Oregon Political Updates

By Jesse Cornett of Portland, Oregon. Jesse is a candidate for Portland City Council.

Today is Ben Westlund Day in my household. However, one day will never suffice to pay respects to this Oregon statesman.

I grew to admire Ben Westlund, the Republican, during the 2001 Legislative Session when he appeared to be the only House Republican with compassion in a House full of slash-and-burn-I’m-only-going-to-be-here-for-6-years conservatives.

In 2003, when Westlund returned from the hospital in the middle of the longest session in Oregon’s history, he gave a speech that still rivets those of us who remember it.

He switched parties in 2006 to run for Governor, but citing his desire to be more than a spoiler, Westlund ended his race before his name appeared on a ballot. In an attempt to prevent repeats of the type of antics that Republicans tried to use in 2004 to make sure that Ralph Nader got on the ballot, the Legislature passed a measure, which unintentionally made it harder for anyone not affiliated with a major party to gain access to the ballot.

Blue Oregon readers will remember that I ran a last-minute campaign for the State Senate in 2006. During that time, it came to my attention that until I ran in 2006, Ben didn’t really know who I was. But that all changed as I sought to become his colleague. At various events, Ben would come and chat me up.

While I enjoyed my discussions with him, I was skeptical thinking he was only being nice to me because he wanted my support for his race for Governor, which was never going to happen. Time after time he’d chat with me and never did he mention his race, much less my support.

The morning after that disappointing election, I got a call – a message I retrieved later. It was a nice and long message from Ben, who referred to himself only as Uncle Bennie and asked me to do the same. I lost and a few folks called, mainly those who’d been supporters and active in the campaign. Uncle Bennie was neither and his call gave me a great reason to smile.

Ashley Henry asked the question in her post this week: what would Ben want us to do? I don’t know. I didn’t know him quite that well. But sign me up and let’s go.

Down the trail, Ben.

By Tony Crawford of Canby, Oregon. Tony is a 30-year classroom teacher. He is currently at Ackerman Middle School in Canby.

The purpose of the Oregon Education Association is to assure a quality public education for every student in Oregon by providing a strong, positive voice for school employees. This is the mission statement of OEA and one that reflects the first interest of members, such as me, pursuing what is best for my students. As a classroom teacher, my students come first. As a member of OEA, I believe what is good for Oregon’s educators is good for Oregon’s students.

For these reasons I am excited to have witnessed OEA’s endorsement of Bill Bradbury for Governor of Oregon. Bill Bradbury proves to be the true “Education Candidate.” Earning the OSEA and AFT endorsements on the same weekend certainly reinforce this message. Bradbury’s call to fully fund the Quality Education Model is a campaign that the education community in Oregon has been waiting years to hear. Yes, in the schools and classrooms of our state we are in need of optimism. We are tired of listening to excuses. Bill Bradbury’s plan to fund QEM will deliver the quality of education my students deserve.

As a delegate to the OEA / PIE Convention, I was pleased with the democratic and transparent process used to consider, evaluate, and eventually choose those candidates for office that will best support public education - and the students in my classroom. The Convention, however, was only the icing on the cake.

In the weeks and months before the convention many of the candidates met with groups of educators across the state to discuss the issues important to us. Bill Bradbury was strong in this effort. Bradbury traveled the education road show to not only detail his plan to support Oregon’s schools, but to also be a good listener. A candidate for governor who engages teachers and support professionals individually and in small groups to learn from us certainly earns our respect.

The top priority of the Oregon Education Association is to ensure that all students in Oregon receive a quality education. To meet this goal, OEA will pursue adequate and stable funding for public education. Our goal statement suggests that endorsing Bill Bradbury for Governor is a natural conclusion. A conclusion that best serves the interests of my students.

Warning: This post is really long. Only read if you’re obsessed with K-12 policy and/or are especially concerned with OEA / Kitzhaber relations.

In 2008, the Oregon Education Association and John Kitzhaber were among my more important supporters. (Heck, all of them were important! - but you know what I mean.) This last weekend, I went to Eugene to try to get my friends at OEA to endorse my friend John. I failed; they endorsed Bill Bradbury.

I don’t think OEA’s endorsement changes the dynamic of the race. In 2008, it went a long way toward establishing me as a real threat to win. But we had already surprised some people with our underdog effort; in fund-raising, for example, as a first-time candidate, I raised $500,000 in 2007.  Bill Bradbury, by contrast, has not been as strong as might have been expected; for example, after over 20 years as a public figure, he raised $187,000 in 2009.  And Jeff Merkley and I were both unknowns, tied in the polls (with huge undecided) most of the way; now, with both candidates well-known, John claims to have a 34-point lead, and Bill hasn’t offered up his own poll disproving that. And, of course, I wound up losing anyway. Kitzhaber is going to win the nomination.

But as a critical friend of John Kitzhaber, I hope he doesn’t draw the wrong lesson from Saturday’s result. The easy, self-justifying way for John to look at the result would be this: “Bill gave them a misleading, crowd-pleasing message, saying he could raise $2 billion by eliminating unnamed tax breaks. I gave them a challenging message that made them uncomfortable, saying the state budget for education has to be based in part on performance, rewarding districts for doing the right thing.  They’re scared of anything with the word ‘performance’ in it, so crowd-pleasing and misleading beat challenging and uncomfortable. I’m going to win the nomination anyway, and anyway, I’d rather be right than Governor, so I’m not going to worry about it very much.” 

It’s true that Bill gave OEA a crowd-pleasing, misleading message. Having read the State Tax Expenditure Book very carefully on numerous occasions, I can say, and have said, that Bill’s saying that we can find $2 billion by going through the tax expenditure book is just wrong – unless, that is, he plans to extend the property tax to intangible assets. (More on that in a future post.)  

But John needs to understand, really understand, why OEA members are worried about  ‘budgeting for performance.’ The fact is that it’s difficult to come up with good metrics for measuring ‘performance’ in education – at the teacher, school, or district level – and even more difficult to figure out how to improve performance.  Educators know that. So when you talk about using the budget process to improve performance, they have two questions: (1) What does that mean? And (2) How? 

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep on trying to find fair ways to measure and real ways to improve schools. To his credit, John told OEA he needed their help in developing the metrics and the policies involved in 'budgeting for performance.' And John is right that if we are going to sell the voters on giving more money to education, we have to be able to tell them some version of: ‘We’re taking care to spend the money on stuff that works.’ I think he’s even right that it’s not clear that the 10-year-old Quality Education Model is the be-all end-all of education policy.

But this is awfully hard stuff – as this New York Times article shows.  If you’re interested in education policy, I’d suggest reading the whole thing. And I certainly suggest that John read the whole thing.  

The article is about a guy named Lemov who is looking at data that seems to show that “who the teacher is” is (when you adjust for demographics etc.) an extremely important factor in how much children learn: perhaps more important than class size.  Lemov has been going around looking at what unusually successful teachers do, and trying to develop a “taxonomy of good teaching” – a list of dozens of recommendations.

As the article says, we don’t know yet if this ‘taxonomy of teaching’ will make sense in practice: “while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof. The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal …” And the article notes that some pretty serious people believe “that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.”

But what’s really interesting about the article, at least to me, is that Lemov started out with a charter-school, merit-pay, reward-performance perspective and, as he learned more, began to doubt it. Here are pieces of the article:

[One day Lemov] made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on …

Incentives are intuitively appealing: if a teacher could make real money, maybe more people would choose teaching over finance or engineering or law, expanding the labor pool. And no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom. Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning.

Lemov spent his early career putting his faith in market forces, building accountability systems meant to reward high-performing charter schools and force the lower-performing ones to either improve or go out of business. The incentives did shock some schools into recognizing their shortcomings. But most of them were like the one in Syracuse: they knew they had to change, but they didn’t know how. “There was an implementation gap,” Lemov told me. “Incentives by themselves were not going to be enough.” Lemov calls this the Edison Parable, after the for-profit company Edison Schools, which in the 1990s tried to create a group of accountable schools but ultimately failed to outperform even the troubled Cleveland public schools …

That’s the main reason OEA members worry about words like “performance”: It’s not as easy as saying “get better,” because we don’t have a MapQuest to betterness.  A lot of people are trying hard, and not doing anything that seems obviously ‘wrong,’ but by conventional measures they seem to be ‘failing.’ And I really think it’s tougher than health care, where it seems that there are a lot of procedures and drugs that researchers know are of limited effectiveness, and less cost-effective than other alternatives, but which are used anyway because of shrewd advertising and messed-up financial incentives in medicine.

I outlined my own views on what the State should be doing on education in this space a few months ago, as follows:

To a great extent, test scores don’t do a heck of a lot more than reflect the demographics of the district or school in question.  But there are occasional outliers. There are some places and subjects – like Lebanon Elementary in math – which stand out; where the teachers and students are beating the odds.  A major mission of the Department of Education should be to study those places, find out what they’re doing, figure out if it’s real (sometimes test scores are a kind of mirage), figure out if it’s replicable, and let other schools and districts know what’s going on in those schools. I’m not talking about mandates, I’m not talking one-size-fits-all; I’m not saying we can expect every district to produce miracles; I’m talking about doing some research and distributing the results.

I still think that. John might object that that’s not going to be enough to convince the voters we’re spending education money on ‘what works’: that there has to be a budget hook of some kind. He might be right. Maybe we can somehow condition some money on districts somehow demonstrating that they really, really looked at what the outliers were doing and really, really tried some of it out. (Emphasis on the ‘somehow’ – I admit that I don’t know exactly how that would work.) 

What’s ironic about this situation is that John – policy-wonk, apolitical John – is quite right about the politics: voters want assurance that we’re spending the money on the right stuff. OEA members are right about the policy problem: It’s not very clear what the right stuff is. If John is to be a successful Governor, the two of them are going to have to work hard, together, to make good politics and good policy in education. 

By Jon Bartholomew of Portland, Oregon. Jon is a policy advocate for OSPIRG.

It’s been about a year and a half since the crash of the global financial system that was brought on by deregulation and what have we done to prevent the next crash?

No significant financial system reforms have yet been enacted that will help consumers trust they aren’t being victimized by their banks and lenders. No significant reforms have been enacted that will stabilize the housing market. No significant reforms have been enacted that will ensure more stability of our entire economic system.

And for the last couple of weeks, Senator Dodd, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee has been trying to negotiate a bipartisan compromise that could water down proposed reforms until they are near meaningless. This is not what the American public needs or wants. In polling done just last month by Pew, Americans overwhelmingly support stricter regulations of financial institutions.

This is why I am pleased to see our Oregon Senator Merkley standing up for tough reforms and introducing a bill with Sen. Levin to curb risky trading by banks. This is exactly what we need – toughening up, not watering down of financial reforms. We should thank Sen. Merkley and then go further to call for Congress to beef up financial reform proposals.

The timing is critical. There are new reports that Sen. Dodd is going to back off his effort to get a bipartisan compromise, and propose something stronger. Now is the time to let all of our members of Congress know that we want consumers and taxpayers put before big banks. Check irresponsible financial practices with new rules and stronger, independent enforcement. We need a new strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

We also need to cover all players and transactions. Rein in hedge funds and reckless investments that escaped regulations and traded without oversight on “shadow markets.” We must prevent financial institutions from becoming “too big to fail.” Banks shouldn’t be able to freely gamble with taxpayer money covering the bets. And we support greater oversight, accountability and democratization of the Federal Reserve.

These reforms are already way overdue, but there will be action in the next few days and weeks that give us the opportunity to make things the way they need to be for consumer protection and financial stability. Senator Merkley is showing he is willing to fight for good reforms, let’s show him he’s right to do so.

I don't know about you, but I barely pay attention to the more obscure categories in the Academy Awards show.

(You see, I'm no Jeff Alworth, with his impressive high-brow appreciation of international film. I'm more of a mainstream Hollywood popcorn movie guy.)

But with a big hat tip to the Mercury's Sarah Mirk, I must insist that you spend 16 minutes watching the film Logorama, winner of the Best Animated Short award.

Might be the best 16 minutes of animation ever. (Be sure to click on that little red arrow in the lower-right corner to make it full-screen. Lots of brilliant little details.)

Klik hier om het video filmpje te bekijken

I acknowledge this is an unusual use of BlueOregon but - I have a speaking engagement Saturday in Portland during Ben's Salem memorial service. I was going to drive down to Bend and back tomorrow (Friday) for the 2 pm Bend memorial but I am not good at all at driving in snow and both passes look troublesome as of now. Was anyone else going to do the same thing, someone with 4 wheel drive who knows how to use it? I will pay for gas. (Ben once drove by me in Portland during one of our unusual snows, when I was waiting for the streetcar, and he stopped and gave me a ride, so I can say for sure that giving someone a ride in the snow would be in the spirit of Ben Westlund.)