school board, seems disinclined to address the crisis of school inequity caused in large part by the transfer policy. And I fear that won’t change with the probable appointment of new board member Martin Gonzales. From what I know of Martin, he’s pro-school choice.
I’ve been the recipient lately of some troubling comments that choice and transfer benefit poor and minority students, and that to deny them the right to choose is to “trap” them in “failing” schools. That’s precisely the stance of the pro-privatization and pro-school choice Cascade Policy Institute and it’s co-conspirator, the Black Alliance for Educational Options.
School choice, in short, has become a civil right.
The reality in Portland reveals how wrong-headed that belief is. Choice leaves behind — or traps, if you will — the poorest and darkest skinned students in schools that struggle to provide barely adequate educational programs.
The Flynn-Blackmer audit (232 KB PDF), Steve Rawley’s research (261 KB PDF), and PPS staff’s graphic presentation to a school board subcommittee last fall all show how choice and transfer further segregate Portland’s students by race and by class.
For a public school district to tolerate, and even encourage, policies that create such race and class-based disparities is intolerable.
So what can be done?
First the school board has to acknowledge that many, perhaps half, of Portland’s lower income schools are in crisis. Confronting that crisis requires bold funding measures to restore programs to low income schools comparable to those found in wealthier schools.
Secondly, (and this is my personal opinion), the board must short circuit the school transfer conveyor belt. We already are witnessing limitations on transfers for the simple reason that students who want out of their “failing” schools have no place to go. In time, the transfer system will grind to a halt on its own, choked to death by congestion. How many Lincolns or Ainsworths, after all, are left to accept desperate students?
Lastly, the district and the board should stop using No Child Left Behind as an excuse for inaction. I’ve suggested that the district thumb its nose at the new federal Title I* mandates. It should take a stand, a dramatic stand, hoping that a new Congress will either refuse to reauthorize NCLB or revamp it to help, not punish, struggling low income schools.
School choice (again, my personal opinion, not the official position of PPS Equity) is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It’s a self-defeating approach to school improvement, one that will ultimately lead to the total privatization of our once proud public educational system. It already has gone a long way toward undermining neighborhood schools. Choice is at the heart of No Child Left Behind, a law that pushes charter schools and punishes low income schools with mandated transfer options.
It’s time to end them both.
* (I figure that opting out of Title I would cost the district 8% of it total budget.)
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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August 6, 2008
by Steve Rawley
The Sentinel reports today that the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has opened an investigation of Portland Public Schools based on the complaint of Marta Guembes on behalf of limited-English proficiency (LEP) students at Madison, Marshall and Roosevelt.
In a letter to superintendent Carole Smith dated July 15, 2008, the OCR notifies PPS that it is under investigation for violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically for:
- failing to provide LEP students the services necessary to ensure an equal opportunity to participate effectively in the district’s educational program; and
- failing to provide information in an effective manner to the parents of LEP students concerning their children and school programs and activities.
The choice of schools is illustrative of the segregation that reflects the concentration of immigrant populations in schools that form an outer ring in Portland, exacerbated by high out-transfer rates of white, middle class students to schools in whiter, more affluent neighborhoods.
Marshall, in outer southeast, is 22.9% English language learners (ELL), Roosevelt, in north, is 19.1% ELL, and Madison, in outer northeast, is 14% ELL.
Of the other high schools in Portland, only Franklin has more than 10% ELL (10.2%). Jefferson is 8.6%, Benson 5%, Cleveland 4.1%, Wilson 3.4% and Lincoln 1.2%.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
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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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