Author Archives: whmacken2013

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Lawyers of Distinction: The Fraud That Won’t Die

What does it take to crush a cockroach?

After multiple exposures as a fraud, Lawyers of Distinction, a Florida-based business, continues to grow its membership and confidently promote itself in national publications such as The New York Times.

It’s latest promotion? A prominent ad in the Sunday, August 6, 2023 edition of The New York Times, reproduced here so you can read the names of the newest members  who apparently want to embellish their credentials by deceiving the public.

Nine of the members saluted in the ad are from Oregon. Lawyers of Distinction claims to have a total of 34 members from the state. “Reach Out for Representation You Can Trust,” says Kali Yost, one of the Oregon members, on her website, which features the Lawyers of Distinction 2023 logo. 

Impressed? Don’t be. 

About all that’s required to be named a “Lawyer of Distinction” is to apply yourself or be nominated, fill out some online forms and pay a fee. 

According to the Orlando, FL-based organization’s website, a Charter Membership, for $475 a year, comes with a “Customized 14″ x 11″ genuine rosewood plaque”. A Featured Membership, for $575 a year, brings the plaque and inclusion in a membership roster published in USA Today, The New York Times, The American Lawyer and the National Law Journal.

Then there’s the Distinguished Membership, for $775 per year (described on the organization’s website as “Most Popular”), which brings the rosewood plaque, the membership roster ads and an 11″ tall translucent personalized crystal statue.

Lawyers of Distinction,  incorporated in 2014, is like diploma mills, outfits that claim to be higher education institutions, but only provide illegitimate academic degrees and diplomas for a fee.

The Lawyers of Distinction website describes the application review process as follows:

“Lawyers of Distinction Members have been selected based upon a review and vetting process by our Selection Committee utilizing U.S. Provisional Patent # 62/743,254. The platform generates a numerical score of 1 to 5 for each of the 12 enumerated factors which are meant to recognize the applicant’s achievements and peer recognition. Members are then subiect to a final review for ethical violations within the past ten years before confirmation of Membership. Nomination does not guarantee membership and attorneys may not pay a fee to be nominated. Attorneys may nominate their peers whom they feel warrant consideration. The determination of whether an attorney qualifies for Membership is based upon the aforementioned proprietary analysis discussed above. Membership is not meant to infer any endorsement of Lawyers of Distinction by any of the 50 United States Bar Associations or The District of Columbia Bar Association. Any references to “excellent,” “excellence,” or “distinguished” are meant to refer to the Lawyers of Distinction organization only and not to any named member individually.”

Phew! Sounds complex and rigorous. 

Don’t believe it.

 It’s just pay-for-play. It’s selling badges.  It’s paying for meaningless accolades. Apply, pay the annual membership fee and you’re in.

According to the Florida Division of Corporations, “Lawyers of Distinction Inc.” is a private for-profit company with a principal address of 4700 Millenia Boulevard, Suite 175, Orlando, FL 32839. 

Robert B. Baker, at the same address, is listed as the President in the company’s 2023 Annual Report. 

Robert Baker

But don’t go to the office address expecting to be ushered into a space with a clean, modern aesthetic that communicates success. The address is only a virtual office. The site offers a “Platinum Plan” for $69 a month and a “Platinum Plan with live receptionist” for $194 a month.

Robert “Robbie” Brian Baker, a member of the Florida Bar (Bar #992460), is also the founder and owner of Baker Legal Team at 2255 Glades Rd., Ste 330-W, Boca Raton, FL 33431. According to the Baker Legal Team website, he has a degree from Boston University School of Law in 1989 and a B.A. from Ithaca College.  He began his career, the website says, as a prosecutor working as an Assistant District Attorney in Kings County, New York. 

As an aside, the firm’s website has the chutzpah to highlight that it’s a member of Lawyers of Distinction. 

Lawyers of Distinction’s website says it currently has over 5000 members. If 5000 lawyers sign up for the Distinguished category at $775 this year, the organization will rake in $3.9 million. Quite a haul.

Lawyers of Distinction used to try to quell doubts about its legitimacy by including on its website a  section headed, “Is Lawyers of Distinction A Scam? With Over 5000 Members, See What Lawyers Have To Say.” All the section contained was a few member comments and ratings, such as, “Andre L. Pennington – June 20, 2022, I love the opportunities that this honor provides. I highly recommend!” Now the link just takes you to a page that says, “Lawyers of Distinction currently has over 5000 members in the United States. The best way to hear about someone’s actual experience with a company is to receive information from an actual user, not a 3rd party.” 

It’s likely that few attorneys have been duped by Lawyers of Distinction, lured into believing they’ve been selected for a rare honor based on their legal work. They must figure that impressing potential clients is worth the mendacity and deception.

But the widespread use of Lawyers of Distinction by attorneys really just represents the decay of honest professional representation. If the American Bar Association  and state bar associations really cared about lawyers’ clients they would be cracking down on such misleading marketing ploys. If the publications that run the outfit’s ads, such as The New York Times, gave a whit about truth in advertising, they’d decline to run its ads, too.

And if an attorney ballyhoos their selection as a Lawyer of Distinction to you, beware. They already have one strike against them and are living in a world of unearned praise.

11/13/2024 UPDATE: Oregon State Bar Refuses To Prohibit Deceit and Misrepresentation By Its Members

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Killing The Golden Goose: The Tualatin-Sherwood-Rogers Rd. Project

The idea that endless growth will solve all ills is a delusion.

When a gargantuan cruise ship pulled into port at the idyllic village of Stavanger on Norway’s west coast, overwhelming the quaint setting, obliterating its scenic beauty and destroying its allure, Norwegian film director Odveig Klyve captured the impact in a stunning video.

‘The liners that pull into the harbor now are so tall and broad that they block out views entirely, fundamentally changing Stavanger’s atmosphere,” Rachel Riederer  wrote recently in The New Yorker. “It takes away the sun,” Klyve told Riederer.  “It takes away the air. It’s claustrophobic.” And with the increased commerce has come noise and pollution. Klyve said that some of her harborside neighbors now have to wash their white-painted houses, which go gray because of the smog.”

Oregonians who live, drive and work in the vicinity of the Tualatin-Sherwood Highway and Roy Rogers Rd. know the feeling.

Prosperity and growth have come with a cost, changing a relatively calm and easy to navigate corridor into a noisy, exhaust-filled roadway resembling a Los Angeles freeway.

Go way back to the mid-1800s and the Tualatin end of the to-be-built highway consisted of little more than a blacksmith shop, boarding house, general store, and saloon. In 1906, the Oregon Electric Railroad’s Portland-Salem line came to town and in 1913 the City of Tualatin was incorporated. 

The early occupiers of what was to become Sherwood were the Tualatin Indians. In the mid-1800s, they encountered wagon trains and farmers who built their homes with local logs that came from forests that covered the area. Incorporated as the town of Sherwood in 1893, by 1911 its city limits were one square mile and it had reached a population of 350.

But the area’s appeal drew more residents and businesses. Since 1990, Tualatin’s population has almost doubled and Sherwood’s has exploded seven times over. Thousands of vehicles now barrel along Tualatin-Sherwood and Roy Rogers roads every morning and thousands more every night.

In 2020, work began on a project to expand traffic capacity and improve safety on the Tualatin-Sherwood Highway and Roy Rogers Rd., bringing what was once a rural road connecting two backwater towns into the 21st century, according to its proponents.

But relief will be short-lived. Following the principle of induced demand, increased road capacity may reduce congestion at first, but that then leads to more people opting to travel and the return of congestion. When the “improvements” are finished, that will spur even more residential and business construction in the corridor and the traffic and grueling transit chaos will increase again with a vengeance. In other words, if you build it, people will come.

One of the most talked about examples of this is the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas. Part of a massive freeway expansion plan meant to alleviate traffic congestion, and built at a cost of $2.8 billion, it has an astounding 26 lanes at its widest point. But analysts examining reams of data have found that traffic actually worsened after widening the freeway.

And not just vehicle drivers pay the price of roadway expansion. The owners of this home on Lavender Terrace in Sherwood must know that.

Once comfortably separated from the highway, they are now hemmed in by a concrete sound barrier alongside the road, as are many other adjacent homes along the route.

It won’t be long before people despair of living and doing business in the once appealing Tualatin-Sherwood corridor.

Ah, progress. 

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Oregon’s Folly: No Money for Summer School; Plenty for Undocumented Immigrants

It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack.*

There’s no question that Oregon’s children have suffered from learning losses before and during covid.

The Oregon Capitol Chronicle reported last week that Oregon school districts and community-based organizations such as the YMCA and Boys & Girls Club have received millions in public funding for summer learning programs from the Legislature in the past two years: a record high of $240 million in 2021 and $150 million in 2022. 

This year — not a penny in additional funding. The result? Districts across the state have had to cut back their summer offerings.  That has school leaders and concerned parents furious.

At the same time, effective July 1, Oregon expanded free health insurance that mirrors Medicaid to immigrants in the country illegally.

House Bill 3352 (2021) put into law a program called “Cover All People.” The program is now known as “Healthier Oregon.” According to the Oregon Health Authority, thanks to Healthier Oregon, people may now qualify for OHP if they live in Oregon and meet income and other criteria.

The bill passed the State Senate with 17 ayes and 11 nays – Anderson, Boquist, Findley, Girod, Hansell, Kennemer, Knopp, Linthicum, Robinson, Thatcher, Thomsen.

The federal government largely funds Medicaid, paying about two-thirds of the cost, leaving the balance to the state. But the federal government won’t pay anything for coverage of undocumented immigrants, so Oregon taxpayers will pick up the entire tab for them.  

“We don’t get any help from the federal government because the folks who are on it don’t have papers,” Rep. Rob Nosse, D-Portland, told the Capital Chronicle. 

What a strange, strange world.

*With all due respect to 4 Jacks and a Jill.

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Justice Clarence Thomas and the Horatio Alger Association: What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You

On July 9, 2023, The New York Times ran a 4,314-word story about Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas’s connections with an exclusive club, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans Inc.. 

“His friendships forged through Horatio Alger have brought him proximity to a lifestyle of unimaginable material privilege,” the reporters wrote, leading into multiple examples of benefits he received from a broad cohort of wealthy and powerful friends and insinuations that Thomas had been compromised.

Citing the Association’s website, the story said the non-profit group, portrayed as a group of wealthy and influential believers in meritocratic success, has awarded more than $245 million in college scholarships to roughly 35,000 students since its founding in 1947. The Association has been tax-exempt since Oct. 1952.

What the reporters didn’t do was look deeper at the Association. It has quite a dubious history.

In 1988, while a business reporter at The Oregonian newspaper, I researched and wrote a story about the Association, which had inducted two prominent Oregonians. The story (which won plaudits from the Columbia Journalism Review) noted that from 1985 through 1987 — the latest period for which tax records were available at the time — the Association raised $2.1 million. During those three years, The organization spent $1.7 million. Just $315,000 of that went to scholarships.

Rather than funding scholarships, most of the association’s outlays went to executive salaries, office expenses, books devoted largely to laudatory stories of the members’ lives, annual banquets at places such as New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel and the Westin Galleria Hotel in Houston and contracts with a New York public relations firm.

The amount of salary and benefits going to the association’s executive director alone, which increased from $98,126 in 1985 to $120,154 in 1987, exceeded or almost equaled the amount of scholarships awarded in each of the past three years. Those scholarships totaled $100,000 in both 1985 and 1986 and $115,000 in 1987.

In 1987 the Association spent more on printing and publications than on scholarships. Its principal annual publication was a hard-cover book titled “Only in America Opportunity Still Knocks.” The book devoted 132 of its 192 pages to a membership list and biographies featuring informal snapshots of the members and outlines of their paths to success.

A review of the Association’s recent federal tax filings reveals it still engages in questionable financial behavior.

The IRS requires that tax-exempt organizations, nonexempt charitable trusts, and section 527 political organizations file an annual Form 990 to provide the IRS with the information required by 26 U.S. Code § 6033. In its recent filings it stated its purpose as: “(1) To provide scholarship assistance to help promising high school students (who fit the Horatio Alger profile) attend college, and (2) to spread the message that America’s free enterprise system provides the greatest opportunities in the world for personal achievement and success.”

The Alexandria, VA-based Association’s recent Form 990s (2020, 2021) reveal it has grown substantially since I wrote about it in 1988, reporting total revenue of $27,092,429 in 2020 and $20,322,852 in 2021. But its scholarship distributions still fall far short of its annual revenue.

In 2020, its scholarship grants totaled $11,223,951, just 41% of its revenue. In 2021, grants totaled $12,287,913, 60% of its revenue, which was at least better than in 2010, when its revenue totaled $19,682,336 and its grants to individuals totaled just $4,721,307.

Where has all the rest of its revenue gone?

In 2021, a whopping $2,446,876 went to salaries, other compensation and employee benefits, including $1,348,080 to Executive Director Terrence J. Giroux. Another $318,936 went to a Philadelphia, PA public relations firm, Brian Communications. A total of $552,717 was spent on “event management”, slightly less than the $1,062,380 spent on event management and production in 2020. (The Association’s Form 990s say some of that money went to Linder & Associates, but that is a property management company in Los Angeles, California. The money probably went, instead, to Linder Global Events, an event management agency based in Washington, D.C.)

The Red Bank Film Factory of Red Bank, NJ was paid $471,271 and Destin Productions LLC of Limassol, Cyprus took in $330,000 for a television marketing campaign in 2021

Another $8,527,523 went to “Other Expenses”, including legal, accounting, advertising, office expenses, travel, conferences, conventions and meetings. 

According to the Association’s 2021 Form 990, $2,739,296 went just to “Member support and meetings, including the annual board of directors meeting, annual awards week in Washington, D.C. and specialized forums.”

In other words, given the amount of its revenue, the Association falls far short of expectations in its scholarship handouts, while spending extravagant sums on compensation and other functions, such as public relations and fancy dinners for its mostly wealthy members. 

Media coverage of the Association, while frequently citing its distinguished members, such as author Maya Angelou, former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, Michael Bloomberg and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, also has failed to mention that its ranks include some questionable characters, such as:

  • Roger Ailes, who resigned as chairman and CEO of Fox News after being accused of sexual harassment by several female Fox employees, including on-air hosts
  • Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos. Holmes was convicted in 2022 on four counts of wire fraud for swindling doctors and patients to use her company’s blood-testing services while knowing that Theranos was incapable of producing accurate results, according to the indictment. She was also accused of defrauding investors of more than $700 million with the fabricated claims.
  • Joe Allbritton, a Washington, D.C. power-broker who turned a blind eye to evidence that Riggs Bank, of which he was  chairman and chief executive officer, was “handling the proceeds of foreign corruption and paid paid a $16 million criminal fine over charges the bank had failed to report suspicious transactions with foreign account holders.” The judge who imposed the fine described the bank as “a greedy corporate henchman of dictators and their corrupt regimes.”

America loves stories about someone picking themselves up by their bootstraps, as in Horatio Alger’s books about  impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of success, although, truth be told, you can’t really do that. Truth be told, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans Inc. isn’t all it’s stacked up to be either.

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Sad Horatio Alger Tale: Scholarship Funds Go To Overhead, Pay to Director of Charity Exceeds Total Student Aid

NOTE: This is a reprint of a story that appeared in The Oregonian newspaper.

December 30, 1988 | Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)

Author/Byline: BILL MacKENZIE – of the Oregonian Staff | Page: A02 | 

Some of the nation’s most prominent business executives, politicians and entertainers have been donating thousands of dollars each year to an organization dedicated to providing scholarships to underprivileged young people. But most of the money has been going elsewhere.

From 1985 through 1987 — the latest period for which tax records are available — $2.1 million was raised by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans Inc., an organization that purports to motivate young people and provide college scholarships to high school students from around the country.

The organization, which is based in Alexandria, Va., spent $1.7 million during those three years, $315,000 of that going to scholarships.

Rather than funding scholarships, most of the association’s outlays went to executive salaries, office expenses, books devoted largely to laudatory stories of the members’ lives, annual banquets at places such as New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel and the Westin Galleria Hotel in Houston and contracts with a New York public relations firm.

The amount of salary and benefits going to the association’s executive director alone, which increased from $98,126 in 1985 to $120,154 in 1987, has exceeded or almost equaled the amount of scholarships awarded in each of the past three years. Those scholarships totaled $100,000 in both 1985 and 1986 and $115,000 in 1987.

The association, which was founded in 1947, was named after Horatio Alger, who in the late 1800s wrote more than 100 books chronicling the adventures of boys who triumphed over adversity to achieve success.

The association was based in New York until its headquarters was moved earlier this year to Alexandria, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

The membership roster of the organization, consisting of people nominated for the Horatio Alger Award by current members, reads like a “Who’s Who in Politics, Business and Entertainment.

Oregon is represented by two members, Robert Farrell, operator of the Newport Bay Seafood Broiler restaurants; and Harry Merlo, chairman and president of Louisiana- Pacific Corp.

Also among the association’s living members — numbering about 250 — are President Reagan; former President Ford; Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.; and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

The association’s diverse membership also includes H. Ross Perot, president of Perot Systems Corp.; Allen Neuharth, chairman and chief executive officer of Gannett Co.; Sam Walton, chairman of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.; Tom Landry, coach of the pro football Dallas Cowboys; entertainers Ed McMahon and Bob Hope; the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale; and evangelist Billy Graham.

The association has declined to provide information on its income and expenditures, despite being contacted by a reporter from The Oregonian twice by telephone and twice by certified letter during the past seven months.

A call in early December to the executive director was referred to the association’s director of education, Pat Brown. Brown, who acknowledged receipt of earlier letters, declined to provide any detailed information concerning the association’s operations.

Love Smith, who served as the association’s executive director until earlier this year, also declined last week in a telephone conversation to answer questions concerning the association’s finances or general operations. “Since I’m no longer with the association, I really wouldn’t care to comment,” Smith said.

Peale, 90, who served as national chairman of the association for more than 25 years, could not be reached for comment. His wife, Ruth Stafford Peale, who has served on the association’s board of directors, spoke last week, however, on her own and her husband’s behalf.

Ruth Peale attributed the allocation of a limited proportion of the association’s annual income to scholarships to the association’s desire to raise an endowment. When she was advised that the association’s tax returns indicated that an average of 80 percent of annual income in the past three years had been spent, and only 20 percent of that on scholarships, Peale said she could not explain the discrepancy.

By not responding to requests for detailed financial information, the association has failed to comply with standards published by the New York-based National Charities Information Bureau Inc. and the Council of Better Business Bureaus Inc. of Arlington, Va., regarding financial disclosure by philanthropic organizations.

The Information Bureau says in its “Standards of Philanthropy”: “Descriptive and financial information for all substantive income and for all revenue-generating activities conducted by the organization should be disclosed upon request.”

Information on the association was obtained from Form 990 returns required to be filed with the Internal Revenue Service by organizations exempt from federal income tax and from annual financial reports submitted by the association to the New York Department of State.

According to the association, its good work is tied to inspiring young people to follow the Horatio Alger ideal and awarding $5,000 college scholarships to “underprivileged but promising” high school students from around the country who exemplify that ideal.

The New York-based National Charities Information Bureau, a national organization that monitors charitable giving, recommends that philanthropic organizations devote at least 60 percent of their annual expenses to their basic program and no more than 40 percent to management, general expenses and fund raising. Less than 20 percent of the Alger association’s annual expenditures have been going to scholarships in recent years.

The inspirational element of the association’s program consists largely of Horatio Alger Day programs at high schools around the country, during which association members share their success stories and offer advice before student assemblies.

According to Farrell, speakers usually live near the school sponsoring the event, so there is little expense involved. The association’s tax records do not break out expenses associated with the school visits; but the records show less than $16,000 annually devoted to travel, conferences, conventions and meetings from 1985 through 1987.

Scholarship expenses are more clearly defined in the association’s tax records.

During the 1985-1987 period, about $1 of every $7 of association income and $1 of every $5 of association spending went to scholarships.

The spending patterns of the San Francisco-based National Hispanic Scholarship Fund Inc., which also raises and distributes money to assist deserving college students, stand in sharp contrast to those of the HoratioAlger Association. In 1987, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund devoted 80 percent of its expenditures to scholarships and only 20 percent to administrative and fund-raising expenses.

Similarly, the Los Angeles-based Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation, which also seeks to motivate high school students through sponsorship of leadership seminars and career fairs around the country, devoted 61 percent of its $1.5 million in expenditures directly to those activities in 1987; 39 percent of its budget went to administration and fund raising.

In 1987 the Alger association spent more on printing and publications than on scholarships. Its principal annual publication is a hard-cover book titled “Only in America Opportunity Still Knocks.” The 1987 book devoted 132 of its 192 pages to a membership list and biographies featuring informal snapshots of the members and outlines of their paths to success.

“Maybe that’s just being a little ego trip for a lot of people in there,” Ruth Peale said.

The records obtained from the IRS show that some young people are benefiting from the association’s programs. During 1985-87, for example, each of 63 students received $5,000 college scholarships from the association.

There is a question, however, as to whether the members of the association are benefiting financially from their connection to the association more than the students are.

Because the association is a non-profit organization exempt from federal income tax, contributions to it are tax-deductible. Maximum marginal tax rates were 38.5 percent in 1987 and 50 percent in 1985 and 1986. If all the contributors to the Horatio Alger Association paid federal income taxes at the highest marginal income tax rates during 1985-1987, the total tax burden of the contributors could have been reduced by $732,246.

In other words, the tax loss to the federal government could have been more than double the $315,000 in scholarship awards made by the association during 1985-1987.

When told of the association’s spending patterns: Farrell said, “That’s shameful not to give out more. It sounds like they are mismanaged.”

Farrell said he had little to do with the association other than winning an award and knew little of the association’s “inner workings.”

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Portland (And Oregon) Public Schools: What the Hell?

I posted a story recently that showed how much money Portland Public Schools is really spending per student.

In April, Willamette Week reported that the National Center for Education Statistics  put the per pupil expenditure in Oregon’s K-12 public schools at $14,829.  

When I sought clarification from Portland Public Schools, the District said its per pupil expenditure is actually  closer to $11,000.

“If you include services like transportation, nutrition, SpEd, English as a Second Language Programs (ESL), other central office supports and operations, from a whole system perspective the budgeted per pupil expenditure number doubles and is closer to $22,000, including both GenFund and Special Revenue, but not bond dollars,” the District said.

But that’s not really the whole story, either. 

In fact, considering all funds available to the District in the 2022-23 school year, totaling $1.9 billion, per student expenditures came out to $45,533.

That’s right, an astounding $45,533 per student for what can only be described as abysmal academic performance by the District’s students.

Where’s the anger?

Look at the situation with all that spending in the 2021-2022 school year:

  • 3rd grade students who failed to meet state grade-level expectations in English Language Arts: 44%
  • 8th grade students who failed to meet state grade-level expectations in mathematics: 62%
  • Students failing to earn a high school diploma within 4 years: 16%
  • Students with chronic absenteeism (in attendance less than 90% of school days): 33.5%

– African Americans chronically absent: 55%

-Hispanic Latino students chronically absent: 48.1%

-American Indian/Alaska Native students chronically absent: 68.8%

-White students chronically absent: 27.1%

-English learners chronically absent: 42.5%

-Grade 12 students chronically absent: 64.7%

And these numbers are for the Portland Public Schools System as a whole. Some individual schools did appreciably worse.

At Cesar Chavez K-8 School, for example, only 17% met state grade level expectations in English Language Arts and only 11% met state grade level expectations in mathematics and science. At Kellogg Middle School, 34% of students met grade level expectations in English Language Arts, 25% met state grade level expectations in mathematics and 18% met state grade level expectations in science.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as The Nation’s Report Card, provides additional information about student achievement and learning experiences in various subjects by state and 27 urban districts. Although the district-specific analyses do not separate out Portland Public Schools, the state reports are illuminating as a supplement to the data noted above. 

NAEP is a congressionally mandated program that is overseen and administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences.

NCES reports results at the state level, most often in grades 4 and 8, in four subjects—mathematics, reading, science, and writing. 

In 1922, NAES tested in mathematics, reading and writing. Oregon students performed poorly in all three areas:

  • Just 28.61% of Oregon 4th graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in mathematics, lower than in 2019.
  • Just 27.99% of Oregon 4th graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in reading, lower than in 2019.
  • Just 22.31% of Oregon 4th graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in writing.
  • Just 22.03% of Oregon 8th graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in mathematics, lower than in 2019.
  • Just 27.79% of Oregon 8th graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in reading, lower than in 2019.
  • Just 33.15% of Oregon 8th graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in writing.

I raise all this not as an act of self-flagellation by a disenchanted Oregonian, but as a concerned citizen. Oregons political and business leaders say they want the state to be a magnet for investment, particularly in technology. With this kind of academic malfeasance, it’s not going to happen. More broadly, we  cannot sustain American freedom and prosperity if the abysmal academic performance of our children, including low-income communities and communities of color, is not righted.

“…gaps between the highest and lowest scoring students, already growing before the pandemic, are widening into chasms,” warns the Brookings Institution, —. “At the pace of recovery we are seeing today, too many students of all races and income levels will graduate in the coming years without the skills and knowledge needed for college and careers.” 

And Oregon and America will pay the price. 

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The Cost of Sending Kids to Portland Public Schools is More Than You Think, a Lot More

How much does Portland Public Schools spend per student?

It’s complicated. 

Is it 14,829? That’s what the National Center for Education Statistics  estimates was the per pupil expenditure in Oregon’s K-12 public schools for 2019-20, their most recent figure.[1]

I asked the district if that number still holds. 

The district said the average of budgeted per pupil expenditures for next year (2023-2024) is $11,000 per student. 

“This represents standardized site services. (teachers, principals, counselors, etc,” the district explained. “It does not include services like transportation, nutrition, SpEd, ESL or other central office supports and operations. “

The district did not clarify further.

So, is $11,000 the answer, then?

Nope. 

“Once you include services like transportation, nutrition, SpEd, English as a Second Language Programs (ESL), other central office supports and operations, from a whole system perspective the budgeted per pupil expenditure number doubles and is closer to $22k/student (this is both GenFund and Special Revenue and does not include bond dollars).,” the District said..

So, is $22,000 the answer, then?

Nope.

It’s not so much a lie as an obfuscation, a deceit, an exercise in willful ignorance. People just don’t want to think about the massive amount of money going to public education that is producing such abysmal academic results.

A lot of things PPS spends money on are not counted in calculating spending per student. When all spending is thrown into the pot, the spending per student jumps up substantially.

Let’s look at the 2022-2023 school year.

PPS served 41,470 students that year. At $22,000 per student, that would translate to total spending of $912.3 million. But the District’s 2022-2023 budget is actually $1.883 billion.

Why the huge difference?

Put simply, the $22,000 doesn’t take into account all funds that support the District each year. The table below, provided boy the District, shows all resources available to the district for the school years 2018-19 through 2022-23.

This table shows that all funds available to the District in the 2022-23 school year actually totaled $1.9 billion. divide that by 41,470 students and per student expenditures comes out to $45,533. That’s right, $45,533.

And that was more than the District spent per student in the 2021-22 school year, even though the number of students served declined.

In the fall 2021, the District enrolled 45,005 students in grades K-12, a decrease of 1,932 students from fall 2020. The net loss was even greater than the previous year’s loss of 1,716 students.

A recent “Portland Public Schools Enrollment Forecast” by Portland State University’s Population Research Center projected that the District’s enrollment will likely continue to fall throughout most of the forecast’s horizon, declining to a low of 39,123 in 2035-36.  

In the meantime, the story will likely be more money for fewer students who are unaware of their rights and obligations as Americans, can’t read, and don’t know how to calculate the square footage of a room, comprehend the ebb and flow of American history or write a coherent and compelling story.

And the beat goes on.

[1] According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the $14,829 of per student expenditures comprise expenditures for the day-to-day operation of schools and school districts for public elementary and secondary education, including expenditures for staff salaries and benefits, supplies, and purchased services. General administration expenditures and school administration expenditures are also included in current expenditures. 

Expenditures associated with repaying debts and capital outlays (e.g., purchases of land, school construction, and equipment) are excluded from current expenditures. Programs outside the scope of public prekindergarten through grade 12 education, such as community services and adult education, are not included in current expenditures. Payments to private schools and payments to charter schools outside of the school district are also excluded from current expenditures. The Center says researchers generally use current expenditures instead of total expenditures when comparing education spending between states or across districts because current expenditures exclude expenditures for capital outlay, which tend to have dramatic increases and decreases from year to year. Also, many school districts support community services, adult education, private education, and other nonelementary-secondary programs, which are included in total expenditures. These programs and the extent to which they are funded by school districts vary greatly both across and within states and school districts.

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Some of the High Priority “Budget Needs” Oregon’s Legislators Seem To Think We Need (or don’t need)

SB 5506 – $100,000 to the Criminal Justice Commission to study the advantages and disadvantages of decriminalizing the crime of prostitution and provide a report on the study to the Emergency Board and relevant interim committees related to judiciary, no later than September 2024. 

HB 2757 – A new tax that Salem politicians want added to Oregonians’ phone bills to fund the state’s new 9-8-8 suicide prevention hotline. Establishes 9-8-8 Trust Fund for improving the statewide coordinated crisis system. Imposes tax of 40 cents per line per month on consumers and retail subscribers who have telecommunications service or interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service and 40 cents per transaction for prepaid telecommunications services, to pay for crisis services system. At least 44 other states have thus far funded their call centers without adding a new tax on consumers. A tax of $.03, not $.50, should suffice to cover basic costs of the 9-8-8 hotline. 

SB 611 – Caps cap rent increases at no more than 10% annually, Oregon’s current rent cap limits yearly rent increases to a base of 7% plus consumer price index (CPI), which is set annually by the state’s Office of Economic Analysis. Because of inflation, the 2023 CPI was set at 7.6% which brought the total allowed increase to 14.6%. Bill would only be effective in years where CPI increases more than 3%.

HB 2426 – Would allow gas stations to make half of their pump units to be self-serve so Oregonians could stand out in the rain, wind and sun to pump their own gas.

HB 2004 – Would create a statewide ranked choice voting scheme for Oregon. Establishes ranked choice voting as voting method for selecting winner of nomination for and election to offices of President of United States, United States Senator, Representative in Congress, Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer and Attorney General. Would require all voters to have a high level of information about all the candidates in order to choose preferences. If you only vote for the candidate you prefer and don’t rank all the rest, you are effectively disenfranchised if your candidate doesn’t come in first in the initial ballot count. Jeff Jacoby, an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe, calls the RCV process “democracy on the Rube Goldberg model”, where  ideas that supposedly simplify people’s lives wreak havoc instead.

HB 2049 – Allocates just $4.9 million for a proposed Cybersecurity Center of Excellence – about one-third of the original request from a joint legislative technology committee, intended to help government agencies monitor cybersecurity, train specialists and respond to data breaches like the one at Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles affecting 3.5 million Oregonians. The League of Oregon Cities, which represents municipalities of all sizes in the state, is concerned about the limited funding.

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Oregon’s Traditional Public Schools Are Cruisin’ For A Bruisin’

Thank goodness for Mississippi.

Only Mississippi lost a larger share of K-12 public school students in the 2022-2023 school year than Oregon. 

Oregon’s public schools have lost 30,000 students since the fall of 2019. lowering total enrollment by 5% to 552,000 students in the fall of 2022.

Ethan Sharygin, director of Portland State University’s Population Research Center, told The Oregonian a switch from public school to private school represents about one-quarter of the “missing” students, many left to be homeschooled and some simply dropped out or weren’t enrolled in kindergarten when they reached the age of 5. Smaller slices of the loss are due to families moving out of state and to a gently declining birth rate.

Portland Public Schools (PPS) have been hit particularly hard by declining enrollment. The PPS website says “…With more than 49,000 students in 81 schools, it is one of the largest school districts in the Pacific Northwest.” But that’s far from reality. 

In the 2022-23 school year, total enrollment was actually  43,023 and a Portland Public Schools Enrollment Forecast 2022-23 to 2036-37, Based on October 2021 Enrollments   projected enrollment will continue to fall throughout most of the forecast horizon, reaching 42,047 in 2025-27, 39,561 in 2031-32 and 39,123 in 2035-36. 

Under a “low growth scenario” enrollment could go down further to 37,350 in 2035-36.  The difference is primarily due to different assumptions about the levels of net migration (the net movement into and out of the District) of the District’s population.          

Every single one of the missing children will represent a loss of revenue to the school district. That’s because Oregon school districts receive (in combined state and local funds) an allocation per student, plus an additional amount for each student enrolled in more costly programs such as Special Education or English Language Learners.

If a departing student shifts to homeschooling, there is no money transfer to families at this point, but the student’s school still loses that student’s funding allocation.

If a student shifts to one of Oregon’s 132 public charter schools, whether a brick-and-mortar institution or an online entity, the money the traditional school got for that student goes to the district sponsoring the charter school. Oregon law then provides that a sponsoring district must pass on to its charter school at least 80 percent of its per-pupil grant for K-8 students and 95 percent of its per pupil grant for grade 9-12 students.

Charter school enrollment in Oregon rose steadily from 1.7 percent of total public school enrollment in 2006-07 to 8.2% (46,275 students) in 2020-2021, then slipped slightly to 7.7% (42,668 students) 2021-2022. Charter school enrollment rose again in the 2022-2023 school year, however, to 11.9% (46,278 students) with 30,578 attending brick-and -mortar schools and 15,700 attending virtual public charter schools.

Right now in Oregon, once a school district has 3% or more of its students enrolled in a virtual public charter school outside the district, it can generally start denying requests. But school choice advocates have been pushing to eliminate that cap. Legislative efforts to remove the cap have failed to date, but that may not hold.

The outflow of students to charters may also accelerate if a movement in Oklahoma is replicated in Oregon. Many parents abandon traditional public schools because they want a more religious-oriented environment for their children. In early June, Oklahoma approved America’s first religious charter school.  The Archdiocese of Oklahoma won approval to launch an online charter school that would embrace Catholic doctrine.

Some advocates of religious schooling have been suggesting that any effort to stop charter schools from being religious is a form of discrimination against religion. Ultimately, this issue will end up in court, perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Another potential problem could come from the increasing public pressure for more school choice. 

The Cascade Policy Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Oregon, is at the forefront of Oregon’s school choice movement. “Oregon’s public schools, largely controlled by teachers’ unions, are a one-size-fits-all system that leaves many students behind,” the Institute argues. “Traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, online learning, private and parochial schools, homeschooling, and tutoring are all paths to success for students. All options should be valued, and parents should be empowered to choose among them to help their children succeed.”

Cascade is particularly enamored of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), where a percentage of the funds that the state otherwise would spend to educate a student in a public school is deposited into accounts associated with the student’s family. The family may use the funds to spend on private school tuition or other educational expenses. 

There are currently voucher and similar programs in 32 states and the District of Columbia, according to EdChoice, a free-market organization that promotes public money for private education. Voucher programs often are characterized in state legislation as “scholarship programs,” but whatever the name, the policies result in a transfer of public money to private institutions. Some even subsidize home-schooling.

In Arizona, the school choice movement has secured a school voucher program which has exploded since it was signed into law in 2022. 

Arizona’s voucher program allows any child in the state to receive roughly $7,000 each year of their K-12 education while getting instruction at home or attending private school. The Arizona Department of Education recently estimated that enrollment in the program would continue to skyrocket and cost $900 million next year, nearly $300 million more than expected, Public school funding would have to go down to pay for it. 

More students have applied for Iowa’s state-funded education savings accounts than expected as well, meaning the cost of paying for the private school scholarships could exceed what the state budgeted.

As of June 13, 2023, 17,520 applications had been submitted for the program, which will provide eligible families with $7,600 per child in state money to be used solely to pay for private school costs such as tuition and fees. A nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency had earlier  estimated  that 14,068 students would be approved to receive education savings accounts in the program’s first year. Families still have until June 30 to apply for the program, meaning the number of applications is likely to increase further.

Imagine the hit to traditional public school funding if similar programs were enacted in Oregon.

Regardless of the specific school choice options adopted, the prognosis for public school enrollment in Oregon is grim. How Oregon adapts in managing the enrollment decay is going to be a challenge.