School Board

School Board Testimony 11/5/07

Hello: My name is Nancy Smith. I have children at Woodlawn and Jefferson, and am President of the Jefferson PTSA:

Parents want skilled, experienced food service workers and custodians, and want them paid appropriately. The District’s proposed pay cut is anti-worker, and would damage the effort to keep living wage jobs in Portland. Lower wages mean higher turnover, resulting in custodians who don't develop relationships with students, teachers and staff. There is no conflict between paying a solid living wage and having an effective operation -- in fact, those go hand in hand.
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The PPS school board still neglects to take action that would address many policies that have resulted in a classist and racist school system in Portland. Not surprisingly, the so-called "achievement gap" also persists. Here is an excerpt from an article by Paul C. Gorski of Teaching Tolerance, which should be read by everyone in positions of power and influence over PPS (school board members, superintendent, Portland Schools Foundation board members and staff, and certain other "community leaders" who have imposed or allowed top-down reforms on low-income schools):

"It's all too easy, for even the most well-meaning of us, to help perpetuate classism by buying into that mindset, implementing activities and strategies for "working with parents in poverty" or "teaching students in poverty" that, however subtly, suggest we must fix poor people instead of eliminating the inequities that oppress them.
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Portland Public Schools are at a turning point. In many ways, the Portland District seems near collapse. Glaring funding inequities plague the poorest neighborhoods of Portland, with public schools closed and merged and buildings leased out to the highest parochial school bidder. Schools are segregated economically and racially — especially in middle and high schools — to a degree disproportionate to neighborhood populations.

We need a New Deal for PPS. I have more exploration of the problem and suggestions for a solution on my
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I posted the other day about the school board "survey". I've thought about this a little bit, and written some analysis of it on my blog.

Basically, the board is not seeking public involvement here, but engaging in marketing. It's essentially a push poll, in which market-based reform buzzwords are dangled as bait to solicit "support" for an agenda in a scientifically meaningless arena. I urge you to take the survey with a sharp eye out for their code words and agenda.

or Neoliberalism, Portland Public Schools, and the Commodification of Human Life

(I've posted the uncensored version of this essay on my blog.)

It's been nearly four months since I wrote Part 1 of this essay, so I figured it's time to let Part 2 out of my brain.

In Part 1 I focussed on Oregon's revenue crisis, the result of a libertarian assault on the state's ability to raise revenue in the '90s. When discussing the state of education in Portland, one cannot overemphasize the dire effect revenue loss has had on our schools. Portland went from 15th in the nation in spending per pupil in the early '90s to 31st in '04-'05. We now have the fourth-worst student-teacher ratio in the nation.
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With the next board, and the next superintendent, we need to get back to a more community-centered model for district management. I have been talking a lot in this campaign about increasing the communications out from the board to the community -- they do not have a good track record at explaining what they want to do, why they want to do it, and how their decision-making processes work.

I also want to challenge this district to re-define school "success". Tests are great, but when we tackle issues like closing schools based on how "successful" they are, we need a fuller, more well-rounded approach to determining success. Closely tied to this is my belief that no one educational approach can possibly work in every situation, and that the "wisdom in the buildings" must be genuinely valued.
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Oregonian, Editorial, 4/27/07

Adkins for school board

She's a Yale-educated market research analyst, longtime schools activist and co-founder of a neighborhood group formed in 2005 to oppose school closures.

She says she's prepared to tackle the excess capacity in high schools, where operations costs are the highest. She also makes a good case that the district can boost its enrollment by improving school quality, mending relationships with parents, marketing the district's many strengths and working with other agencies on affordable housing.

http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial...
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