Oregon economist: Fancy school don't boost student achievement

Patrick Emerson of the Oregon Economics Blog questions the educational value of the bond measure:

From academic literature we know that making schools fancier is not going to help student performance substantially other than perhaps attracting and keeping good students (peer effects are huge).

Oregonian letter: PPS needs to provide evidence that it can deliver results

Southwest Portland resident, Vanessa Wilkins, writes:

Voters and parents are tired of hearing about budget and program cuts and fearful of our poor academic results. We are desperate for answers and leadership. The school board has only one choice: to present real, evidence-based reforms and a compelling vision for the future of Portland Public Schools alongside the investments they are asking us to make.

If they can promise and produce educational results that make us proud, we will support them with our votes and our taxes.

Read the complete letter in the Oregonian.

Oregonian guest columnist: Can we trust PPS with all that money?

Oregonian guest columnist John Braestrup writes:

Portland voters are being asked to approve a huge bond measure this May. So we need to ask ourselves some questions to determine if the measure makes economic and educational sense.

Has Portland Public Schools told us that test scores, dropout rates and graduation rates will improve 20 percent if the measure is passed? Do we really need to spend money on every K-12 school? Isn't it really the junior and senior high schools that may need better labs and scientific equipment, not the elementary schools where the teacher, not the building, makes all the difference? Will the measure allow union and non-union contractors to bid equally so the money is well spent? Are there alternative means of raising money such as selling or leasing idle or underutilized properties that PPS owns? Can't PPS consolidate facilities, closing some schools and thereby reducing personnel overhead, maintenance and other operating costs, especially when district enrollment has steadily declined for the past 20 years?

These are only some of the questions we should be asking PPS.

Equally important is the matter of timing. Why didn't the district schedule its labor negotiations earlier so it could show progress in demanding and obtaining accountability by teachers, principals and the entire school system?

Citizens would be a lot more willing to pass the bond measure if PPS had shown its willingness to solve some of the core problems facing our schools.

Unrelated directly to the bond issue is the elephant in our living room -- the future unfunded costs of PERS. These costs will take away from every state function -- education, safety, roads, you name it. If PERS is not reformed, taxes in some form will have to rise, some businesses will likely look elsewhere to invest and many high-income individuals will leave, resulting in a stagnant Oregon economy with high unemployment.

Many voters believe government spending at all levels is out of control. The PPS measure is just another example of uncontrolled government spending.

Since our children started elementary school some 20 years ago, we've seen four or five PPS superintendents come and go, each one stating that he or she would change the system and with just a little more money everything would be fine. Yet there has been little improvement in student achievement. Oregon's status among the other states puts us in the bottom quarter, unable or unwilling to compete for the Obama administration's offer of federal grants.

I think voters should reject the upcoming bond measure as a means of forcing Portland Public Schools to achieve significant progress with the teachers union and then resurrect the measure a year or two later. Certainly a delay of one or two years is not going to change things dramatically. And if voters sense that real accountability has been established and progress has been made in the system, then maybe a better bond measure can be proposed and passed.

We're all for good schools and better pay for excellent teachers and principals, but they have to be accountable for turning out good students able to compete in the real world.

Source: Oregonian

Oregonian guest column: Save the schools but lose the house?

Oregonian guest columnist Eric Fruits writes:

As reported in The Oregonian, Portland school board members will consider asking voters in May to approve a new, higher local-option tax to fund school operations. This would be in addition to another new property tax heading to the May ballot to fund the first phase of the district's massive building program to "modernize" its schools.

The school district promotes the bonds as a modest increase in property taxes. In our neighborhood -- and many other neighborhoods -- homeowners are looking at annual increases in the $750 to $1,000 range. That's a steep increase for many of our residents, especially those struggling on fixed incomes and incomes decimated by the recent recession.

Even in the best of times, such huge property tax increases would be tough to choke down. But the recession hit Portland hard, and the foreclosure crisis has caught up with us. The number of Portland-area foreclosures has increased by almost 20 percent since last year. The increased tax burden the district hopes to impose will lead to even more Oregonians losing their homes. Recent research from the Kansas City Fed suggests that the proposed property tax increases may trigger 1,000 or more foreclosure filings.

At our last neighborhood association meeting, one of the older residents raised a question on the minds of many: "How do you expect those on fixed incomes to pay for the tax increases?" When faced with sudden and steep increases in housing costs, those on fixed incomes have a narrow range of options available to them. One option is to flee the city. Recent research published in the Journal of Urban Economics indicates that approximately 4,500 people age 50 and older may be driven out of Portland if voters approve the higher property taxes.

While the impacts seem staggering, they are also reasonable based on past experience. In 2003, when Multnomah County imposed a temporary income tax to support area schools, the county lost almost 7,000 residents. These new property taxes are much higher, virtually permanent, and can be avoided only by moving away.

As a father of children in Portland Public Schools, it's clear to me that the local option is the more reasonable of the two taxes. The district promises it will provide funding for teachers, textbooks and other things that immediately impact our children's learning. In contrast, not a single dollar of the modernization bond money will be used to shrink class sizes, acquire new learning materials or preserve educational programs.

We entered this recession with little in our rainy-day fund for schools. The local option can be a lifeline to see us through to better times. However, because so many Portland families are trying to weather their own financial storms, the Portland school board must withdraw the modernization bond from the ballot and shelve it until our economic sun starts shining again.

Source: Oregonian

School Board seeks public input on local option property tax increase

The Portland School Board is inviting testimony as it considers placing a local operating levy on the ballot in May to provide additional funding to protect PPS schools from expected state budget cuts.

The board invites comments on the idea at several upcoming meetings:

• Wednesday, Jan. 12 at 4 p.m., at a public hearing before the school board’s work session on budget matters.
• Wednesday, Jan. 19 at 5 p.m., at the board’s Finance, Audit and Operations Committee meeting.

All meetings are in the Blanchard Education Service Center, 501 N. Dixon, and will be streamed live on the PPS website and broadcast on TV28. Those wishing to speak may sign up in person before the meetings, or in advance by contacting the board office at schoolboard@pps.k12.or.us or by calling 503-916-3741.

Oregonian guest column: Modernization bond will provide buildings without teachers

Oregonian guest columnist Lainie Block Wilker writes:

As a concerned parent and committed advocate for public education, I urge Portland Public Schools to adopt a more modest facilities bond measure in conjunction with renewal of the local-option levy to assure adequate funding for classroom operations. A facilities bond should be prudently designed to serve the most students, prioritize the worst buildings and fairly allocate scarce resources. While our school buildings are certainly in awful condition, significant future budget shortfalls may force a choice between buildings or teachers. And updated buildings will not serve our students if PPS cannot provide a quality education within them.

Our school buildings are in dire need of repair. Student learning environments are compromised by leaking roofs, broken heating systems, outdated safety and security systems, and inadequate or nonexistent science and technology labs. My daughters attend Laurelhurst School, one of the worst physical facilities in the district. Its dilapidated building is crammed to 40 percent overcapacity, to the point that the district can't offer some educational programs because of space constraints. While I fully appreciate the need for a capital bond to update facilities across the district, it needs to be in conjunction with assuring adequate operational funding.

Laurelhurst's principal has braced parents for devastating cuts. The district has a projected $40 million budget shortfall, with another $38 million in local-option funding expiring in mid-2012 (the equivalent of about 800 teaching positions). It's hard to believe our classrooms could get worse.

My first-grader has 28 kids in her classroom, including kids with behavioral issues and special needs. Much of the day is spent on crowd control rather than learning to read. In Portland, our kids go to school three weeks less than students in other states. PE is down to once a week, and the district has steadily hacked away at enrichment programs. While I would love to see updated facilities, most parents are more concerned about having stable funding inside our classrooms.

In a tough economy, an expensive bond measure could displace public willingness to support classroom operations and force a choice between buildings or teachers and programs. PPS cannot use a capital bond to fund operations, but the bond could be prudently scaled back and put on the ballot with renewal of a local-option levy for classroom operations. A bond without adequate operational support is a tough sell to parents who are worried about huge class sizes and lack of programming.

The current proposal doesn't meet the school board's own criteria of serving the most students, prioritizing high-need buildings and geographic diversity. In particular, the proposal to spend $50 million on a new Jefferson High School campus serving less than 400 students at a perpetually failing school seems financially irresponsible. Both Franklin and Grant high schools have worse facility condition indexes, serve more students and provide more geographic diversity to generate broader public support.

The $50 million gamble on Jefferson is symptomatic of a spare-no-expense approach to struggling schools, while the majority of students receive barely adequate educational funding. For example, Grant has the lowest per-student funding ($4,432), worst FTE ratio (20.48:1), and largest class sizes (30.1) of any PPS high school. Jefferson receives twice as much funding per student, and Roosevelt nearly three times as much with grant money. PPS concentrates a huge amount of scarce resources on bringing up the bottom and closing the achievement gap, while providing little academic support once a student meets academic benchmarks. That's not a formula for sustaining strong community schools that are key to our city's economic vitality and livability, or for educating a skilled workforce to drive our regional economy.

This bond measure is being pitched to Portland's business community as a way to develop a skilled workforce. The reality is that facilities alone will not help our kids without adequate support for academic instruction. At Grant, many kids can't even get into oversubscribed classes, and 56 kids are packed into calculus class. The district has hacked away at advanced programming, arts that foster creative decision-making and foreign languages that enable kids to compete in a global economy. The bond measure might build gyms without PE teachers, auditoriums with no music or art assemblies, state-of-the art science and technology labs without teachers.

I'd like to support the bond. But the proposal needs to be financially responsible. It needs to serve the most students. It needs to prioritize the worst facilities.

And, most importantly, it needs to be done in conjunction with measures to assure sufficient classroom funding equitably distributed across all schools--funding that will allow students to excel, not just to pass.

Source: Oregonian

Oregonian columnist: Tone down the modernization bond

Dave Lister writes:

When I attended a city budget forum in the cafeteria of Portland's Cleveland High School a few years ago, I was saddened by how run down my old alma mater had become. The floors were worn, the paint was shoddy and the restroom, which I recall used to smell of urinal stones, now simply smelled of urine. Clearly, the old girl had been neglected for far too long. But despite the obvious need, I can't support the half-billion dollar modernization bond measure proposed by Portland Public Schools. It's too ambitious, too uncertain, too expensive.

Many of our local leaders say investing in education is the long-term solution to our poor economy. They insist that top-flight companies are not locating here because we lack the educated workforce such companies require.

When you point out the number of people with B.A.s, MBAs and even Ph.D.s who are serving up coffee drinks or waiting tables in Portland, they respond that those graduates don't have degrees in the fields desired by perspective employers.

I'm not willing to concede that point, but even if I were, I remember the early days of the space race and the national push for engineers. By the time ambitious young people completed their four-year programs after heeding that call, there was a glut of engineers but teachers and nurses were in short supply. And even if we could develop that workforce more quickly, no one can really say what the jobs are supposed to be. Green somehow. That's about it.

We're told that if we make this investment in our public schools, we'll see a dramatic improvement in our students' academic performance and better graduation rates. We're told that a better learning environment will lead to better learning. That makes sense, up to a point, but it doesn't necessarily lead to better teaching or better parental involvement.

Public education should be government's highest priority after public safety. Despite this, we continue to divert huge amounts of taxpayer money through urban renewal schemes for light rail and transit-oriented development. And just as with Portland's fire trucks or TriMet's buses, taxpayers are asked to go to the well to fund the basics. Many taxpayers are skeptical that the bond, if approved, will even meet the goals of the modernization plan.

They have good reason to be skeptical. In the last decade we've seen numerous examples of massive public investments either failing to meet the stated goals or the original estimates being so far off that the project costs quadrupled or quintupled. Portland's aerial tram morphed from a cocktail napkin design estimate of $18 million to $60 million. Portland has wasted more than $60 million in two botched computer system implementations. The state Department of Motor Vehicles had a similar fiasco. The most recent example, exposed by The Oregonian as, if not outright fraud, then blatant misrepresentation by the project's managers, is the wireless interoperability network. Hundreds of millions of dollars were sucked into a black hole with hundreds of millions still needed for completion. Based on history, why wouldn't we assume that our half-billion invested in schools will really accomplish only a quarter of what's promised?

Here's what I'd go for: Tone it down and narrow the scope. Go ahead and replace those aging boilers and weatherize the buildings. Catch up on some of the deferred maintenance. Fix up the science labs. Offer us a bond that is less ambitions and less expensive. Meet the stated goals and then show us the improved academic performance. If the district can show us a real return on a smaller investment, then maybe, just maybe, it can begin to regain our trust.

Source: Oregonian

Cleveland students question modernization bonds

From the Oregonian:

Still, many Cleveland students say their school seems in need of minor repairs and upgrades, not a wholesale renovation. The idea that they would have to spend a year or two being bused to the former Marshall High School while Cleveland is gutted and improved looms as a greater horror, they say, than the chilly or overheated classrooms, the grungy ceiling tiles and the outdated computers, photography studio and science labs.

"Nothing leaps out as bad or needing to be fixed," says sophomore Sasha Moore, who says his chemistry class has the equipment it needed and his P.E. class doesn't have any true "sardine moments."

Portland's senior citizens cannot afford PPS modernization bonds

From a letter to the Oregonian (December 8, 2010):

I don't know about you, but around here we have what's called a budget. We also have needs, and sometimes they come in multiples. It adds up, and it all needs to be addressed, but since we aren't the school board, we don't have the wherewithal to tackle it all at one time. We prioritize, we schedule and we take on each need in turn.

Why is it that our Portland Public Schools can't do the same thing? Yes, everything they've asked for needs to be done, to the tune of $548 million. Is there a reason they can't fix our schools in steps, the way normal people with normal financial situations do?

I realize that $2 per $1,000 doesn't sound like a lot. But a quick look at our property tax statement shows we're already paying $575 a year, just for "bond issues and misc. taxes." Adding that $2 would bump us up to $1,463, and that's before adding in the bond issues passed in the recent election. For this two-senior household, it's a lot, and I don't think we're unusual.

Let me suggest that PPS manage its needs the way actual people do: in steps. Give us a bond for the first three critical needs, take care of them, retire that bond, then go on to the next. The district might find a more receptive group of voters.

Modernization bonds alone will raise property taxes by 9 percent

From the Oregonian:

[A]ccording to a detailed analysis by June Tilgner, applications manager for the Multnomah County assessor's office, 98 percent of homeowners in the Portland School District, including all who live within Portland city limits, would see their property tax bill rise an additional 9 percent if voters approve the bond measure.

We can't tax our way into construction prosperity

From the Daily Journal of Commerce:

John Killin, executive director of Associated Builders and Contractors of Oregon, said that as a homeowner he’s also concerned about what would be a large tax in a struggling economy.

"That’s a big chunk of change," Killin said. "And I don't think we can tax our way into construction prosperity. The $548 million is a ton of money, and it would help, but if you look at that proposed mall in Oregon City (a 650,000-square-foot project called The Rivers)--that's a big chunk of change for the industry too, and it doesn't involve taxing anybody."

Half of district voters think Portland Public Schools can't manage money

From the Oregonian:

[A] poll commissioned by the school district and conducted in September found ... only 3 percent of those polled said the district does an excellent job of money management while half gave the district negative marks for watching its finances.