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School board candidate Rita Moore speaks up for equity

(Thanks to Lynn Schore)

In response to Kim Melton's coverage of yesterday's "community conversation" at Jefferson regarding the district's plan for redesigning its high schools, Rita Moore, Zone 4 school board candidate, stepped up with a timely response in a letter to Melton.

It reads in part:

"Just read your article on today's meeting and I wanted to say thank you.  After 4 hours of remarkably shallow discussions of the models and an additional hour talking with District leaders about the principal situation at Roosevelt, I appreciate your highlighting the level of frustration that was present in the room. ...

"Most disappointing, both Carole (Smith, Superintendent) ... refused to take the opportunity handed to [her] by several members of the community to apologize for subjecting poor and minority students to experimental structures and sub-standard curricula.  Carole came close, but the "mistakes were made" formulation just won't cut it and she needs to understand that.  Until District leaders are willing to take responsibility and then take steps to fix the problems they have created, we will never be able to establish trust.  And many of us will remain forever skeptical of both the intentions and the competence of the District to provide the kind of education that all our children deserve."

Here's the problem as I see it.  Community meetings --or "conversations"-- are basically useless.  They're devices used by the district to give the illusion that district stakeholders have a say in policy.  In reality, district administrators know what they want to do, know what they're going to do, and despite outcry from the "community", they'll go ahead and do it, the consequences or bruised feelings be damned 

The "real" Jefferson community had no say in the re-reconfiguration of its secondary programs.  And how did that work out?  What the district did to Jefferson High School, the very place this latest "community conversation" took place, has been no less than disastrous.  Is it any wonder then, at Saturday morning's meeting, that

"...the underlying pain and frustration ... emerged over the way Portland has redesigned high schools and moved staff at schools such as Jefferson and Roosevelt[?]"

Until district administrators and school board members address school inequities directly --a good start would be to  discontinue the neighborhood-to-neighborhood school transfer policy-- all the community conversations in the world will be of no help whatsoever.

And speaking of the school board, remember to vote.  You have my recommendations here and here. 

Worth reading: "Why Obama is wrong about our schools"

But first, from David Marshak, long a critic of No Child Left Behind and "obsessive" testing:

"...when it comes to education, President Obama is a hypocrite. He sends his own kids to a progressive, child-centered school. The school enrolls 1097 students in 13 grades, about 100 per grade. It’s small and personalized. It focuses on its students as whole persons.

"You don’t hear anything like this kind of language coming from Obama or Arne Duncan when it comes to education policy."

Schools which hold teachers strictly accountable for student test scores --that's pay for performance, isn't it?-- are anything but child-centered.

The piece worth reading, "Why Obama is wrong", was written by Los Angeles teacher Randy Childs, a member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, a union affiliated with both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.

Childs accuses Obama of neoliberalism, intent on foisting market-based reforms on America's public schools:

"Tellingly, just hours after making his speech on education, Obama proclaimed himself a 'New Democrat,' identifying himself with the conservative faction of his party--the very people who have championed charter schools, merit pay and other attacks on teachers in the name of 'school reform.' "

"New Democrat" means neoliberal. 

Take charter schools, for example, Obama's favored "reform":

"Charter schools have become Corporate America's most successful method of introducing privatization and market-style competition into public education. That's right--the same free-market dynamics that have wreaked havoc in the fields of health care, housing and high finance are coming to education.

"Supporters of charter schools describe them as laboratories of pedagogical innovation. In practice, most 'high-performing' charter schools cherry-pick students and families that are already enjoying academic success and dump the children they find inconvenient to teach back into the mainstream public school system."

And then there's "merit pay", based on the supposed superiority of private sector employment practices, the underlying assumptions of which have never been thoroughly, or even cursorily, examined.  Childs writes:

"Plus, there's a very simple problem with the logic of 'performance pay' for teachers. There is no honest scientific method by which 'excellence in the classroom' can be quantified."

He's got that right.  And for that, perhaps Randy Childs deserves a boost in pay --"merit pay", if you will.

(NOTE:  Childs' piece is published on the Socialist Worker website.  I don't know if Childs is a Marxist/Communist/Socialist, but the very fact that his criticism of Obama, at least on education policy, is carried on a "socialist" website should acquit Obama of the charge --the latest by Iowa Republican Charles Grassley-- that his policies are fundamentally socialist.)

Portland's 'Million Dollar Baby' gets even richer in retirement

Progressive evangelical preacher, Jim Wallis, writes about the moral dimensions of economic policy.  In defending the Employee Free Choice Act, Wallis invokes memories of his father --a negotiator for Detroit Edison-- and argues that the EFCA levels the playing field between employer and employee:

"And the great chasm that has now grown between CEO salaries and that of average workers, I know, would have appalled and offended my father."

The chasm is huge. 

"In 1965, U.S. CEOs at major companies made 24 times a worker's pay-by 2004, CEOs earned 431 times the pay of an average worker. ...  While CEO pay continues to increase at rates far exceeding inflation, wages for the vast majority of American workers have failed to keep up with rising prices.  In fact, real wages for the 90% of Americans who earn under $92,000 a year have actually fallen since 2001."

Enter Portland's own "million dollar baby", retiring PGE CEO, Peggy Fowler.  Even she seems embarrassed by --and defensive of-- the generous terms of her golden parachute.  "It pales," she said, in comparison to the bounty bestowed on her predecessor.  Besides that, she argues, "analysts" demand competitive pay for the CEO's of "performing" companies."

Maybe so.  But who has PGE been "performing" for?  Not it's stockholders, who have seen the value of their stock drop 40% since the company went public.  Not ratepayers, either.  According to Bob Jenks of the Citizen's Utility Board,

"PGE already has among the highest electric rates of any utility in the region, he said. It earned more than its allowed rate of return in 2007, and the Oregon Public Utility Commission granted the utility a 7.6 percent increase in 2008."

In reality, says Jenks, we --the ratepayers-- have been "paying Peggy to build up her retirement."

Let's say the average hourly wage for PGE workers is $40, meaning an annual income of $83K.  (It isn't, of course, even for the unionized segment of the workforce.  This website for PGE  customer technical services pegs it hourly pay at $16.72 ...with no benefits.)  But anyway, say you did make that $83K a year, probably as a skilled electrician/lineman with years of experience.  

That's still only about a tenth of what Peggy Fowler is going to make in retirement.

Trudy and the Flynn-Blackmer audit

In a recent post, I suggested that school board member Trudy Sargent ignored testimony presented by John Wilhelmi and Sara Allan about the reality of school segregation in Portland.  Trudy's comments would lead us to believe that the neighborhood school assignment system was responsible for the increasing concentration of poor and minority kids in all but four of Portland's high schools.

She also ignored the audit of PPS' transfer policy prepared by Suzanne Flynn and Gary Blackmer.  The audit stated quite bluntly:

"In addition, we found that the District’s schools were less diverse in terms of low income and minority representation than would be the case if all students attended their neighborhood schools. We concluded that the transfer system has not increased diversity in schools, but actually reduced it."

If you believe Flynn and Blackmer when they say that, "if all students attended their neighborhood schools", schools would be far less segregated by class and by race, then you might think that a discontinuation of neighborhood to neighborhood school transfers would be a good thing, not only for diversity, but as a stabilizing influence on school enrollment.

Trudy concluded quite the opposite.  God knows how many of her board colleagues, wedded to school choice, agree with her.

I bring this up again because the Tribune has an interview up with Gary Blackmer, who just announced his retirement as Portland's city auditor.  The interview doesn't mention Blackmer's audit of the school district.  But fortunately, my pal Lynn Schore reminded readers of Blackmer's PPS connection in a lengthy comment to the article:

"For example, more than $10 million in taxpayer dollars were spent for the auditor to perform three audits of Portland Public Schools. The most critical of those three was Blackmer's audit of the PPS Transfer System, and his trenchant analysis of the segregation which results from it."

The Flynn-Blackmer audit, Lynn continued, "...proved what parents always knew: that our neighborhoods are much more integrated than our PPS schools, because of the PPS transfer policy."

On a related note, Lynn sent along this map of neighborhood housing affordability.  It appears from the map that one of the least affordable and most "gentrified" neighborhoods in inner Southeast Portland corresponds to the attendance area of the popular Sunnyside Environmental School.  Sunnyside Environmental is one of Portland's focus option schools. 

Most of the spots --80%-- at such focus options are reserved for neighborhood residents.  It appears that, rather than chancing the transfer lottery, many well-off parents are moving into the neighborhood, thereby driving the cost of housing up.

One might justifiably conclude, then, that another of the unintended consequences of school choice is neighborhood gentrification, and the further demographic stratification of Portland's schools.

Trudy wants another term

In other local school news, Portland School Board member Trudy Sargent announced that she wants ...four more years! 

I can only ask, why?  With all due respect, although Director Sargent may well  be a very nice person, well-meaning, and kind to her dog and her kids, I really don't think she has a clue about what's going on in the district, even when presented with the evidence directly, as she was at the last school board meeting. 

What evidence?  For starters, how about the data, in graphic color  and nifty bar graphs, presented to the board by John Wilhelmi and Sara Allan showing that the equity chasm between the four wealthiest high schools in the district and all the others had increased dramatically in the last 12 years?  The highlights:

• --"students in poverty are more heavily concentrated in specific schools", namely Jefferson, Roosevelt, Marshall and Madison.  That trend has accelerated over the past 12 years, from a 24% gap in 1995 -6 to 44% in 2007 -8.

• --"Declining enrollment has been coupled with these demographic shifts."  Only the wealthiest four high schools --Cleveland, Wilson, Grant and Lincoln-- have gained students.

And here's the clincher:

• --"Data show that students at benchmark [e.g. good test scores] transfer to other neighborhood schools as well, so not only are we losing students, we're losing students that perform at levels above students who remain at those schools."

Hmmm.  It doesn't take an expert statistican or a deep thinker to conclude, given the data, that lots of good students are leaving poor neighborhoods schools. And that's what accounts for the enrollment drain.  That's what accounts for the clear exacerbation of segregation in the schools by socio-economic status. 

In short,the culprit in the growing inequity between schools is, quite simply, the district's transfer policy and its commitment to school choice. 

But Trudy doesn't see it that way.  In a question to Wilhelmi and Allan, she blamed the problem entirely on Portland's neighborhood school student assignment system:

"Our neighborhoods are segregated by poverty and by race... .  So our system which is based on neighborhood schools results in different populations at different schools based on the neighborhood."

In other words, the problem lies not with the transfer policy, but with existing neighborhood demographics, despite evidence just presented to the contrary: the transfer policy directly exacerbates segregation in the schools.  And it contributes to the marked enrollment declines in the poorest of Portland's high schools. 

The Flynn-Blackmer audit said precisely the same thing.  So did Steve Rawley's masterful study, Charting Open Transfer Enrollment, a copy of which should be in Trudy Sargent's hands: 

"Portland Public Schools has a system of school choice that has resulted in a radical redistribution of public investment. ...

"Since funding follows students, this has created a self-reinforcing pattern of money leaving our poor and working-class neighborhoods and flowing into our wealthiest neighborhoods. As more and more students have followed the money with their own funding, we are left with a two-tiered school system... ."  

To be fair, no other school board member, with the exception of Dilafruz Williams, mentioned the transfer policy as a problem in need of fixing.  And even Williams could only say it was a "complex problem."

It's not complex at all, except politically.  Simply end neighborhood to neighborhood school transfers and scale back charter and magnet school options. 

Here's another suggestion to help clear up any lingering confusion on the board.  I ask that Trudy and the other board members read (or re-read) another inspired piece by Steve Rawley.  It's called The Very Important Problem: Three Parables. 

Just click on the link, school board members.

School news: Fluff and substance

The fluff piece, courtesy of the Oregonian (where else?), is the announcement that the top rated public high school in Oregon is Beaverton's School of Science and Technology, a magnet school that attracts some of the best and the brightest students in the Beaverton area. 

The rating comes courtesy of GreatSchools, a San Francisco outfit that bases it ratings on "the most recent test scores available for reading, math and science."  Using the same criteria, GreatSchools named Jesuit the top private high school in Oregon.

What have I always said?  Good students equal good test scores equal good schools.  End of story.

In news of substance, both good and not so good, Education Week writes that Secretary of Education-designate, Arne Duncan, was an innovator as CEO of Chicago Public Schools.  During his tenure, Duncan improved the quality of teachers and principals in the district.

How?

"One of the biggest legacies of Mr. Duncan’s tenure will be the Renaissance 2010 initiative that Mr. Daley announced in 2004. The project calls for closing underperforming schools, mostly in high-poverty areas, and replacing them with new schools run by outside groups and organizations. The goal is to open 100 such schools by 2010; so far, 75 of those charter and charter-like schools have been opened."

Good news if you're a fan of charter schools.

In other charter school news, the American Federation of Teachers has succeeded --finally!-- in unionizing one the vaunted KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools in Brooklyn, New York.  That's good news, since the charter school-promoting Albert Shanker* has been succeeded as AFT President by Randi Weingarten.

Here's what Weingarten said about the union's success:

"We know that teacher turnover is a major concern across the charter school movement. The unionization of KIPP’s New York City schools provides a unique opportunity to create a model of sustainable teacher recruitment, development and retention."

KIPP schools are infamous for their official six, ten-hour day, workweeks.  (Well, maybe teachers aren't required to work a full ten hours on Saturday.)   No wonder that teacher burnout is a problem. 

And finally, Michael J. Petrilli, a self-described No Child Left Behind "true believer", has had a change of heart.  The right wing think-tanker --Hoover Institution, Fordham Foundation-- has concluded

"Speaking personally, I’ve gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair."

Good news for sure.  

*(To be fair, Shanker was always a staunch advocate of teacher collective bargaining, even in charter schools.)

Libertarian think tank trots out 'scientific' poll in support of its goal to gut public education

That's right.  Portland's own Cascade Policy Institute commissioned a poll --a "scientific", poll, no less-- showing that "87% of Oregonians" want to send their kids to any school --private, charter, home school-- other than a public school. 

So, if nearly one in nine citizens don't want to send their kids to the local public school, yet nine of ten do end up opting for public schools, isn't there something wrong, seriously wrong, with our system of universal, tax-supported public education?  Well?

Well, that's what the Cascade Policy Institute would have us believe.  On the other hand, maybe there's something wrong, seriously wrong, with the poll the folks at Cascade Policy, avowed opponents of the "government school monopoly", have come up with, scientific or not.  That's what one comment on the op-ed piece suggested:

"Gee, a poll paid for by the Cascade Policy Institute that reaches the conclusion Cascade Policy Institute already believed anyway."

Another added:

"There are lies, damn lies and statistics. We should be able to add to that list agenda driven polls. Certainly, someone with a differing viewpoint can construct a scientific poll that would reach a different conclusion."

We have no way of knowing how valid Cascade's "scientific" poll is, since no link to the poll is provided in the op-ed piece.  We do know this, however.  The results of the poll fly in the face of other poll findings on the attitude of parents toward public schools, the last two Kappan polls, for example. 

In those polls, most --nearly 7 0f 10 surveyed-- give their local public schools an A or a B grade.  Only 5% give the schools a failing grade.  That doesn't sound like a populace eager to flee the public neighborhood school.

We also know that the Cascade Policy Institute has long been trying to convince state legislators to divert money from public schools to families who want to send their kids to private schools, but can't afford the tuition.  First, it was the School Choice Project, headed up by Matt Wingard (who is now a state legislator himself.)

Now it's ORED, the Oregon Education Tax Credit Coalition, which would allow Oregonians a tax credit of $1000 for any educational expenses --private school tuition or any other out-of-pocket expense incurred by sending kids to school.  Those would include school supplies and, presumably, participation fees for school related activities which nowadays are all too common in public schools (thanks to Measure 5.)

Simply put, ORED would drain state coffers of a substantial portion of its total tax revenue, half of which is used to fund public education. 

Call the tax credit proposal a stealth voucher program.  At a $1000 a pop, it would do little to get poor kids into private schools, but it would do a great deal of damage to the state's ability to adequately fund public schools.  

Isn't that the goal of the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute?  To 'gut' public education?

One last note.  There are only a handful of private schools in Oregon that may be academically superior to the typical comprehensive public school.  In fact we know little about most of them since they aren't subject to the same test-based accountability as public schools.  Furthermore, charter schools, based on the most recent research, do no better in raising "achievement" than traditional public schools. 

So why are charters considered a legitimate alternative?

Worth reading: "Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago"

Kenneth Libby, the Portland teacher-in-training I mentioned in a recent post, has published a piece on CounterPunch.   It goes almost without saying that Ken's views are a must read for opponents of No Child Left Behind, proponents of real school reform, and advocates of diverting wasteful federal military spending to rebuilding the infrastructure of public education.

Here are a couple of snippets from the CounterPunch post:

"The reform proposed by the Democratic Party, echoed by Obama, and practiced for the last 8 years by Arne Duncan as CEO (yes, CEO) of Chicago Public Schools include: a neoliberal, market-based approach to improving the education system, including the outsourcing and privatizing of public schools; militarization; and a severely narrowed curriculum." ...

"We could also ... get rid of No Child Left Behind, provide affordable housing in urban areas instead of blowing up Iraqi and Afghani homes, build libraries instead of bombs, construct community centers instead of tanks."

Not bad for a Portland Public Schools student teacher.  Well done, Ken!

(Thanks to PPS Equity's Steve Rawley for the heads up.)

Arne Duncan's charter schools

Obama's Secretary of Education designate built his reputation in Chicago on the success of his so-called "turnaround schools." Turnaround schools are "low performing" schools (kids with lousy test scores) which are shut down and then replaced with "different" schools, many of them charters. 

Under Arne Duncan, many of the new charter schools were handed over to private management firms, not necessarily a bad move if they served ALL kids in Chicago Public Schools equally.  Problem is, they don't.

In a letter to the chair of the House Committee on Education and labor, Julie Woestehoff of the Chicago school activist group, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), cautioned Rep, George Miller that charter schools with high test scores, in this case the Dodge Renaissance Academy, have an unfair advantage:

"The new school is essentially serving a completely different student body. It simply does not operate on a level playing field with other schools, and its results should be considered in that context."

At a Chicago School Board meeting honoring Arne Duncan as Obama's pick for Education Secretary, unhappy parents and teachers registered their complaints:

"Jesse Sharkey, a Senn High union delegate, said that after a fight at a charter school in March, 19 kids showed up at Senn with letters saying they had been 'dis-enrolled' from the school. Charters 'are allowed to kick people off the island,' Sharkey said. 'We're supposed to take all children. How is that fair?' "

Fair or not, in Chicago, "charters are allowed to create and enforce their own disciplinary code", thereby justifying a process that rids the schools of hard to educate students.

In a post to the PURE website, Julie Woestehoff writes that, essentially charter schools in Chicago are manipulating their enrollments  to improve their test scores.  The smaller the enrollment and the fewer the number of low income students, the better the scores.

Same goes for New York's high flying public charters.  EduWonkette claims that successful choice schools like the

"...Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics isn't serving a population typical of the South Bronx: only 18% qualified for free lunch, 0% were in full-time special education, .9% were in part-time special education, .9% were English Language Learners... ."

 ****************************

Closer to home, here's anecdotal evidence that Portland's charter schools are not above excluding students that they believe may be too difficult to educate.  It arrived as a comment to one of my earlier posts. 

Here are the salient remarks:

"My son [a child with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] went to Trillium Charter School for 5th grade the first year it opened... .  It was a difficult year and by the end they simply said they couldn't serve him anymore at Trillium, so we enrolled him at Beaumont Middle School for 6th grade, which was also a disaster in many
ways... . ...

"[After a couple of years at local area private schools,we] applied again at Trillium for 9th grade." ...

"The week before school started we received a letter from the director of Trillium that stated that our son could not be admitted because he was on an IEP (he was not!) and because he had attended so many different schools since his time at Trillium.  Basically, the director of Trillium was saying that they didn't want him, didn't want to deal with his OCD, and they came up with an excuse."...

"I'm very offended.  The charter is just like a private school where the director gets to decide who is enrolled or not based on their whim, and they are accountable to no one."

Take that for what it's worth.  I have no way of verifying the accuracy of the account. 

But the fact remains that charter schools in Portland serve far fewer poor and special needs students than traditional public neighborhood schools. 

Hopefully Barack Obama will keep that in mind as he and Arne Duncan forge a new public schools policy for the 21st Century, one based on equitable and truly democratic principles. 

Local school activist lambastes Teach for America

Everything DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee knows about improving school performance she learned from her three year stint as a Teach for America recruit.  Her formula for raising "student achievement" is a simple one:

Put a dedicated, hard-working teacher in every classroom and test scores will soar.  The achievement gap will gradually dwindle to insignificance. 

Forget about poverty.  In Rhee-world, in the Teach for America cosmos, there are no excuses.  Teachers just need to roll up their sleeves and work harder.  Those who don't share that zeal must be removed from the system, and the unions be damned.

Peter Campbell disagrees.  The local educational activist has written two long critiques of the Teach for America approach to school improvement.  He concludes that in the long run, and on a large scale, it just won't work.

In his first piece, Campbell takes dead aim at the underlying flaws in the Teach for America philosophy --good teachers can overcome all obstacles.  Not true, says Campbell:

"...success depends on teachers working much longer hours than they already do - while this might be reasonable to ask of young, ambitious, TFA teachers who are single, unmarried, and have no kids, it is not reasonable to ask this of older teachers who are married, have kids, and who must struggle in balancing work/life commitments."

Campbell says it simply won't work.  Such a commitment cannot be replicated on a large scale.  And because it "won't scale", he says,

"...the most it can possibly hope to achieve is modest, limited success in a certain number of schools populated with young, ambitious, 20-something TFA teachers."

Success by TFA standards, says Campbell, would mean that

"...becoming a teacher would not be all that different from entering a monastery, i.e., to become a teacher, you need to renounce all other connections to the world."

Another flaw in the TFA philosophy is that "academic success depends on students working much longer hours than they already do."  But what do they work on in those extended hours? 

If success is defined as higher test scores --that's how Michelle Rhee defines success-- it likely means that many of those extra hours of study are devoted to mastering skills in reading and math, the skills that students will encounter on those all important standardized tests.

In the second piece, Campbell writes that Teach for America may be inadvertently  influencing policy makers to think more "conservatively" about school reform.  In that sense, those who oppose No Child Left Behind and testing for accountability (and high stakes testing generally) may have something for fear from the perceived classroom success of TFA  recruits. 

More on that tomorrow.