Send Charter Commission back to drawing board, broaden mandate to include consolidation

Mayor Tom Potter laid out ambitious new plans yesterday to overhaul the Portland school system by giving principals more power and autonomy, requiring teachers to undergo rigorous review in order to gain tenure and revising the school financing system that has allowed more experienced teacher to cluster in affluent schools.

If only.

Substitute “Mayor Michael Bloomberg” for “Mayor Tom Potter” and “New York City” for “Portland” and you have the lede to a New York Times story earlier this week.

Using his authority to run the schools, Bloomberg announced sweeping school changes in his annual address to New York City Council on Wednesday.

In Portland on Thursday, the Portland City Council, which includes Potter as a "first among equals," reviewed Charter Revision Commission recommendations that said not one word about consolidating city and school governance in Portland.

Obviously the destinies of the schools and the city are intertwined, but in Portland the school district and the City are on entirely different pages in terms of governance and policy.

And the pages aren’t even in the same book. Portland Public Schools and City Officials rarely talk to each other. They aren’t required to. Very frequently they don't want to because of friction over turf and money.

But why should Portland look to New York for guidances? For starters, The Big Apple obviously has some similar problems. Do Bloomberg’s concerns about low school funding and school inequity sound familiar? (I'll leave it to others to comment on how rigorous the review of tenured teachers is.)

The Charter Review Commission clearly needs to expand its mandate to include possible city/schools consolidation. The commissioners could start by talking to officials in cities where city and school governance is one and speaks with one voice, as it did Wednesday in New York City.

Charter review omits neighborhoods, vision

I can't attend Thursday's Portland City Council deliberations on the Charter Review Commission's recommendations at 2 p.m. at City Hall, so I've sent my comments.

I have serious concerns about both the commission's process and its recommendations. Here's what I've written the City Council...

Commissioners:

I'm writing because I have concerns that the process followed by the Charter Review Commission suffers from serious disconnects.

Specifically, the commission makes no recommendations regarding the role the City wants neighborhoods to play. As the mayor has said many times, the City can't do its job alone. It needs the energy found in the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods should be partners in the business of the city, and yet the Commission's recommendations utterly fail to acknowledge or formalize that partnership.

Moreover, there seems to be an inexplicable disconnect between visionPDX and the Commission's deliberations. As one who has read hundreds of visionPDX responses, I believe ignoring the concerns expressed in the responses is a travesty.

Consider just one area, education. Respondents were nearly unanimous about the need to bring equity to our schools, and yet their concerns were being directed to the City, NOT the School District. There is obvious need to tear down the walls between these two governments, if not actually combine them. The commission is silent on the question of consolidation or structures for improved communications.

I urge you to slow down the Charter Review process so that neighborhoods and visionPDX become part of the commission's deliberations and recommendations.

Sincerely,

Rick Seifert
Hillsdale Neighborhood