Letter to the Portland Public School Board

Here is a copy of the email I sent to the school board. Hopefully it makes a little bit of difference. They seem pretty gung-ho on going through with their plan, regardless of what the community says. I hope I'm wrong on that.

Dear School Board Members,

I am very distressed to hear of your plans to turn Grant High School into an application-only magnet school. I just barely graduated from Grant in 2002 and am now currently studying towards a Master's degree in Policy Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Turning Grant into a magnet school will do nothing positive for the surrounding community. It will force current residents with students lacking desire to attend the magnet school to expend more resources shipping their kids to another school further away and not centered in their immediate community. You will also increase the commuting costs for many of the students who do get into the magnet school. An increase in commuting is not good for our environment or for abating the increasing congestion Portlanders face every day. You have a choice between allowing many students to continue to walk to their neighborhood school, a healthy activity, or encourage/force them to drive/commute greater distances. And the idea that lots students, who previously walked or drove a short distance, would simply substitute with public transportation is laughable. It's hard enough to get students up for class at 8am when the school is only five or six blocks away.

I also object to the idea of magnet schools in general, unless they are on a very small scale. All schools should have a diverse list of educational programs. I didn’t know what I wanted to study until I was 21 years old and a sophomore at the University of Oregon. And I am not alone. Many students get college degrees that they don’t necessarily care about because of little interest in academics, but felt strong pressure to ‘just get a degree.’ Magnet schools encourage students to pick an area that they may ultimately decide they’re not interested in pursuing as a career. What happens if a student realizes at the end of junior year that they’re more interesting in engineering than music? They’ve trained for a music college that they’re no longer interested in. Students should have a wealth of diverse classes right in their community school. I would have loved to take a polytechnic class, but that would have required me to completely switch schools and head to Benson.

I also believe that magnet schools often promote elitism. The idea of elitism is strong in higher (and private) education but it carries with it the added element of one's ability to pay its high costs. We should not be promoting elitism based on academic or artistic skills in public education. Why not try to engage other students with lower math or writing score with other programs more suited to their strengths? Put the money into bringing back the industrial arts in all schools, not just one school that may not be practical for a student to attend, or may not want to devote their entire high school education to. Give students at all schools the opportunity to learn welding, how to build an electronic circuit, or how to paint a portrait. Students need to see that no matter what their ability in a few arguably arbitrary subjects they are valued. You don't accomplish that by segregating them. And often overlooked are the negative effects on the students that are 'qualified' for the magnet school. It can reinforce in them the idea that they are more valuable and more deserving than other students. This is just as unhealthy as telling them that they are not valuable. Elitism gets promoted on both fronts. When you segregate the students you take away the invaluable experience of interacting with other students of different races, socioeconomic backgrounds and talents – a vital component in developing a caring, responsible, civic-minded person/populace.

Maybe a student with low math scores just needs to see its application in a very concrete way? Teach him math in the context of electronics. Make him see that math isn't just for getting good test scores and further asserting how much better they are than other students. If you restrict subjects to specific locations, that student won’t have the opportunity to see math in another light. I nearly failed algebra my senior year. I wasn't in the least bit interested in learning math. When I realized that what I was interested in studying microeconomics and it contained a great deal of math, I went to work. Now I've excelled in topics such as Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Mathematical Statistics, and I plan to learn more math that I don't even need.

Because of the waste of resources, the damage to the surrounding community, the damage to all students of the city, and the inherent elitism, I am strongly opposed to turning Grant High School (and other current community high schools) into an application-only magnet school. One of the main reasons Grant is a good school is the community that surrounds it. If you take the community out of that school, not only will the school suffer, but the community will suffer alongside it. I urge you, the members of the School Board, to think seriously about the negative consequences and the destructiveness of such a decision.

I also urge the School Board to rethink how it evaluates the quality of the district’s education. Our society is placing far too much emphasis on a college education as the only way to “get ahead.” This is incorrect and it promotes an unhealthy definition of success as winning a competition of who can gain the most monetary and material wealth. As a student of economics I’ve seen first hand the dangers of a worldview based solely on the idea of ‘competition is king’ (me and Alan Greenspan both). By pushing college attendance rates as the primary rubric of a school district’s quality we’re entrenching a stigma of technical and skill-based careers in the minds of students and their parents. Glen Waddell, one of my economics professors at the University of Oregon, studies higher education and frequently told us that too many kids are going to college that probably shouldn’t.[1] In a video by Matthew Orr for The New York Times, Tamara Draut, director of the Demos Economics Opportunity Program, explains that a college education makes men no better off than it did in the 1970’s (women have done a little better), yet the cost of education has increased dramatically.[2] We’re selling college as the only way to go when it has a worse net payoff than ever before. We are misleading the next generation and that is unambiguously wrong.

It was mentioned in the District’s “Plan for Stronger High Schools” that there was concern that many of the graduating class of 2007 would “struggle and drop out before earning their degrees.” This is NOT necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps they will go to college and realize that college isn’t the right fit for them. Maybe some students struggle because they really didn’t want to be there and don’t see the applicability to what they want to do or care about. My cousin had that exact realization. He hated college, dropped out and is now working with his dad as a mason and feels much better about his situation in life. Do we want to tell kids to burden themselves with twenty- or thirty-thousand dollars of debt so they can get a degree that they may not want/need, because, well, ‘that’s just what you do’? No. We need to guide students to careers that not only are a good fit for their individual talents, but careers that they will feel are making a useful contribution. When this happens you get people who love their jobs.

If we give students all of the correct information, almost all of them will self-select and choose the path that fits them best. And some might take longer than others to do that. It took me two years to go back to school. Part of the correct information would be to let kids know that they can take their time, but they have to be very mindful and not put themselves in a situation where the option of college is out of reach (for example: by spending a bunch of money they don’t really have with credit cards, a subject ripe for extremely informative application-based math education).

The main criteria for high schools should be the level of engagement, which I argue is directly reflected in graduation rates. The School Board definitely has a right to be concerned about the level of graduation. It is correct to say that we need to get students to see the value in a high school education. But when we stress getting into college as the ultimate goal, many will choose to opt out (which includes “just getting by” like I did) as college is not their goal. High school must be relevant to all goals. This is why every student must have easy access to a variety of educational experiences. Magnet schools do not offer this.

I have laid out a lofty challenge: to reevaluate how we as a city and a society measure success and how best to implement this new philosophy given the structure of our current school system. I, for one, don’t exactly know how. But the problem isn’t beyond our capabilities. We have a wealth of very talented people that could offer solutions. One of the main obstacles is getting agreement on what the problem actually is, which too often degenerates into politics. While I think the problem is relatively clear, and I hope that I will have convinced some (a controlling majority of the members of the School Board – nudge, nudge), there are certainly going to be those that remain unconvinced. Hopefully they will be genuinely open to further discussion and not so quick to pass judgment. If we make a strong commitment, and mention taxes as little as possible, I think that Portland is the place that could get this done and show the rest of the country that it is a leader in giving our kids a truly quality education.

Thank you for you time.

Sincerely,
Reed Avery
avery3@illinois.edu
Ulysses S. Grant High School, Class of 2002


[1] Fully explaining Dr. Waddell’s thinking is beyond the scope of this letter, and I hope he would not feel that I have grossly over-simplified.
[2] Orr, Matthew, “Debt Trap: College Borrowing Catches Up,” http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/12/31/business/1194837095176/debt-trap-college-borrowing-catches-up.html?scp=1&sq=college%20debt&st=cse. The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2008.