Jefferson High School: After years of failed reforms the only solution for PPS is more money

Portland's Jefferson High School has suffered through 40 years of reforms, realignments, and overhauls.  With every change, more and more students flee the failing school. As the Oregonian reports:

Wholesale reinvention is not new for Jefferson. Since the late 1990s, the school has been subjected to a constant churn of reforms and changes, many of them ill-conceived, poorly supported or both. As principals came and went, sometimes several in a single year, the faculty has been upended and the school remade into subject-area academies, then grade-level academies, then back to a unified school.

Portland Public Schools latest plan is to spend tens of millions of dollars to rebuild Jefferson as a mini college.  Remember, this is the same school where more than half the students do not meet state standards for math or science.

And now they're ready to go to college? Early?

The Oregonian reports that interest in the program is weak:

Although nearly 400 eighth-graders live nearby and have limited choices apart from Jefferson, however, the school has not been swamped with interest.

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: 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