The Superintendent Who Listens, part three:
A Tarnished Star
Portland Public Schools bills itself as "the urban district that works." The big question hanging over the district these days is, Can it hold on to that distinction? Can Ben Canada and his team put the 55,000-student district back on track for the new century?
The district’s longstanding status as a star of city education is more than a little tarnished these days. A decade-long funding crisis forced the Northwest’s largest district to switch from a paring knife to a machete as it hacked away at programs and services year after year. The "fat" and "frills" some taxpayers complain about were carved off long ago. These days, the district is reduced to "lopping off limbs," in the words of one administrator.
After voters passed Measure 5 in 1990—the ballot measure that shrunk Portland schools’ main funding source by limiting property tax rates—the district first whittled away at the central office. Dozens of midlevel administrators got pink slips. By 1996, the cuts reached the classroom. So far, 450 teaching slots have been axed.
Today, most Portland schools are running bare-bones programs bereft of art, music, and drama, with deep cutbacks in PE and world languages. Classes are big. Choices are few. Science textbooks are 10 years out of date—a fact that Saxton calls "criminal."
But this is where Portland’s story veers away from the history of other cities. Unwilling to watch their topnotch schools—long a big point of pride for Portlanders—go the way of St. Louis or Detroit, the community has stepped up.
The city council has kicked in funds ($40 million over six years) to keep the Portland Public Schools and four smaller urban districts floating. Parents are ponying up thousands of dollars in donations to keep class sizes from bloating. Some affluent families donate as much as $200 a month to 25 individual school foundations so that schools like top-performing Lincoln High can buy art history textbooks to replace blurry photocopies of Michelangelo’s "David" and Picasso’s "Guernica." The donations are shared with other schools, as well. Three years ago, concerned parents and community members created the Portland Public Schools Foundation, which so far has raised $6 million for the district.
This wellspring of energy and money on behalf of schools is tied to the Northwest’s ferocious commitment to livability, many observers say. The same maverick spirit that spawned Oregon’s famed beach and bottle bills—progressive laws aimed at saving the state’s unspoiled landscape—may be what separates Portlanders from residents of other big cities. People here don’t just watch things crumble around them. They act.
"We have an incredible base of parental and community support that’s missing in a lot of places," says Board Chair Saxton, an attorney and father of a son attending Lincoln. "I think we see a community saying, ‘We refuse to accept the loss of our schools. We’re not going to accept failure.’"
In Portland, Canada sees a rare "sense of pride in the urban core," hand-in-hand with a get-involved ethic. "In the Pacific Northwest, people want to be engaged in the decisionmaking process," he says. "They’re not going to just sit back and let a superintendent or a board dictate what is going to happen."
Dictating, however, is just what the district tried to do in pre-Canada days, critics charge. Cynthia Guyer, whose activism as a concerned parent led to her current position as Executive Director of the Portland Public Schools Foundation, describes a district that was insular, top-down, and rigid.
"A lot of people have felt like the doors have not been opened to their aspirations for a better education for kids," she says from her eastside office overlooking downtown. Even district employees, she says, describe a culture that was "very resistant to being entrepreneurial, to building partnerships, to believing in change."
Sue Hagmeier, one of the longest-serving members of the school board, has been on both sides of the fence: insider and critic. She got involved years ago as a mom who was unhappy with her gifted daughter’s schooling. "There just was not a customer-service ethic in the district at that time," she recalls.
Now, she says, "I think we’re much more open to the community and to parents. I think we’re a lot more willing to adjust programs to kids instead of (just saying), ‘Eat it and shut up’—which the district was kind of famous for at one time."
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