School Colors
What happens when a school district spends millions on integration but gives parents the right to choose their children’s schools?
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[November 14th, 2007]
Last week, far from the sideshow of the César Chávez street-naming dispute, a far weightier racial issue was on the agenda. The venue was not the Portland City Council chambers but the blue-hued walls of the Portland Public Schools boardroom. The players were not the salaried commissioners who run the city but a handful of elected volunteers—School Board members who, in ways large and small, determine the fate of Portland.
With television cameras rolling, the board was considering a controversial audit that showed Portland’s schools have become, over time, more segregated than their neighborhoods. What was particularly painful to confront was the finding that the school district’s “school choice” policy, whose roots stretch back to Portland’s 1980 school “desegregation” plan, was a large part of the problem.
So last Monday, after 17 months of studying the audit and no small amount of hand-wringing, the Portland School Board met, discussed and acknowledged the failures of school choice. “Ours is a tale of two cities,” said Dilafruz Williams, one of seven School Board members. “We are a segregated city by race and by class.”
And with that the board did absolutely nothing.
“This is a time bomb,” says parent Steve Rawley. “They don’t see what’s coming. They don’t have a long-term vision. They’re kicking this problem down the road for somebody else to deal with, and what’s at stake is the livabilityof Portland’s neighborhoods.
“You can’t just wave your hands around and say you’re going to do something about it but not actually change the policy,” Rawley says. “The policy itself is at odds with equity.”
Welcome to week six of Carole Smith’s tenure as the new superintendent of Portland Public Schools.
On April 14, 1980, Jimmy Carter was president, the disco era was still alive on the radio, Mount St. Helens was getting ready to erupt, and Portland headlines were filled with the rumblings of a young, charismatic and combative black man named Ron Herndon. A Head Start worker and 1970 Reed College graduate from southeastern Kansas, Herndon was stomping his feet, jumping on tables, kicking School Board members’ nameplates to the floor and telling Portlanders what they may have known but didn’t want to face: that black children were being treated unequally in this city. Forget housing. Forget the disparity in jail sentences. What really ticked Herndon off was the lack of good schools in black neighborhoods and the racist policies that put the burden of integration on black students and their families, a burden that had resulted in the scattering of black students to schools across the city.
Until 1980, Portland had employed what amounted to mandatory busing to “improve” the racial balance of its public schools.
Herndon and the other members of the Black United Front wanted to stop this. They knew how to get attention. And the School Board eventually responded with a plan to desegregate Portland Public Schools “voluntarily.” How? By ending forced busing. By infusing the city’s black schools with extra money and teachers, creating additional “magnet” schools in black neighborhoods and letting black and white students transfer out of their neighborhoods to different schools—if they wanted to. For the first time in years, all students, regardless of race, could attend their neighborhood school or go elsewhere. The idea was to boost the quality of the black schools (to make those schools better and to attract white students) and to give black students the choice to move voluntarily to white schools. Out of this blender of options, equality would follow.
At least that was the plan. “It felt great,” says Steve Buel, a member of the School Board in 1980. “It felt like it was a huge accomplishment.”
Look at today’s numbers and there is no other conclusion: Despite tens of millions of dollars spent on programs to support the policies, voluntary desegregation and school choice have heightened neighborhood segregation by race and by class.
And this pattern is no more evident than at Jefferson High School. In 1990, 33 percent of the students at Jefferson were white. By 2006? Less than 13 percent. During the same period, the percentage of black students increased from 56 to 68 percent (see graph, above).
So what happened? Both white and black families have abandoned Jefferson for other schools, either in Portland or the suburbs, sending overall enrollment at Jefferson into a tailspin. But the gap between the number of white and black students has doubled in just 10 years.
Today, young white families who have moved to gentrifying neighborhoods like Albina, Overlook, Arbor Lodge and Concordia have exercised school choice to send their children to schools outside their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, more black parents who have stayed in those neighborhoods have stayed put in their neighborhood schools. The white enrollment at Vernon School, a pre-kindergarten through seventh-grade school just north of the Alberta Arts District, dropped from 27 to 11 percent between 1990 and 2006. Call it school choice or white flight, the bottom line is that the shift has drained some schools of students—and, with those students, money, other resources and, some would say, the schools’ chance for recovery. In Portland, school funding follows the student.
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“We saw some neighborhood schools really suffering under that program,” says Portland City Auditor Gary Blackmer, who helped coordinate the audit considered last week by the School Board.
Others agree. “The current policy has produced more hardship for disadvantaged kids and their families,” says Jeff Miller, president of the Portland Association of Teachers union.
On its very first page, the audit declares: “district objectives not met.”
Yet, last Monday, when the board was supposed to initiate a response, school administrators urged “caution in creating policy changes,” as Judy Brennan, a midlevel district administrator, told the board.
Instead, Brennan recommended creating an advisory committee. Superintendent Smith said school choice alone was not to blame, and she echoed Brennan’s cautious tone. “When we go to solve one problem, we may create another one,” Smith said.
The inertia on school choice is somewhat understandable. Entrenched ideas can often withstand even the clearest evidence they cause harm. In addition, a lot of very powerful constituencies believe in the absolute necessity of school choice. Nationally, it’s a keystone of the federal No Child Left Behind act, promoted as a tool for improving “underperforming” schools.
Perhaps no local group is more influential in shaping the direction of our city’s schools than the Portland Schools Foundation, the 10-year-old fundraising group whose board includes a number of business and educational leaders. The foundation has no official stance on school choice, but various board members have said school choice plays a fundamental role in keeping Portland Public Schools from following the path of other urban districts, such as Boston, which has lost many of its middle-class parents to the suburbs and private schools.
“You’re going to see a shrinking of a certain kind of parent by not offering school choice,” says Beryl Morrison, a member of the foundation’s board and the PTA president of Alameda Elementary School, a wealthy Portland school in Northeast.
Lolenzo Poe, a former member of the Portland School Board and one of the few members of the foundation board who is black, put it more bluntly: “I think it plays an important role in keeping the white middle class in the district.”
School Board member Bobbie Regan agrees it plays a role in keeping Portland’s enrollment as high as possible. At last week’s meeting, she said parents who don’t find what they want within existing schools will instead form charter schools, siphoning more public money away from established programs.
One of the most vocal champions of school choice is neither an elected official nor an educator, but Susan Nielsen, a columnist and associate editor for The Oregonian who frequently writes about schools.
“Letting families vote with their feet is an administrative pain, true,” Nielsen wrote in June 2006 after the controversial audit made headlines. “But it’s the best way to retain the largest and most diverse pool of students in the public school system. It’s also the best way to force the district to get its act together.”
Less than a year later, Nielsen was again writing about school choice, this time to dismiss the program’s critics, including an up-and-coming School Board candidate who was then threatening to take down an incumbent.
“They insist that transfers cause school inequality,” Nielsen wrote in May 2007. “It’s like saying crutches cause broken legs.”
Ruth Adkins is a white, Yale-educated market researcher whose three daughters attend Portland public schools.
An outspoken critic of Portland Public Schools’ administration, Adkins ran for and won a seat on the School Board last spring, against incumbent Doug Morgan, in part because of her concerns about school choice. “[L]ow-income children shouldn’t have to travel across town to get a decent public education,” Adkins wrote on her campaign website, sounding a bit like Ron Herndon nearly three decades earlier. “The School Board has yet to follow up...with the needed comprehensive review of the transfer system. As a school board member, I will make this a priority, paying close attention to the issues raised by the auditors. Every Portland Public Schools policy needs to take into account how all students will be impacted, not just those in the middle class who happen to have the most power and the strongest voice. No more ‘trickle-down’ education policies!”
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 EDUCATION FRUSTRATION: Nearly 30 years ago, Ron Herndon of the Black United Front jumped on the Portland School Board’s table to protest lousy schools in black neighborhoods. |
Only a few months into her four-year term, Adkins appears to some to have moderated her views. “I never thought I would come in and say we have to end all transfers,” Adkins says.
Some of her closest allies from her campaign have declared her a traitor. “Give us a freakin’ break, Ruth,” the blogger “NoPo Parent” writes online. “Stand up for what you used to stand for.”
Others are holding out hope that she may yet force some changes. “Ruth Adkins...must commit to her campaign promise that all children living in all neighborhoods will have equitable curricular opportunities,” says Jefferson parent-teacher organization president Nancy Smith. “If not, then she will have betrayed the promises she made in her campaign to Portland’s neighborhood schoolchildren. What the district is advocating is going to perpetuate the decline in enrollment and educational opportunities for the hundreds of students who are already being denied the educational opportunities afforded other students. It’s immoral what they’re doing.”
Steve Rawley thinks the solution is staring the district in the face. He says it’s time to start putting the brakes on school choice by curbing transfers first at the elementary-school level. Doing so, he says, will pump money into the schools that have been losing it for years.
Seven years ago, Steve and his wife, Nancy, moved to the Overlook neighborhood in North Portland because they found a 100-year-old Dutch Colonial-style house on a cozy street that they could afford.
Self-declared “yuppies,” the Rawleys wanted to send their children to their neighborhood schools. They envisioned one day sending their children to Jefferson.
But a quick walk down their block, north of Killingsworth Street and not far from Jefferson, is a lesson in the reality of school choice: More than one-third of all students in Portland opt at some point to transfer out of their neighborhood schools.
In a city that prides itself on the livability of its neighborhoods, school choice fragments communities, the couple says. For example, the 20 children who have lived on the Rawleys’ block since the couple moved to the neighborhood have gone to 12 different schools, including one private school.
Compounding the problem, in the eyes of the Rawleys, is the fact that Jefferson is divided into four different academies, one of which is housed on an entirely different campus, 3 miles from the main building. The school’s division further limits resources available to students because it reduces the number of classes offered in any one school.
“I would be thrilled to have my kids go to Jefferson,” Steve Rawley says. “But they don’t have the offerings. I’m not looking for a white school. I’m looking for what my kids need.”
School choice is to blame for this, the Rawleys say.
To back up their assertions, Steve Rawley spent the summer poring over data on transfer patterns across the district and discovered that the Jefferson High School cluster, including elementary- and middle-school programs, lost about $15 million in the 2006-2007 school year because children who lived in the neighborhood decided to attend schools far from their home.
Now the Rawleys are moving to Beaverton.
“I feel like no matter what we do here, it’s not going to make a difference,” Nancy Rawley says.
And theirs is a cautionary tale, they add. Other middle-class parents will soon be confronting the same problems they are, and many of them will elect to move to the suburbs because school choice has perpetuated a two-tier system.
“Ten years from now, these people who are moving into these neighborhoods are suddenly going to wake up and say, ‘What the fuck is wrong with these schools in these neighborhoods?’” Steve Rawley says. “The elementary schools aren’t that bad. But when you get to the middle schools and high schools, it’s messed up. It’s seriously bad. It’s inequitable, and it’s obvious.”
In addition to advocating a gradual decline in neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers, the Rawleys say the School Board needs to equalize the programming offered at all its schools—to remove the reasons for transferring in the first place.
“Right now we have seven people on the School Board, including Ruth Adkins, who’s supposedly the biggest advocate for neighborhood schools, saying, ‘Hey, it’s fine, everybody likes this policy,’” Steve Rawley says. “They have no clue that it’s a problem. The best-case scenario is, two years from now, we have some turnover on the board, and two years after that we have some more turnover on the board, and then maybe they start looking at changing the policy. That puts us out four years. I’m sorry, I don’t have that much time. My daughter’s starting high school soon. She has middle school before that, and I don’t like the options. I want her to go to school in the neighborhood with her neighbors. I don’t want her commuting across town.”
 Hopson’s choice: Franklin High Principal Charles Hopson. |
The woman in charge of leading Portland Public Schools through this muddle is Carole Smith. Fresh out of Oberlin College in Ohio in 1976, Smith began her career in Massachusetts, working—ironically—to desegregate Boston’s public schools.
And while some of Portland schools are more—rather than less—segregated than they were two decades ago, Smith appears unwilling to give up on school choice. Yet she has agreed to give the School Board a plan in January to address some of its effects.
“It’s not like you’re going to replicate everything in every part of the city, because you’re not,” Smith says. “We can’t afford to replicate everything and have every part of the city have a science and tech school, every part have an arts school. We’re not going to get that. But across the whole city? Can we end up with some things that go deep and really prepare kids for post-secondary education? Yeah.”
In the meantime, the Interstate Avenue/César E. Chávez Boulevard renaming ruckus has garnered far more attention.
“At some point [the César Chávez debate] will be over,” Commissioner Erik Sten says. “It probably won’t really determine whether a kid goes to jail or college. But the schools strategy, whether or not we can make the struggling schools work and all the things we’re talking about, that’s the basic DNA of the city.”
Separate but equal, revisited
The only thing more odd than the Portland School Board’s inaction in the face of numbers that show Portland Public Schools are more segregated is the fact that a number of African-American educators in Portland say this is fine.
“The greatest mishap for students of color was integration,” says Charles Hopson, president of the Oregon Alliance of Black School Educators and principal of Franklin High School in Southeast Portland. “We were like kids standing in a candy store. We thought what we were going to get was one thing, based on what was presented to us. But what did we really get based on the evidence of desegregation?”
More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education and nearly six months after another U.S. Supreme Court case invalidated integrationefforts stemming from that landmark civil-rights decision, Hopson’s question has newfound urgency.
Ron Herndon, one of the authors of Portland’s desegregation plan, and now the chairman of the National Head Start Association, says he still holds to the idea that every child should have a high-quality school in his or her neighborhood. But the racial makeup of those neighborhood schools makes no difference to Herndon. “The problems with poor-quality education do not have anything to do with the complexion of the students,” Herndon says. “This becomes a very convenient distraction.”
Nearly 30 years after Portland ended what amounted to forced busing, Herndon says the goals of earlier integration efforts had more to do with what white adults wanted for their schools than what children of color needed to succeed. “I don’t think the presence of middle-class white kids is going to help black kids learn,” Herndon says.
Integration as a tool for creating high-quality schools is a myth, he adds. Conversely, segregated schools aren’t such a bad thing. To suggest otherwise is “insulting and borders on racist,” Herndon says.
Cynthia Harris, the new principal at Jefferson High School this year, considers her words carefully when talking about race at her school. She says she’s not sure if integration is the answer, but she also doesn’t say it’s not the answer. “I’m not going to drag white people in here,” she says. “I want them to walk in.”
Having seen the results of mandatory integration, Herndon agrees with that approach. “Don’t force it on people,” he says. “Let people come to those conclusions on their own.” —Beth Slovic
A lottery, developed in 2002, determines who may transfer and where. Applications are weighted according to priorities that include gender and socioeconomic diversity. Race is not a factor.
The federal No Child Left Behind act of 2001 requires school districts to let students transfer from “failing” schools. An average of 350 Portland middle- and high-school students opt to do so each year. Jefferson High students are among those given top priority for transfers.
The audit of Portland’s school choice policy revealed students who transferred from “failing” schools did not show improved academic performance at their new schools.
In Beaverton, 93 percent of students attend their neighborhood schools. In Portland, only 63 percent of students do.
Steve Rawley’s blog is morehockeylesswar.org. Nancy Rawley also blogs about school choice at wackymommy.org.
Between 2003 and 2007, charter school enrollment in portland tripled from 346 to 1,082.
Wonderful effort, Beth Slovic. You hit this one out of the park.
I've long thought that segregated schools in and of themselves aren't necessarily bad things. The problem arises when segregation by race is coupled with segregation by class and income level. Poor schools simply lack the political clout to force the powers that be to pay attention to them.
Inequity in educational offerings is the inevitable result.
Speaking of which, proponents of school choice, like Bobbie Regan, say that choice is responsible for the district's 84% capture rate. I haven't been able to find any data that supports that contention.
It would be great, Beth, if you could find out what the capture rate was before choice kicked into high gear and began decimating low income neighborhood schools.
Poor schools? Isn’t funding per student the same for all Portland Public Schools? It would seem to me that the issue isn’t funding but parental involvement within those schools that are performing poorly. This issue won’t get fixed until parents get involved with their kid’s education. There’s a reason why parents take their children out of a school and it has nothing to do with the teachers and curriculum and more to do with the student body. A school that does not provide a safe and supportive environment is a school that parent’s will abandon if they have the means. Ending transfer policies won’t fix those schools. In fact I would think ending transfer policies would have the unintended consequence of sending more students out of Portland Public Schools and into suburban school districts as families would leave Portland in order to get a better education for their children. I would argue that choice has kept more kids within Portland Public Schools.
At the end of the day, involved parents are going to do whatever it takes to get the best education possible for their kids. Ending school choice is a short rope. The key is to somehow strengthen families in those poorly performing schools, especially single parent families that are short on resources and time. Another solution to this problem is for people in those affected neighborhoods, regardless if they have children or not, is to donate their time to the schools that need help. The students will come to realize quickly that they’re being supported at school even when they’re not at home. The more role models in the school the better of it will be. A bottom up approach is always better than a top down one. There’s enough manpower in the community to solve this problem overnight.
No, Dean, funding is not the same for all Portland Public Schools. Many schools rely on generous contributions from their parents and local businesses to make-up for low per student funding from the state. This inequitable funding is exacerbated by the transfer policy, which sends more children to these well-off schools. With school closures hanging like a sword over the heads of many smaller schools, parents transfer their children to well-off schools because they know these schools will be less likely to close.
The funding is not equal for poor or rich in Portland.
The schools with educated parents have more money because of donations and auctions, though some of the money is shared with other schools.
The schools without many educated parents get federal money for extra teachers and programs through Title I.
Here is the bottom line: family support.
Show me a school with little or no family support and I'll show you a struggling school.
Show me a school families support and I'll show you a very good or great school.
It's not magic. All you need is a kid working hard, with a good teacher, some resources and a little help at home.
It's not magic.
p.s. Lookin' for a great, diverse, challenging middle school with lots of programs?
Think Mt. Tabor!
We are 90% benchmark and there's plenty of room for everyone!
Tell 'em Sid sent you.
Well put. We believe if more people volunteer in their community, the city would be a more supporting and engaging place as we intertwine our lives. There are an abundance of lost opportunities to learn from eachother. Unfortunately, as a society, we have evolved to interact less with our community. We live in a city because we enjoy the people. It is unfortunate we don't take responsibility and support each other more.
Dean: you're missing the point. Yes, per-pupil funding is the same for all students. But if your high school only has 500 students (because most of them transferred out) and the one across town has 1500, those in the 500 school don't have crap course offerings compared to the other school.
And if there aren't decent offerings and programs, more and more families will continue to leave. Then you have a catch-22 that leaves the poorest class of folks with inequitable, terrible schools in their neighborhoods - and that's before they close down from lack of enrollment and the families that most need public schools have no schools in their neighborhoods at all.
Asking the communities with the fewest resources to step up and fix the inequities the district has created is simply not realistic.
It is the school district's responsibility to provide all Portland's children with an equitable education, regardless of race or class.
Why is it that every other Portland-Metro area school district has it figured out, except Portland?
The folks running PPS are bunch of racist, classist bozos. And any Portland resident who would support this policy, after realizing that thousands of innocent children's lives and futures are being screwed, is racist and classist also.
I attended a very diverse and integrated elementary school in NEP from '85-90. Afterwards I attended a predominantly black middleschool (Harriet Tubman) and was shocked by the attitude of failure and lack of interest on the part of the TEACHERS. That isn't to say that HTMS didn't have some amazing teachers and administrators, but for the most part people were there to collect a check and didn't really seem to give a damn how much we learned. When I went back to highschool (back in NEP), I was far behind my classmates freshman year and had to work hard to catch up on 3 years of lost education. For all the worldly education that I got at Tubman (about race, class, have/have nots), our teachers didn't do their jobs, for the most part. Again, there were some amazing exceptions, but if you put 8th graders at Tubman against the 8th graders at Gregory Heights, you would see the difference that 3 years of wasting time creates in a 13 year old.
I agree with what everyone has said regarding the need of the community to fix this problem. Unfortunately, most people outside of the more troubled areas of Portland (parts of SE, NE, NoPO and St. John's) don't seem to care. As the article says and history has shown, they'll be more than happy to eat Thai food on N. Mississippi Ave. or even buy a big house on 8th and Prescott, but I'd bet the farm they aren't sending there kids up the street to King or Jeff. So how do you make someone care? I've studied the issue of segregation quite a bit, in both an economic and political sense, and haven't found an answer. At least I'm looking, though, which I can say is a whole lot more than the PPS Board seems to be doing.
Great article, Beth. Congratulations!
From my perspective the problems at Jeff result from bad decisions imposed by successive school boards and administrations without consideration of community input. PPS has been paternalistic and patronizing to the Jefferson community for years.
Many of us actively involved at Jefferson consider there is only solution now: return Jefferson to one comprehensive high school, thus providing resources to the entire student body -- not divided resources into inadequate curriculum offerings and too few faculty as is the current case with four small academies (not recommended by the Design Team as some people continue to claim). This fourth reorganization in five or six years has four administrators on the campus and one at the Young Women's Academy three miles away. That's five administrators for 800 kids.
One thing that escapes coverage of Jefferson: these kids are among the best! As the Metro YMCA building supervisor said last June when we left our second all night grad party there, "I am really impressed with how well behaved, very courteous these kids are. They really seem to enjoy themselves. In the two years we've had them here, I haven't had to reprimand anyone. Jeff kids can come back any time."
And despite the limited curriculum, the students in the Class of 2007 earned $1,000,000 in scholarships and are doing well academically at colleges and universities across the nation. One of last year's graduates was the second DEMO in three years to earn a Gates Millennium Scholarship -- providing tuition, books, room and board through Ph.D at the university of the scholar's choice.
If any of you want to know the GOOD NEWS from Jefferson, please email me at jfruen@aol.com and you'll get the monthly DEMO EMAIL
GO DEMOS!
This is a fabulous article Beth; great job.
However, I believe the bigger picture is missing. The racial make-up of each school is not THE issue.
THE issue is that there is a profound inequity among PPS neighborhood schools in terms of the courses, programs and educational opportunities offered. The neighborhoods with the poorest and darkest students receive far fewer opportunities than whiter, richer neighborhood schools.
This is shameful and inexcusable no matter how you try to frame it.
To my knowlege, Portland is the only district in the state that has such a classist public school system
PPS is not the only school district with these issues, they just get more press than others such as the North Clackamas School District, where there is an unbelievable separation between rich and poor divided by 1-205. The children from the suburban mansions in Happy Valley are receiving a very different education than those from the the trailer parks and gang-ridden apartment complexes off 82nd Avenue. I'm sure Beaverton and others have similar issues. It would be interesting for the WW to compare free and reduced lunch data (public information) of local area schools to illustrate the point. The issue of equity in education for low income children is nationwide. I applaud Beth Slovic for opening a discussion to the public that a lot of people have been having for a long time!
Thank you Beth for this excellent piece! Many of us have been discussing these issues for a long time. It is important for the entire community to understand just how (albeit unintentially) segregated PPS has become. I echo the sentiments that the DEMO supporter mentioned: bring back comprehensive high schools. The lack of course offerings are what is driving most folks away from Jeff, Madison, etc. and their feeder schools. The inequity is shameful. In addition, witness the neighborhoods that still have true neighborhood schools. The neighborhoods that have retained their schools are upper middle class/wealthy. Why close Rose City Park, leaving stuffed to the gills Laurelhurst, Fernwood/Hollyrood, and Alameda? Why close Clarendon when the student population in that neighborhood is growing? Where is the planning in establishing boundaries that create socio-economic diversity and feeder patterns that strengthen our neighborhoods instead of dividing them. Magnet school transfers are the only transfers that should be allowed for those kids who wish/need a different kind of an education. If we make the course offerings equal at all neighborhood schools, the need for transfers is minimized.
An interesting article on Lincoln HS and the proposed sale of the school and a new private/public partnership/redevelopment was just in the Oregonian. Because it's not like Lincoln has enough money or programming...
Why do we have to re-invent the wheel in the most expensive and controversial fashion? Why don't we just fix the school that no body seems to want to trust their kids to?
It seems to me if you make a declaration that you MUST send your kids to a sub standard school, The parents will likely not move to this neighborhood nor will they stay if they are really that concerned.
This dumb strategy will only cause the neighborhood to sink lower into poverty as only people who have little choice but to stay will stay. Thus you have deepening segregation where the only solution is to import children who have been identified as "white" while exporting Children who have been identified as "Black". Do we really want to do the racial profiling thing and illegally force migrations? I think the communists tried that?
Fix the school and you won't scare families away. Instead, you will attract families who see a good product and place to nurture their most valuable things?
I can't directly help these people shake off poverty, but I bet that a decent school would help do the trick far more eficiently that frightening residents off.
My multicultural family lives in a neighborhood with crappy school. We live here because our family of three can't afford to live in the nice neighborhoods with the "good" schools if we also want to eat and wear clothes and rent a place that isn't contaminated with lead paint or some other such shit. So, until Portland Public gets their act together, we will be playing the lottery transfer game, or moving outside PPS. I'm all about building community, being involved, joining the PTA - but I'm not delusional...sending my kid to our crappy school isn't going to fix a district wide problem. A good education and love are the best things I can give her. Until parent involvement is matched by a district commitment to improve schools outside Richie Rich alameda and Hollyrood, we're out.
And Beth- maybe your next story can be on PPS's teacher hiring practices, which ensure that the least desirable new teachers are the ones we end up giving the jobs to. Every other district hires in the spring. PPS waits until august, forcing new teachers who want financial security (don't we all?) to accept jobs elsewhere...even if they've done their student teaching here. Can anyone guess which schools the crappy teachers get sent to?
I guess Beth Slovic means well, nonetheless she is a little bit scary. Six months ago she wrote a cutesy piece in which she bravely impersonated an uneducated worker in a NoPo food processing plant and bam, 150 or so undocumented workers got arrested and kicked out of the US (the article blabbed lengthily about how nearly every worker in the plant was illegal; cue in the INS, who immediately raided the place). It is unclear what the workers' families should do now that Dad is sitting over in Guatemala. Maybe they should ask WW.
Now Ms. Slovic has indignantly uncovered "segregation" in Portland Public schools, based on enrollment figures at one school (Jefferson). Seeing that no educator or community leader she interviewed felt that that was necessarily a bad thing, let alone constituted actual segregation, she goes to a disgruntled couple who have attempted to remake their neighborhood school (Guess? Jefferson) after their needs and expectations, and, surprisingly, failed. Whereupon this couple huffily elected to move to Beaverton to take advantage of the best schools in the Metro area. These people are clearly part of the problem: As much as they bitch and moan about how the Man screws up poor neighborhood schools and diverts all the money to his own "wealthy" schools, when presented with the opportunity to do something about it they pick up and leave instead of sending their kid(s) to Jeff and working from the inside to turn things around. I can't blame them: when it comes to your kids, their welfare somehow trumps your political convictions. But please, just shut up about it. Didn't you know the local schools had issues when you chose to move to that oh-so-diverse and edgy inner-city neighborhood?
Portland Public schools have more pressing problems than that envisaged by Ms. slovic. School choice is hands down the best thing the district has going on. Ending it would be a totally self-destructive move that would have devastating long-term effects. The reasons choice was created are as valid and relevant today as they were 30 years ago. The reason no one is "doing anything about it" today is simply because nothing needs to be done about it. So please, Beth: Leave it alone. There is a fringe constituency out there who wants to end school choice, perhaps so that their local school gets a temporary shot in the arm while their kid(s) go there, never mind if 20 years hence the entire public school district goes to pot like in Los Angeles and so many other American cities. Public schools are working here, the way the First Amendment or democracy work: imperfectly but vastly preferable to the alternative. Parents don't need the Willamette Week pouring gasoline on that fire anymore than those Del Monte workers needed to be "outed" last May.
Finally, the article blabs on about blacks and whites as if no one else lived in Portland. Perhaps Hispanics, Asians and others beg to differ. What do you think?
Fredo,
Beth didn't "uncover" anything; it was there, in plain view, all along, just waiting for someone to report it. And while the article does focus on Jefferson (maybe because it is the most egregious example!), the issue is a district-wide issue. Even the Wilson cluster has been affected. Check it out here:
morehockeylesswar.org/blog/archive/...
Concerning the Rawleys, you criticized them, both for trying and "failing" to "remake their neighborhood school after their needs and expectations," and then also for NOT "working from the inside to turn things around." Which one ticks you off more?
If you knew the Rawleys, you would know that they have worked tirelessly to do the latter ever since they moved into that neighborhood. But this is now 7 years later, their efforts have led to nothing, and they are sick of fighting. I suggest you spend seven years trying to do what they have tried to do before you criticize them any further.
"Portland Public schools have more pressing problems. . . ."--than children of color being underserved? Why didn't you tell us what is more "pressing" than that?
"Public schools are working here. . . ." If they are working so well, then why are Jefferson, Madison and Marshall more empty than full? You think there might be a reason so few people want to go there? What would be happening there if families weren't allowed to transfer out?
If it is of interest, I am a member of an interracial family.
Beth, keep writing. These issues won't go away just because people like Fredo wish they would. An informed public is our best hope for meaningful change to benefit ALL Portland schoolchildren.
A couple of clarifications and amplifications.
Yes, we knew about the schools before we moved to our not-so-edgy neighborhood (the one we could afford at the time). Nancy is a life-long N/NE Portland resident, and a graduate of the neighborhood public schools here. She's been living this and fighting this since the days of mandatory busing.
We're not fleeing "bad" schools in Portland for "good" schools in Beaverton. That's a facile distillation of a nuanced issue. (Obviously the nuance can be lost in a relatively short newspaper article, but if you've paid any attention, you know there's much more to it than that.)
If that's all we wanted, we'd send our kids to private high school, or play the lottery and send them across town, like most white families in our neighborhood. This is the fragmentation of community we're fighting.
What we want are equitable neighborhood public schools. Only the district can provide this. No amount of volunteering from within will restore programming equity to Jefferson.
And it's not just Jefferson. It's Roosevelt, Madison and Marshall, too, basically all the schools that aren't in overwhelmingly white middle class neighborhoods.
Beth's story used Jefferson as an example, but the pattern is there for anybody to see: Comprehensive high schools in wealthy neighborhoods, and underfunded high schools balkanized into academies in poorer neighborhoods.
Like I said, this is a time bomb given demographic trends, and I can't imagine a more pressing issue for PPS than equity and supporting the future of our neighborhood communities.
Finally, I'm not against "school choice." I want all neighborhood schools to be so strong, that there is no need to transfer from one to another. There will always be a place for alternatives like special focus options. But if we have equity, neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers should be the exception, not the rule.
You seem to have a vendetta against the author of the article, and that's clouding your understanding of the underlying issues. I encourage you to dig a little deeper. I've been researching and writing about these issues since last February. My colleagues at the Neighborhood Schools Alliance (hardly a "fringe" group; school board member Ruth Adkins was a founding member) have been at it for much longer.
We've been working at every level for years, from the classroom, to the principal's office, to the PTAs, and to the school board, to make things better for everybody's children.
But we've hit the brick wall well represented by your thinking: there's no problem at all.
I'm telling you now, there is a big problem, and in ten years our schools will be like LA if we keep going down this free market path. There's an alternative available, and it's not radical.
Fredo’s let’s sweep it under the rug attitude is common in Portland Public Schools. With the “Lord of the Flies” competitive atmosphere worsening between our schools, parents are afraid to raise concerns about curriculum, facilities, safety and health because they don’t want bad news about their school hurting their enrollment.
This discussion focuses on Jefferson, but these inequities between schools are in all quadrants of the city.
Quoting Rabbi Stephen Pearce, “The Hebrew word for sin is chet. It is also the word used in archery for missing the mark. In the sin of inaction, we not only miss the mark, we never shoot the arrow.”
Fredo: I have to agree and disagree with you.
Beth's article may or may not have led to the deportation of these workers. As to the 'splitting of families' I think she made a great point in her followup article. Dads are leaving their families in guatemala, to come to america in the first place. Having worked in food service, I've known a significant number of illegals, and many who have left children behind, and are even forming new families in the states. So the reality is, deportation destroys just as many families as importation.
As far as this article goes, I have to agree with you. Every person who's actually worked on this problem, doesn't think it's an issue. Also the whole article seems to focus on jefferson. What none of her statistics seem to mention, are very significant numbers, like are the attendance number out of line with the racial makeup of the students in that district. Also, it mentions that 'blacks and whites' are transferring. Is there an uneven number of people transferring?
Really, the one thing that will SAVE any school, has nothing to do with locking schools in, but FIXING the school. If parents saw the district investing resources to improve the school, they wouldn't be fleeing like rats from a ship.
I do not understand how anyone, no matter how deluded, can deny Portland's public schools are racially and economically segregated. The numbers prove it. The test for determining segregation is to consider what variables determine an outcome. The race and class of students largely determines where they go out to school and whether they get at least a middling education. Black and Hispanic pupils, who are disproportionately poor, do not.
Furthermore, discrimination in education is intentional. Research clearly shows that white parents will more often than not remove their children from predominately minority schools, regardless of the quality of the education offered there.
It does matter. The 'Fredos' of the world would have us believe the status quo is fine because most whites, the middle and upper-middle classes benefit from the inequities. But, that foolishness will come back to haunt us and future generations. The coming minority majority will be even less well- educated than current adults if the racial and ecomic segregation continues.
The first step in real reform would to be to limit transfers absent a compelling need, as a previous commenter suggested.
Thank God I live in Vancouver. Our schools have these things called boundaries, and if you live within a school's boundary, you go to that school. Occasionally exceptions are made, called "boundary exceptions, but mainly you go to school where you live. It's very simple, and works well. In fact, we have some of the best schools in the area, which of course is no secret as Portlanders keep moving over here and trying to turn them into Portland's crappy schools. But what are ya gonna do...
You may point a finger at school choice. You can blame class, money, or race. Choose any or all for creating what are called 'failing schools' with dropping enrollment. Then when you get tired of waving your arms and pointing fingers, applying the research from other cities, like LA, to see where Portland is headed; after you get heated up and cooled down, take a seat.
That's right, take a seat. Put yourself in a classroom. Think of yourself as a rich black kid, or a poor white kid, or any economic and racial demographic in between. What you have in common with every student, from Aristotle to today, is a teacher.
In Oregon a teacher might be from a rich or poor background, from any ethnic group on earth, but they are all licensed by the state.
Every teacher in every public school has gone through an educational process from an accedited teacher education program. If you'd like to brush up on what it takes to become a teacher, check the class listings at University of Portland, Portland State, or Lewis and Clark. They are within the city limits, if that matters. In the rest of the state you have teachers coming out of the directional schools (Eastern, Western, and Southern Oregon) as well as OSU and UO.
Can we agree that teachers coming from those programs are qualified to teach? They've done the course work, taken the tests, been licensed; they've been interviewed at the district level, by the principal, by other teachers in the group they will be bunched with if the school works that way.
Before the teacher even picks up a piece of chalk, or directs students to a web page, or turns on the overhead projector, they've been looked at pretty hard by some qualified interviewers. They've tested out and passed. If they are in the classroom, it's not by accident.
You can break out your educato-centric vocabulary designed to befuddle; your social models of engineered enlightenment that works on paper, and the teacher is still in the classroom. You can force integration, segregation, blame white flight or the culture of the 'hood, and the teacher is still in the classroom.
Believe it or not, teachers talk. They saw Ben Canada's act and his paid to leave numbers. They saw Vicki Phillips' act and her $620,000 payout to Steve Goldschmidt. Teachers see the writing on the wall, and since they can read, make their plans accordingly.
What is the biggest problem in PPS? It's not the kids or the issue of choice. They are down the public education foodchain. Instead, look to the big-timers. Until professional educators and administrators stop viewing their work as a stepping stone to their next job, all students will suffer regardless of social, racial, or economic status. Build a better educational experience from the inside out, instead of the outside in, and the students will stay. Once that happens you won't stop the flow of goals and achievement each kid aspires to.
Dave
Non-teacher
How many parents have left the district because of damage done to their neighborhood school due the skimming effect of choice? How many parents have left Portland due to PPS closing the exceptional, efficient, well-attended school to which their children could walk or bike?
It is one thing to allow choice, it is another thing to encourage transfers through endless spin and hype be PPS, PSF, CPPS, the Oregonian and other PR arms of the well-connected and well-off.
Please! I have never denied that Portland's public schools are racially and economically segregated. Schools are segregated indeed, racially as well as economically, and I don’t believe I am deluded about that. Read before you accuse.
I also believe the status quo is not “fine”, but it is OK, and not because “most whites… benefit from the inequities”, which is near-racist nonsense, but because the status quo is preferable to the alternative, which would be, as some propose, to limit or eliminate school choice.
Here is what would happen if choice were eliminated. One’s street address would determine where one’s kids go to school. One, of course, would still want one’s kids to get the best education possible regardless of the anti-choice advocates’ dogmatic bleating. People who couldn’t afford to move would stay (be trapped) in the neighborhood, and their kids would attend school there because they could no longer send them to another, better school. Middle- and upper-class people, on the other hand, could still afford to choose where they live. And (surprise) they usually choose not to live where schools are bad, when they have children. Score: Poor people -1, rich people 0.
Soon enough, home values would soar near good schools, and get depressed elsewhere. Do you want real estate prices in Portland to explode even more selectively than they already do? Since people who relocate often make these choices long-distance on the basis of data found on the Internet, you can see what fair shake our neighborhoods would get. The rich would flock to the good schools; the poor would have no choice but send their kids to the bad ones. Good-school neighborhoods (i.e. rich) would prosper more; poor neighborhoods would deteriorate. Do you call this a good thing? This has been happening in many cities around the country for decades. If it happened here in Portland, would you call that an improvement?
My point is that when rules don’t fit people’s needs, people find workarounds. As an example that comes straight for the article, were school choice to be eliminated, the family who are fleeing to Beaverton would still be fleeing to Beaverton. Nothing to stop them; no difference. You can blast yuppies all you want, and I’m not disagreeing, but at the end of the day we need their kids in our public schools, not Beaverton’s. Some schools struggle under the choice rule; they would struggle just as much under a no-choice rule. The difference would be that in the latter case neighborhoods would struggle too. This would be good for Beaverton, though.
To be clear, Portland Public schools have more pressing problems than the black-to-white student ratio at Jeff. As for the much-larger issue of children of color and / or of lesser means being underserved, that would most likely get worse if school choice were eliminated.
Here's an idea: PPS students can transfer willy-nilly like they already do, but the tax dollars STAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL. Whatever neighborhood catchment you reside in, your education dollars stay in that neighborhood school.
How'd that be?
That would be great... but, unfortunately, illegal.
Oh, good God. I'm not a "self-declared yuppie," I never claimed to be. Who would say something like that? I'm not young, upwardly-mobile or a professional. I don't even have a "real" job; I write and edit. I'm a Northeast Portland native, graduate of Harvey Scott Elementary, Madison High and PSU. Of course I knew how rough the schools were in my neighborhood, having grown up here during a time of forced busing, race riots, white guys carrying knives, black guys fighting with the cake cutters they wore in their hair. Asian guys saying, I'm not fighting with you, man, get the hell away from me, and having wars within their own communities.
Me? I was leaving the school grounds and going home whenever I saw everyone heading to Wellington Park or Glenhaven Park to fight. People would chant, "Fight, fight, nigger and a white" and I would be out of there.
Which is basically what I'm doing now, by moving across town.
It was a horrible way to grow up. I don't want that shit for my kids. What has changed here, will you tell me? In the 25 years since I graduated from Madison, what has changed? Nothing. That is breaking my heart, do you get that now? I want better than that, for everyone. These are our children.
Madison was rough -- fights every day, and more integration chaos when SE Asians started arriving after the Vietnam War ended. Then when they opened businesses, bought houses, made a huge difference in my community, all of the whites were still saying, Yeah, fuck them.
So don't give me shit, Fredo, you don't know me. I went back into PPS thinking, my kids will deal, they'll be fine, but you know what? No one carried guns when I was a kid. Not even the badass up the street who the white guys used to go get to "mediate" whenever a fight broke out. (The black guys didn't have an older, neighborhood mediator, cuz they were bused in, so one of the 8th graders would take on the responsibility.)
I talked about my past with Beth, but she obviously didn't have room for it, or maybe the Yuppie Bitch tag worked for her better, I have no idea. I didn't write the story. I thought she did a good job on the story and hope to see more from her.
I want better for my kids, and I'm sick of fighting. Nothing is changing. Nothing. I've been seeing and dealing with the fights in and around PPS since I was five years old.
For what it's worth, here's the quote, Nancy, where you used "yuppie" to describe yourself and your husband. I understand what you're saying now. Here's what you said earlier this month, from the digital recorder:
"All of us yuppie parents, you know, Steve and I didn't have our kids until we were in our early 30s -- mid-30s, mid-30s. You look at all us yuppie parents and we're really different than if we had been parents at 20, and of course you want what's best for your little woggums."
Hey, Wacky, good oral history. You are true Portland. People read about the pinch faced NY stereotype and the smug smiling LA cooltype; you've given a slice of Portlandtype rarely served.
I can imagine you out on the sidewalk, talking to Beth, pointing to the neighborhood sights.
You want something for your kids, something better than what you grew up with? And you're going to Beaverton? Let me tell you...
I was settling into the idea of being true Portland once, or as true as a newbie can be. Growing up on the Oregon coast made Portland 'the big city.' A few years on the eastcoast made Portland more manageable, shrunk it down. I moved here and settled in for an urban life on bike and bus, just like the big city.
Then I got married, moved from cool climbing rent NW to inner lowrent SE. Had a son and started looking around the neighborhood with his eyes.
Across the street was the telephone pole the woman crashed into when she jumped drunk from a van doing fifty. They pulled her teeth out of the wood. Sonny would know that history. There's the fighting couple next door in the fourplex, and the cult sharing the ground floor. He'll hear them screaming and chanting. Ah, the memories. Around the corner a house has steel bars over all the windows and doors. It's a dealer with a slider in the steel front door. You could film Serpico on the front steps. A friendly pitbull cruises the neighborhood at night. I'll be pushing the stroller with that company.
I didn't get as far as educational equity when I picked up and bolted. I wasn't leaving my roots, or a trail from dragging them behind me, and wouldn't have cared if I did. But Beaverton?
Why not Gresham or Tigard? Sherwood or Wilsonville? You want to go through a tunnel every day the rest of your life? Check out Linnton on hwy30 and Milwaukie on 99E. Oregon City? Beaverton means 26. It's called the Sunset Highway, but it might as well be called the Burned Retina Blvd. You've got that to look forward to.
One more thing, you are following what amounts to an Oregon trail. Why did people start wagon training out here in the first place? Better Life. Some of them found it on the Tualatin Plains. Here's some new stories for further education, and welcome to Washington County.
So, the thing Fredo is thinking is more important than educating children of color is real estate values? If that were not so depressing, it would be wrily amusing. Actually, it is the same old shit that has plagued our society for so long: stuff counts, people don't.
Here is a link to a blog quoting a recent scientific study on school choice. The title: Conservative think tank finds school choice does not improve schools.
Hi Nancy,
Sorry I gave you shit. As you justly point out I don't know you, or rather I just know whatever filtered through the WW article, which, unfortunately, included none of the above. It might have been too real for a cutesy-pie article about "segregation" in schools by someone who’s probably never seen the former and likely has no experience of the latter as a parent.
I understand where you come from. I am from a similar place, just not in Oregon. There is zero chance that my kids will ever go to the failed, violent high school I went to, but if I were still around the neighborhood you can bet that I would sooner pick up and take them half the world over than letting them go to that dump. If that is what you are doing, I completely understand that.
What ticked me off earlier is the do what I say, don’t do what I do attitude that transpired in the WW interview: "'Curbing transfers [...] will pump money into the schools that have been losing it for years [...] School choice is to blame', the Rawleys say"; but hey, the Rawleys are taking school choice into their own hands by relocating the family to the top-rated Beaverton SD. Do you see where I’m coming from? I do understand that what Beth Slovic wrote isn’t quite the same as what Beth Slovic was told. Maybe Beth should switch to lifestyle issues or something like that, more inoffensive.
I guess if I liked where I live I’d sooner stay put and use school choice to put my kids in a school that works for them than moving to Beaverton, but that’s just me... I’d rather my kids commute across Portland than go to school with the kind of neighbors I could statistically expect having in Beaverton, evangelical Intel workers and what not. Besides, PPS can use the dollars. Dave above has a good point. At any rate, I respect your decision and I am sorry I gave you shit earlier.
Another nuance missing from my opinion here. I don't think "School choice is to blame." I am not opposed to school choice, just neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers. There should be no legitimate reason for these, but I maintain that inequity is probably the primary reason for them.
Once more, for the record: what I want is equitable neighborhood schools. Then (and only then) neighborhood-to-neighborhood transfers should be the exception, not the rule.
Hey Fredo,
Here's one thing I based my word choice on when writing the sentence "School choice is to blame for this, the Rawleys say," where "this" referred to the lack of course offerings at Jeff.
It's from Steve Rawley's testimony to the School Board on Nov. 5 when he talked about school choice:
"The problems caused by this policy are clear. You all know them: racial and economic segregation, diversion of public investment from the neighborhoods that need it the most, a two-tiered high school system, and the fragmentation of communities."
Anyway, I'm curious to know more about your views on school choice. You seem like a true believer in the policy. Where do your kids go to school, if you have school-age kids? And in what part of town do you live? Would you have moved elsewhere if PPS required your children attend your neighborhood school, assuming they don't already?
I DO have a great idea for a lifestyle story. It's about adults who use fake names online to throw rotten cyber-tomatoes at people they don't know. What do you think? Do you know anyone I could interview?
Hey fredo,
Thanks for the mention. What do you think of Beth Slovic now? In case you missed it, she kicked your butt. She jumped right up and put the boot to you and your posts. I've got a feeling she can back up most everything she's written. Is wacky mommy a yuppie? She knew the password "woggums."
I'm looking forward to that lifestyle piece you and Beth are working on.
Speaking of our neighboring community, Beaverton delivers choices in higher grades where choices are most effective and Beaverton has equitable schools. Portland should look to Beaverton for the principles of school equity that are the foundations of their school system.
Anyone who is moving to the suburbs to "get away from drugs" is fooling themselves and wasting their money and time. Here's the research that shows no one parties down like a kid in Beaverton.
www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_t...
Reason? Absolutely nothing to do in the burbs, which all close down at 7pm, weekends too.
So they spark it up, baby. Big time.
And who buys all that kooky, drug-ridden, violent hip-hop music to listen to all mellowed out?
The Beaverton Boyz and Gals. You can look it up!
Fredo,
Thank you. Peace.
Beth,
"...mid-30s, mid-30s," yadda-yadda-blip, ah, me at my rambling, sarcastic worst.
Signed,
The Yuppie Bitch
For those thinking about fleeing to Beaverton, choice is increasingly creating income and racial divides. This becomes true starting middle school. We have "option," not magnet schools--including the Gates model for a medical magnet.
These schools of choice get more motivated kids, more motivated parents. And guess what??? They are the highest performing kids! Choice feeds on itself when the hype surrounding these school's test scores imply that somehow the best teachers are at these schools.
Not necessarily!!!
In the meantime, with buses to get any kid so lucky to win the lottery enrollment at these option schools, exhaust fumes increase and general funds are drained by transportation costs.
Neighborhood middle schools of more mixed neighborhoods are losing kids and their reputation. Parents are pissed off because the randomness of a lottery never considers the child's interests or the mentorship of a teacher who observes talent and desire in a poor kid.
Our most segregated schools are burgeoning with Hispanic kids. While 22% of all elementary school-aged kids are Hispanic, virtually all the children at schools like Vose Elementary are Hispanic.
We have no charter schools, but middle class families are getting restless. They are screaming the same complaints as schools like Jefferson. Make curriculum choices available at all schools. Offer rigor. No cookie cutter approach. Strengthen neighborhood schools.
You see, in the BSD we recognize the low bar of NCLB and worry that AYP pressures are hurting ALL KIDS who trust that their public schools will prepare them for a college education.
If Site Councils and Locals School Committees had the power to do what they are intended to do, we just might see neighborhood schools that reflect what parents want for their kids to give them the sense of empowerment that has been stripped from them.
Suburban Flight Warning
I'm a flight risk. I'll admit it. I flew in fear, from a big apartment in the city to a small ranch house, which is like a mobile home without the mobility.
My first day walking out of the dead-end, er, cul-du-sac, heading for the bus downtown, I saw a syringe lying on the side of my new street. I stomped it like a rhino on a fire. I noticed odd traffic patterns in the evening, which might seem odd but how many nights do you spend in a new place before you move in?
Turns out a house one street over, with backyards abutting the houses on my street, was the dope house. Hop heads parked on my street, hopped the fences in my neighbors' backyards, got their stash and came back to their cars where they'd hit it up and toss their rig on the way out. And I was concerned about teeth in a telephone pole?
The drug traffic stopped after some intervention activity, but then I learned the school district was re-drawing boundaries. Instead of my kid going to the school up the street, he had to catch a fifty minute bus ride to an elementary school near I-5. You've seen images of the airborne debris field generated by high speed highways? The school was in that envelope.
Then they re-drew the high school boundary down the middle of a road so the kids on one side had a ten minute ride to school, but the other side had an hour that included driving past their former school.
Needless to say, the suburbs are no panacea for family issues; same shit, different package. Strong family backbone is all that makes a difference, no matter where you live.
The Rawley's never said Beaverton wouldn't have big-city problems. They're moving because the Beaverton School District offers equitable course offerings and programs at every neighborhood school regardless of the racial make-up or income level of the neighborhood's school children. Fact: Beaverton has equitable neighborhood schools, Portland does not.
What does the fact that some Beaverton kids do drugs (as do kids in all US cities) possibly have to do with school choice, and the fact that the Beaverton School District has an equitable educational system that values all students equally?
The Rawley's moving to Beaverton, not driving through the tunnel every day to send their kids to school there. What's the issue with the tunnel?
And addressing rural issues like sidewalks and cul-de-sacs has NOTHING to do with the topic of this article: that Portland Public School's policies shamelessly discriminate against children based upon their race and the amount of money their parents have, of which these children have no control.
The Rawley's are moving to Beaverton for quality of life issues, one being educational equitability. I'm not suggesting they'll be lucky to get what they're looking for, just that moving often doesn't solve the real problems.
Today's report of two murders on Killingsworth speak to quality of life issues you don't often associate with the suburbs. At least that's what I thought. I was shocked to see the police and ambulances at the corner house; more shocked to learn that the man who lived there had a city order to cut his overgrown backyard because it qualified as a fire hazzard; the police and ambulances were there because the yard guy found a dead body in the tall grass.
How does that happen?
I understand that Portland Public Schools are not equitable. So far nothing else has been equitable either. For example: When is the last time a teacher from one of your kid's school was fired and sent to prison because his internet romance with a fourteen year old boy turned out to be a forty five year old detective? The last time a teacher was fired for throwing a book at a mouthy student in choir? The last time a girl's basketball coach was accused of sexual impropriety, fired, then found innocent and not re-hired or his innocens publicly acknowledged? The last time a local doctor helped the school sports teams buy giving discount physicals and a little more then hung himself when he was found out? The last time a local guy killed his second wife and still lived in the same house with his step-children while being the police's number one suspect?
I read about a murder in a local apartment building. I'm talking to guy at the store and he says "That's my new apartment. I got discounted rent because they couldn't get the stain out of the carpet."
Like I said, welcome to Washington County. Just make sure you know if your new place is incorporated into Beaverton, otherwise you're on the sheriff's patrol from Hillsboro, the county seat.
"The Rawley's are moving to Beaverton for quality of life issues...."
Dave, what are you, a mind reader? This particular Rawley (my wife has her own list) has two things pulling him to the Beav: 1) equitable neighborhood schools and 2) a better commute to my job.
These two pros barely outweigh the many cons, in my mind.
My greatest regret is leaving the quality of life in my walkable, diverse, working class neighborhood. The fact that we're even considering a move to suburbia, with
As a school parent in Beaverton, I appreciate this history lesson about Portland schools and the insight into the players, constituencies, and complexities. From a community viewpoint, it is undeniable that we all want our kids to go to a school with kids from our own neighborhood...and for this school to be in our own backyard. Even if the plan of giving people the choice to move around and seek better schools in other areas "worked"--that is, resulted in more balanced social-economic representation in Portland schools, the approach would still not address the real underlying issue: how do we improve the quality of neighborhood schools outright so kids can walk to school in their own neighborhood, accompanied by friends from their own neighborhood?
Portland is a culturally vibrant city but has no vision and leadership when it comes to education. It's ironic how a city that touts itself as being so progressive is so incapable of making progress on what must be the most essential issue of livability...local school quality.
I love Portland and it's fate affects Beaverton and the state as a whole. We must get this issue of school quality right at the K-12 level as well as at the university level. We need world class education for our kids because they are the future of this state. If any business leaders are listening, please think about how you can help Portland and Oregon at large can solve this fundamental issue.
gauss.publicpress.org