PPS hastily approves teacher contract giving raises to thousands of teachers and firing hundreds of teachers

As reported in the Oregonian, the despite criticism from parents and one school board member's adamant opposition, the Portland school board approved a new teacher contract that will bring the district's 3,200 teachers slight pay raises and result in hundreds of pink slips.

The agreement between the union and the board was reached a light speed and behind closed doors. The Oregonian explains the reason for the super quick hush-hush agreement:

The quick approval of the contract, reached less than a week ago and prepared entirely out of public view clears the school board's agenda to work on securing voter approval of a record tax increase on the May ballot.

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.

Even with Sam Adams and Jeff Cogen pushing for higher taxes, only half of likely Democratic voters favor largest property tax increase in Oregon history

The Oregonian's Steve Duin reports on Portland Public Schools megabucks campaign to send property taxes through the roof:

The three girls sit in the middle of the maelstrom Monday night, the Hansen soda cans empty, the pizza slice forgotten, pounding numbers into cell phones, oblivious to the din about them.

A half hour earlier, Mayor Sam Adams rolled through the room like a wisp of smoke, leaving Jeff Cogen, the Multnomah County chairman, to frame the challenge posed by the Portland Public Schools' $548 million bond measure.

Even with political heavyweights calling the shots and kids straight out of Oliver Twist, the developer funded campaign is challenged to find support even among the strongest supporters of public education.

After an hour, the girls tally up the results. They made 146 calls and connected with a grand total of 30 voters. Sixteen of the 30 said they'd support the $548 million bond measure and the local option levy. Seven were negative and seven undecided.

And these are the likely voters, the motivated voters, the Democrats?

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

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