Terry Olson's blog

Since the Portland Schools Foundation is a big fish in Portland's educational pond, it's big news when PSF picks a high powered charter school proponent from Chicago as its new executive director.

Big news, but not necessarily good news.

The choice of Connie Van Brunt sets a disturbing precedent --the apparent need to look nationally for educational leaders. Don't think that the Portland School Board won't be influenced by PSF's decision. David Wynde, remember, was a PSF board member before his school board stint, and PSF has been a staunch supporter of Vicki Phillips and school closures.
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I've argued* that Leon Dudley should never have been entrusted with the principalship of Jefferson High School in the first place. Now, more than halfway through the school year, Dudley has provided ample evidence that he's ill-suited to lead any school, let alone Jefferson.

So when will Vicki Phillips admit her mistake and fire Leon Dudley?

Rumors about Dudley's incompetence have been rampant, but Jennifer Anderson's piece in yesterday's Tribune seems to verify much of what I've heard. Anderson reports that
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Portland School Board co-chair David Wynde has vehemently denied that the Portland Public School District's affiliation with the Broad Foundation is indicative of what some see as the district's rightward tilt toward privatization. Neither the Broad Foundation nor its founder, Eli Broad, he claimed, are conservative or particularly right-leaning.

I wonder then how Wynde would characterize the Hoover Institution and its schools publication, Education Next, if not right-wing and pro-school privatization.

Back in 2001, Hoover fellow Paul Hill wrote an article in Education Next praising the Houston Independent School District for its efforts to raise student achievement. (The so-called "Texas education miracle", the model for No Child Left behind, was later exposed as a massive fraud of manipulated test score results and phony dropout rates.) In his article, Hill singles out as heroes of school reform "...community activists like Don McAdams and Kathy Mincberg, and Rod Paige."
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You gotta love this from today's O about the school district's decision to limit high school transfers:

" 'What are we going to do?' [Director of Secondary Education Steve] Olczak said. 'Where are we going to put these kids?' "

Where indeed?

As I wrote yesterday, there are only so many "good" schools available to high school students in Portland --"good" meaning mainly white and solidly middle class, with good test scores, which are demographically driven and therefore virtually synonymous with white and middle class.
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I've said it before (many times), but it bears repeating:

The idea that you can judge the so-called "performance" of a school based on limited data from student achievement tests is, for want of a better word, silly!

It bears repeating because of what an Oregonian editorial said yesterday morning about the Supreme Court revisiting the issue of race in education:

"The Seattle and Kentucky districts have much in common. Both have an insufficient number of "good" schools, typically in white, affluent neighborhoods. Both districts were sued by white parents who say their children lost their rightful place in those good schools to minority children."
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Back in 2003, battle lines quickly formed when Rieke Elementary was threatened with closure. You'd think the district would have learned its lesson from the uproar occasioned by even a "hint" of closure. But apparently not.

Based on the thrashing the school board took last night from a superbly well-organized group of Rieke parents, one would expect never again to hear the words "Rieke" and "closure" juxtaposed in district planning documents. If the hearing at Wilson had been a prize fight, it would have been stopped in the first round.

Former candidate for school board Jon Jacobs' opening remarks followed by Jeff Dobbins' devastating power point deconstruction of the district's rationale for closing Rieke, had the board --and Superintendent Vicki Phillips-- reeling from the outset. Dobbins, a Harvard educated courtroom lawyer, convincingly demonstrated that the only possible reason the district could cite for shutting down Rieke is --- it's too small!
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At least it roused me from the stupor inflicted by the oh-so-polite tedium of Monday's school board meeting.

Doug Morgan's praise of the Jefferson cluster reconfiguration implementation as a "Thousand Points of Light" immediately caught my attention. His choice of words may have been inadvertent. On the other hand, perhaps the use of that phrase was a Freudian slip -- providing a revealing glimpse into the mind of the man most likely to vote in favor of Vicki Phillips' school closures proposal come May 1.

Recall that the phrase was popularized in George H.W. Bush's inaugural address in 1989:
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