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White flight

So what did I tell you?  School choice hasn't been good for Portland schools, at least not for most of them.

Two articles in this morning's Tribune make it clear that middle class parents don't want their kids to attend lower middle class schools. Parents are scrambling and clawing for the few available spots in the city's most "desirable" schools:

"This quest for the best has tensions running high at play groups and cocktail parties, and tempers flaring at school meetings citywide. When parents learned that Irvington Elementary School would accept no transfer students because of budget cuts, one mother loudly cursed another who’d consoled her after she learned her child wouldn’t get in for the 2005 school year. Wide-eyed — and wide-eared — children took in the exchange."

The accompanying piece about Beach School parent Michelle Laherty's battle to keep neighborhood kids in their neighborhood school points out the devastating effect that school choice has had on many neighborhood schools, especially in North and Northeast Portland:

"But of the 13 schools that are part of the Jefferson High School “cluster” in North and Northeast Portland, nine enroll fewer than six in 10 of the school-age kids who live in their neighborhoods.

"Schools around Roosevelt High School in North Portland do a bit better. Still, three of six elementary schools that are part of the Roosevelt cluster enroll fewer than six in 10 of their neighborhood students, according to demographic data analyzed by Portland State University’s Population Research Center."

Why won't parents enroll their children at Beach?  It's "too rough." Which means, in effect, that it has too many minority students.  It's too "diverse":

 “I think it would be naive to pretend that that’s not an issue,” Laherty said.

“ 'Beach is an incredibly diverse school. And I think it challenges people’s comfort zone in terms of diversity,' said Mike Moran, who is active on the school’s recently reinvigorated parent teachers association and whose son, Ethan, is a kindergartner at Beach. 'Most people embrace diversity in speech. But when they have to embrace it in reality, in their schools, it pushes their comfort zone a little.' ” 

Another parent, Beach PTA president Barbara Brooks,  says that the experience of having her children at the diverse school has been "positive, both for her children and her family."

“ 'I wouldn’t trade it for anything,' she said. 'I’m a different person than I was when I started out here. I’ve grown. I’ve stretched. I’ve gotten out of my comfort zone of white, middle-class. … I used to tell people that Beach got a lot easier for me once I got over my whiteness.' ”

Why middle schools?

Assuming that achievement test scores are adequate measures of how good schools are (they're not, but that's what we're stuck with), then it's clear that K-5 schools "outperform" the middle schools.  If that's the case, why don't we chuck the middle school model and keep kids in elementary schools through grade 8?

This morning's Tribune article extolling Ball Elementary for it's high test scores should be read carefully by all those concerned with school reform.  The key ingredients in the success at Ball, as I read the article, are collaboration, focus, and flexibility:

"The teaching staff works collaboratively and continually to assess how each student is doing, and where he or she may need help, Newsome and Fielding said.

"The school focuses especially on reading, giving students guidance during traditional reading classes. Students who need extra help can get it during smaller group sessions and one-on-one sessions throughout the school day."

That's much more difficult in middle schools, where specialization kicks in.  Student proficiency, as measured by test scores, invevitably drops off--way off-- by the eighth grade.   Portsmouth  Middle School eighth graders, where the high scoring Ball students end up, reach reading and math benchmarks at about a 60% rate.  That's true across the city. 

As I wrote in "Why not K-8 schools?", middle school reform is all about emulating elementary schools:

"What better way to finish that reform than by turning middle schools back  into grade schools?  The self-contained grade school classroom is a perfect small community of learning, the most fundamental feature of a restructured school.  It allows for integrated instruction and provides the flexibility to group and regroup students according to their needs and abilities."

Research strongly supports the move back to K-8 schools:

"In fact, more and more school districts--urban, suburban and rural--are scrapping their middle schools in favor of K-8s. The move is being prompted by several factors, including growing discontent with middle schools, the district’s own research on the link between grade configuration and academic achievement and the wishes of parents."

And this from Philadelphia:

"Current national research on K-8 schools may be a shallow body of literature, but consistent, positive findings surface while wading through it. In a number of published studies comparing K-8 schools to junior high schools in Milwaukee and New York City, K-8 schools outperform junior high schools in almost every category assessed."

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The other key issue in the Tribune article is the ethnic diversity at Ball, which is typical of most grade schools in Portland.  As a proponent of public education and neighborhood schools, I believe that in itself is important, regardless of test scores. It's also an underlying principal of the movement to create "common schools", which were envisioned as necessary for inculcating civic and democratic values in a country as culturally diverse as America.

But Portland's system of open enrollment and school choice is at odds with that principal.  As I've written before, parents, when given the choice, will opt for a school with a better "class" of students. 

The Boulder Valley School District in Colorado struggles with the same issue.  "White flight" within the district has skewed student demographics:

"Choosing a school outside a family's neighborhood is a popular option for Boulder Valley parents, but open enrollment also is criticized for fueling 'white flight' and causing inequities among schools.

"Critics also say parents too often choose schools based on state test scores. Schools with more diverse student populations tend to have lower test scores and, in turn, bad reputations. The result is minority and low-income students are increasingly concentrated in a few district schools."

Sounds like Portland. 

In defense of diverse schools, Eileen Gayle Kugler has written a book called Debunking the Middle Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools Are Good for All Kids.  In the book, she says this:

"It happens every year. Well-meaning parents begin their exploration for a new home, a place where their kids can attend a 'good' school. And what’s usually their primary tool for measuring a school’s worth? They look at the school’s standardized test scores, assuming the highest average scores definitively mean the best schools. They check out demographic statistics, fearing that high populations of minority students translate to schools where gangs rule, violence is common, and expectations are low. Far too often, they don’t dig beyond the most basic statistics. They never learn that many diverse schools have challenging curricula, high-achieving graduates, and low rates of violence. The parents never investigate research that clearly shows the benefit of being educated in a diverse environment."

Again, sounds like Portland.

 

 

 

Tom Potter, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the bogus "War on Terror"

In his Sunday commentary in the Oregonian, Garrett Epps offered these insights into the conflicts inherent in American conservatism:

• American conservatism has not one but two hearts: one is libertarian, the other authoritarian.

• The new GOP agenda seems to be less, not more, freedom.
  

Nothing is more illustrative of the trend toward authoritarianism and the restriction of freedom than the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force program now operating in more than 100 U.S. cities.  In my opinion, Portland Mayor Tom Potter and the City Council were absolutely justified in their decision to withdraw the city from the task force.

I endorsed Tom Potter in the November election mainly because I opposed the negative and money-grubbing campaign of Jim Francesconi.  I admired Potter as the "father" of community policing, and as the actual father of a lesbian Portland police officer for whom he showed unwavering support.  But I didn't know then how effective he would be as mayor.

He's proven his mettle.  Even the far left editor of the Portland Alliance, Dave Mazza (my neighbor), has given his grudging approval:

"Mayor Potter is telling the FBI that unless he gets a top secret clearance — the better to keep tabs on what those wacky g-men are up to — then he’ll pull his police officers off the Joint Terrorism Task Force and go home. Potter is shaking up the city bureaus with his business-not-as-usual approach to bringing them back under the council’s collective thumb."

The Joint Terrorism Task Force is a civil liberties disaster waiting to happen.  In fact, it's already happened too often around the country, including Oregon:

" 'There is now ample evidence that several FBI task forces elsewhere have targeted individuals because of their political or religious affiliations,' Fidanque said. 'Almost a year after Portland lawyer Brandon Mayfield was cleared of any involvement in terrorism, city officials still don’t know what, if any, involvement the police department had in that investigation.' "

Another example, the case of retired Nevada astronomer Chuck Clark, whose home was searched by the FBI, may be more common than people suspect:

"Clark isn’t a terrorist or spy but is angered that hikers, four wheelers, or photographers are being monitored by the military on public land, miles from the boundary of the base, which is clearly marked by signs."

But I believe the larger issue is this: Is there really is a global terrorist threat, one that justifies the imposition of a kind of martial law in this country?  I say there isn't. The Bush "Global War on Terror" is a bogus issue, which probably has more to do with politics-  the reelection of Bush-- than domestic security.  Here's what I wrote in this post Feb 19 post:

"Terror is a tactic, not a monolithic threat.  Terror, however repugnant, is the weapon of the weak against the perceived oppression of the powerful.  In Iraq, we're battling an insurgency largely of our own making.  In Israel--Palestine-- the enemy is Hamas and Hezbollah, groups solely concerned with Palestinian rights. And so on and on and on.   Terrorism arises in specific places in specific circumstances. It's idiotic to talk about a global war on terrorism.  Terrorism is a chimera, used as a pretext to justify huge defense expenditures and, sadly, military adventurism."

This article from the Sept. 16 edition of the Guardian goes even further.  It links the War on Terror to the goals of the neoconservative agenda outlined in the Project for the New American Century:

"The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."

I say to Bush that freedom begins at home.  It comes in the form of extended and protected civil liberties.  In that sentiment, as Garrett Epps points out, I probably have allies in the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. 

As does Tom Potter.

It WAS a beautiful day in the neighborhood, Sallie Tisdale!

Maybe it's serendipity, but the public squabble over property rights keeps popping up in the newspaper.

Today it's Sallie Tisdale, Laurelhurst resident and nationally renowned writer, with an opinion piece in the O musing about the demise of a large neighborhood tree.  It's owner, a recent transplant from California, wasn't happy with it, according to Tisdale:

"The needles were a nuisance, he added, and the tree was big. If it ever fell, it might hurt his house."

Tisdale and many of her neighbors disagreed.  So did the city's urban forester, saying that removal of the tree would have a "significant negative impact" on the "character, aesthetics, property values or property uses" of the neighborhood.  He was overruled and the tree was cut down.

What surprised Tisdale was not so much the outcome. It was the attitudes voiced by some at the hearing before the Urban Forestry Commission:

"Several said they thought people should be allowed to do what they want with their private property.

"This last argument is strange to me. Do my Laurelhurst neighbors mean I can leave out my trash cans, put an abandoned car in the front yard, get a rooster and stop mowing my lawn? We all live by laws that recognize the balance between the individual and the community."

That's what I've been saying about Measure 37.  And the zealots who crafted it.

Here's a column by Tisdale from the "Mothers Who Think" section of Salon, where she was a regular contributer in 1998-99.   She advocates the elimination of handguns.  So do I.

 

Pay off the Measure 37 land speculators and be done with it!

Of course you need a source of revenue to pay off those who speculate in real estate.  And Measure 37 doesn't supply it, for good reason:  the intent of the measure is to undermine Oregon's visionary land use laws.  If the government can't pay the aggrieved property owner, it must forgo restricting private property rights.

The state, in my opinion, needs additional money for many services it now doesn't adequately support.  Public education is one. That's why I am a staunch supporter of progressive tax reform.  Our corporate income tax accounts for about 4% of general fund revenues, little more than the Oregon Lottery provides.  The personal income tax is virtually a flat tax for adjusted gross incomes over $20,000.  And, as a result of Measure 5,  business property taxes have decreased dramatically as a portion of overall property tax revenues to the state.

But back to Measure 37.  In the absence of meaningful tax reform, here's a good idea from Onward Oregon and the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, who argue that the "... best solution is to find a way to pay affected landowners so that good planning can continue."

Their solution?  Establish a compensation fund by "... capturing some of the windfall profits that some developers reap when government action brings land within urban areas, dramatically boosting its value."  Its called Development Credits, and it's already in play in Deschutes County, and in the states of Washington, Colorado, and New Jersey. 

So why not here?  The only reason I can think of is the handful of anti-planning ideologues serving in the state legislature.  They're far removed from the Tom McCall bipartisan coalition back in 1973 that established the unprecedented Land Conservation and Development Commission.
 

Measure 37 and the dash for cash!

Measure 37 was passed for the supposed "protection" of elderly property owners--Dorothy English, for one-- and family farmers.  The latter is an even more egregious distortion of the truth.  The Family Farm Preservation PAC was dreamed up by Oregonians in Action head honcho Dave Hunnicutt to raise large amounts of money, not from family farmers (who generally opposed Measure 37), but from developers and timber interests whose sole concern was in overturning Oregon's protection of farm and timberlands.

In practice, the property rights measure has turned into an even more sordid "dash for cash" by the hucksters who seem to believe they've won the property rights megabucks lottery.  The thousand or so claims filed so far under Measure 37 have included proposals for strip malls, major commercial developments, shopping centers, and even a gambling casino, all on previously protected rural land.  And we were told it was all about the right of farmers to build homes on the land they tilled.

Now even urban zoning is under assault by small time realtors and developers, like Augustine Calcagno.  Mr. Calcagno claims that his retirement secrity has been diminished by changes in zoning rules proposed by his North Portland neighbors:

"The problem wasn’t some environmental regulation but new zoning rules approved by his neighbors in the St. Johns/Lombard Plan, the product of a three-year process involving community meetings, public hearings and the approval of the Planning Commission and the City Council. Of the 14 Measure 37 claims filed in Portland so far, his is the first to challenge rules drafted by neighborhood consensus."

Measure 37, as I suggesed in my last post, has unleashed the forces of greed and selfishness long held in check by the the most basic of land use regulations.  As the Tribune article points out, that's what the property rights revolution has come down to:

"No other Portland case better illustrates the tensions inherent in the property rights measure passed by voters in November. Who wins when the wishes of the community conflict with the interests of an individual?"

In a spin worthy of the best political operatives, Augustine Calcagno blames it all on the city:

" 'It didn’t make any difference what the people wanted,' Calcagno said. 'The city doesn’t care what the people want or what’s fair.' ”

That's bound to garner sympathy from those who love to hate City Hall.  But let me set the record straight:

It was your neighbors, Mr. Calcagno, people concerned about their community, who pushed for the zoning changes.  Not the evil, soulless bureaucrats who work for the city of Portland.

As I wrote back in November, the evils of Measure 37 keep finding new and improved ways of manifesting themselves.

Divorced from reality: Rush Limbaugh really is an idiot!

Although I typically wince when I hear liberal pundits speak from what they call a "reality-based" perspective (in my view reality encompasses more than cold, hard logic), it is important to hold reactionaries like Bush accountable for their shameless flouting of scientific fact, scientific consensus, and scientific reality.

Case in point:  Right wing no-nothing blowhard (and Bush defender to the bitter end) Rush Limbaugh said today that the sun is responsible for global warming.  Therefore, there's nothing we can really do about it, short of sending fire trucks up there to cool the sun off. 

Maybe it was yesterday he said it, or the day before, but he did say it, and I did hear it, courtesy of Al Franken who played the transcript on this morning's show as he was interviewing Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of a series on global warming published in the New Yorker.

Franken wrote the highly amusing book calling Limbaugh a "big fat idiot."  He's not fat anymore, at least not as fat, but he's still an idiot. 

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In other environmental news, the poll published in today's Oregonian on the public's attitude toward Measure 37, property rights, and state land use planning, has forced me to amend my conclusion that Measure 37 was approved overwhelmingly, even in  Multnomah county, because it was overshadowed by more contentious initiatives like Measure 36. 

The poll reveals a sort of public schizophrenia.  People support both property rights and planning to prevent sprawl:

"On one hand, respondents valued protecting property rights more than farmland, the environment or wildlife habitat. And 60 percent chose individual rights over responsibility to their community.

"On the other hand, more than two-thirds said growth management makes Oregon a more desirable place to live. Respondents strongly favored public planning over market-based decisions and wanted to protect land for future needs instead of using it now for homes and businesses."

Those attitudes seem self-contradictory.  Planning --zoning-- by definition limits the rights of individuals in order to promote the common good.  I guess Oregonians, like most Americans, are torn between greed and self interest, on the one hand, and community values on the other. 

On the positive side, maybe the preference for planning over market-based solutions--69% to 23%-- will silence the libertarian clamor for privatizing everything.  The most radical libertarians believe that all  property should be in private hands.  It's the notion that's behind Bush's "ownership society:  if it's yours, you'll take better care of it.  Of course, that doesn't address the really tricky questions like, who owns the air we breathe, the oceans, the water we drink, the airwaves?  And closer to home, who owns, or should own, the electricity that powers our economy?  Who owns,  or should own, PGE?

Call me a communist, even if I do own a house, half a rental house, three cars, and a dog,  but I can't help but think that some things are better off in public hands.  Some things-- parks and schools, beaches and roadways, forests and wilderness areas-- should be owned and managed communally.  That's kind of what we have now.

Unfortunately, it's a social arrangement that's continually under assault, and Measure 37 is the latest skirmish  in that assault.

 

One down, two to go

As I predicted yesterday, some people will actually miss Promise King.  It's a real stretch to characterize King as "an intelligent local commentator."  Local, sure.  I guess it's a case of "birds of a cynical feather" simply reinforcing each others' views about bumbling public bureaucrats and elected officials.

Promise King would have been more tolerable had he backed up his critical comments with actual data.  When he called for the closure of Jefferson High School, calling it an "academic embarassment", he was factually wrong on two counts.  First, he based his critique of the school only on standardized test scores, which have far more to do with student demographics than the "performance" of the school.

Secondly, he compounded the error by failing to look at actual district test score data.  Had he done so, he would have concluded that Roosevelt or Marshall were the real district embarassments.  And had he dug a little deeper, he may have concluded that Wilson's "performance", given its demographics and the student achievement of its incoming students, was truly abysmal.

Of course, he could have admitted from the get-go that he knew very little about education and even less about testing and measurement, and refrained from passing judgment on the state of public education in Portland.

In a sense, I too will miss the commentaries of Promise King.  I'll have one less thing to write about.

"You da man!" Steve Novick

You just gotta love this Steve Novick guy.  He's the one responsible for the school- based balance the budget project that has teenagers calling for tax increases.  He also demonstrated in a slick op-ed piece for the Oregonian that state tax policies have no measurable effect on jobs or per capita income.

Today he shows up in letter to the Tribune lambasting the obsessive-compulsive Phil Stanford for his cheap shots at Erik Sten and publicly financed elections:

"So what’s Stanford’s reason for making patently unfair accusations? Does he just take gratuitous pleasure in raising the level of public cynicism about elected officials? There’s enough of that without his help."

Amen to that, I say.

Speaking of cynicism and the Tribune, the ever-so-subtly cynical columnist Promise King wrote his last piece for the Trib today.  He may be missed by some, but not me.  He's made a career, at least at the Tribune (where did he come from anyway?), of promoting a pernicious anti-government, and anti-public school, point of view.   Not philosophy, because his rants were never well-reasoned enough to rise to that level.
His last column includes this characteristic dig at "wasteful" government:

"I cannot leave without saying that government waste is next in importance to the issue of race. Our waste problem does not come dressed in the costumes of potbellied accountants with pilfering fingers; it wears instead the well-intentioned policies of those who believe that government has the answers to all things. It does not. We must band together to change that line of thinking."

"Our waste problem?"  Sounds like he's talking trash.

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Another local columnist with whom I rarely agree, Renee Mitchell, did get something right yesterday when she quoted a Portland police officer praising prevention over punishment:

" 'The prevention side is vital,' says Lt. Eric Hendricks, a Portland police gang enforcement team supervisor. 'We need those programs; it's as simple as that.' Without them, he adds, 'The bottom line is it means more work for us.' "

Of course, prevention costs money, and there's too little money spent, either publicly or privately, on programs to deter crime, from early childhood education to treatment programs for drug and alcohol addiction, or mental illness.  Those maladies, usually more than one of them, explain most homelessness.

You've undoubtedly read about the lack of jail space to hold criminals.  You've heard about the unused beds in the county's new Wapato facility, unused because there's no money to staff it.

But you probably aren't aware that most--I repeat most-- of the 500 or so beds in the downtown Justice Center are filled with the homeless, the mentally ill, alcoholics, and drug addicts, very few of whom have committed serious crimes.  They're nuisances, not dangerous criminals.

I know this because my wife is a RN at the Justice Center.  The police routinely "sweep" the city, she says, to pick up homeless people and others whose "crimes" are menacing, trespassing, disorderliness, or "failure to appear" on outstanding warrants.  Why?  Because they're easy pickings.  It takes time and hard work to find and arrest people who burglarize houses or steal cars, the real criminals, in other words.

As a result the jail becomes a de facto treatment center for the down and out in our society, without the mandate or the expertise to actually "treat" the "clients" who  routinely--too routinely-- show up there.

So I agree with Renee Mitchell in this sense:  an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Or in the case of public safety, a pound of punishment.

Pete Sorenson for Governor! Plus more on Jack's Bog

Apparently Jack Bogdanski is too broke to pay more taxes to a government that squanders the money it already rakes in.  Read his year old post on Measure 30.

In the meantime the brother of Jack's bete noire-- Erik Sten-- is teaching his students at Madison High School the realities of tax and spend legislative decision making.

"Oregon high school social studies students from Creswell to Portland have been balancing the state budget as a class exercise, juggling many of the same options for raising taxes and cutting spending as elected lawmakers -- but without fear of being voted out of school for their decisions.

"The group from Portland's Madison High School -- part of Matt Sten's natural resources and public policy class -- presented its proposal to the Joint Ways and Means Committee last week while other schools are still putting the final touches to their budgets."

The students, no doubt brainwashed by the liberal propaganda spouted by their teacher -- he is Erik Sten's brother, after all-- weren't at all hesitant to recommend tax increases:

"Leigh Berg and Austin Reed got right to the point: As painful as it might be, the Legislature should raise taxes to balance the state budget.

" 'Oregon is in crisis,' the Madison High School juniors told legislators as hundreds of citizens crammed into an aerobics studio at Portland Community College recently to testify before the state budget writers.

Good idea, although I don't know why they included the qualifier "painful".  I'm not rich--household income about $80,000-- and I've never complained about the taxes I pay.  I figure it's my investment in the community.

In other tax news, David Bean, a member of the Coalition to Preserve the Estate Tax, takes issue with those who call the "death tax" unfair:

"Lowell Miles, owner of Miles Fiberglass & Composites, who has 50 employees, will ('Estate tax battle shaping up,' April 6). Is that fair?

"The society he inherited provided him with the opportunity, and isn't it "fair" that he leave opportunity for the next generation so the cycle can continue?

"A married couple can pass on $4 million before the Oregon estate tax engages.

"The odds that the estate tax will diminish the opportunity to your (or anybody's children) are 99 to one. Why? Because 99 percent of people are already free from paying the estate tax."

While taxes and tax reform are on my mind, allow me an early endorsement in the 2006 gubernatorial campaign:  Pete Sorenson for Governor!  I've had enough of the weak-kneed "leadership" of Ted Kulongoski.  We need somebody in the state's top office
principled enough to say things like this:

"If shortsighted, large 'tax expenditures' - tax credits - given to profitable corporations and the wealthy are plugged, as they should be, we will have millions more to spend on the futures of our children. Two-thirds of Oregon's big corporations pay only $10 annually in state taxes, an unbelievable state of affairs that must be addressed. The wealthy receive tax credits for owning second and third homes, and for piloting pleasure boats on state waters. This huge tax burden has been shifted onto the backs of the middle and working class people of Oregon - unfair by any analysis. I plan to turn this around, and use the tax dollars to build our schools back to their optimal and effective functioning for our kids."