Earlier this year, Gov. Tina Kotek and the Democratic Party of Oregon were under pressure to return a $500,000 contribution to the party in 2022 from Nishad Singh, the 27-year-old wunderkind director of engineering at FTX, the disgraced and now bankrupt crypto company.
John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, pushed to get the money back, but the party stalled, likely hoping the passage of time would diminish any public pressure to return Singh’s donation.
But the pressure didn’t let up. Finally, in June 2023 the party paid the piper, repaying the $500,000 to federal authorities, but not from the party’s coffers. Instead, the money came from the campaign accounts of Gov. Kotek, Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and three unnamed Democratic U.S. House members.
Rep. Val Hoyle, (D-OR), elected to the House of Representatives in Nov. 2022 by Oregon’s 4th Congressional District, could learn something from all this.
Don’t count on running out the clock on malfeasance.
Hoyle is trying to pull the same delaying tactics in a situation where the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) wants her to turn over her personal cellphones so the state can probe them for messages relating to state business Hoyle may have conducted outside public scrutiny when she was Labor Commissioner. In particular, BOLI is interested in any communications related to the controversial cannabis dispensary chain, La Mota.
Hoyle has resisted complying with the state’s request, insisting, instead, that she would review her personal devices and determine what was relevant to turn over to the state.
Talk about the fox wanting to guard the henhouse.
“She’s obligated to turn over those devices so they can be properly searched,” Ginger McCall, who served as Oregon’s public records advocate during 2018-19, told Willamette Week. “I don’t think that the public should have to trust her to do her own search, because obviously there’s a conflict of interest there on her part.”
Hoyle’s intransigence makes it look like she has something to hide. She’s be wise to learn from the FTX case that stalling won’t work. We’ll shame her until she gives in.
If you think Portland and Multnomah County’s homeless crisis is chewing through money, you probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Like the ravenous plant, Aubrey II, in the Little Shop of Horrors, its unbridled appetite for more money and more employees just keeps growing.
The Joint Office of Homeless Services, a collaboration between the city of Portland and Multnomah County, was created in 2016. In FY 2017 the Joint Office received a total allocation of $48.3 million from the city and county.
City funding for JOHS programs included $6.7 million for “Rapid Rehousing” that aims to make homelessness a short-lived experience for recently houseless individuals; $5.8 million on “Supportive Housing” to help individuals gain access to housing and preventative services; and $8.0 million on “Safety Off the Streets” to pay for shelters and services for victims of domestic violence, youth, women and families. The bureau also directed $736,825 to prevent seniors and people with disabilities from becoming homeless, divert at-risk individuals from coming into contact with the criminal justice system, and expand tenant protections.
While the extent of homelessness was sobering, the mood was hopeful.
“A greater focus on management and results – in addition to sustained funding – will be needed to ensure that the region is making the most of its investment to help Portland’s most in need,” an early performance report said.
“…the department has a clear road map to expanding services that reduce chronic and episodic homelessness, with priority given to strategies that eliminate racial disparities, the Joint Office said in its FY2023 Adopted Budget.
Whatever that “clear roadmap” has been, it has cost a growing pile of money, up almost 550% since 2017, and a blistering July 2023 report from Multnomah County’s auditor alleges that the Joint Office is a mess.
As OPB has put it, “…a peek behind the scenes of the joint office reveals how clunky contract management, poor communication, insufficient data collection, and lack of vision have undermined the program’s effectiveness at solving one of the region’s most entrenched challenges.”
And now another scathing review from Health Management Associates of Oregon (HMA), requested by Multnomah County Commission Chair Jessica Vega Pederson , noted:
a lack of alignment among elected leaders, county leaders, providers and service and housing providers regarding the appropriate components of the homelessness response system
a lack of a cohesive, effective governance of the Homelessness Response System
Uncoordinated systems provide fragmented care for shared clients, leading to returns to homelessness and poor outcomes
a lack of timely communication with stakeholders and sometimes finding out news through the media,
a lack of role clarity, decision-making and organizational structure within the JOHS
According to Multnomah County’s Press Office, ” The Joint Office contract with HMA is for two years, from May 2023 to June 2025. The total cost is $140,000. The contract involves the review today alongside work to accomplish the steps laid out in the review.” Why two simultaneous reviews are necessary, one of which cost the Joint Office money, is not clear.
Tracking the Joint Office’s budgets over the years is difficult because online reports from the office have numbers for given years that are all over the map, a sign, perhaps, of its dysfunction.
What is clear is the Joint Office’s FY 2023 Adopted Budget is $262.4 million. The budget increases over the years have been accompanied by a concomitant increase in staffing, from 13 full time equivalent positions in 2016 to 45 in FY 2021 and 96 in FY 2023.
Has the homeless count gone down with the commitment of all this money and personnel?
A 2015 Point-In-Time report said 3,800 individuals were homeless in Multnomah County on any given night.
After eight years of work and millions of dollars spent by the Joint Office of Homeless Services, the number of people considered homeless in the most recent Point-In-Time Count in Multnomah County, conducted Jan. 25-31, 2023?
In the 2015-16 school year, alarms went off when one in six K-12 children were chronically absent at Oregon’s public schools..
The legislature was so concerned it enacted a bill which directing the Oregon Department of Education and the Chief Education Office to jointly develop a statewide education plan to address the problem.
So much for that.
In the 2021-2022 school year, the most recent year for which data is available, 36.1% of Oregon’s K-12 students were chronically absent from school, absent for more than 10% of the academic year. Only Hawaii at 37%, Michigan at 38.5% and the District of Columbia at 48.1%, had higher rates of chronic absenteeism.
Children who are chronically absent in their early years of schooling are likelier than their peers to struggle to read at grade level by the end of second grade and students still struggling at the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to research supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Center for Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, State University of New York.
For the worst readers, those who could not master even the basic skills by third grade, the rate is nearly six times greater.
By the ninth grade, every week a student misses reduces that student’s chance of graduating by about 20 percentage points.
“The fact that absenteeism has gone up is the biggest issue right now and has been overlooked,” says the Lewis-Sebring Director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, Elaine Allensworth. “People keep focusing on the test scores, but our research shows over and over again that student attendance is an incredibly strong predictor of pretty much every outcome you care about: High school graduation, college ready, college enrollment, college graduation. It’s vital that students actually come to school every day.”
Oregon media have reported on rising absenteeism, but the general take has been that it is a system-wide problem. What they’ve mostly missed is the high rates of absenteeism among kids of color.
An exhaustive review of Oregon Department of Education data on absenteeism at Oregon school districts in the 2021-2022 school year reveals substantial differences in rates of absenteeism between white students and students of color.
“The long-term consequences of disengaging from school are devastating,” says Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit addressing chronic absenteeism. For children of color, the consequences can be particularly severe.
In other words, for all the money Oregon is pouring into its schools to improve the academic performance of kids of color, it’s not going to make any damn difference if kids of color don’t show up.
It looks like the really tiny town of Mitchell (pop. approx. 137) in a rugged Eastern Oregon canyon has figured out how to bring in big bucks – sponsor public virtual schools.
Mitchell, Oregon
Since Oregon enacted a charter school law in 1999, virtual charters in the state have spread like a rash, with 20 now offering online courses to some or all grades of K-12 students. Enrollment at the virtual charters in 2022-2023 was 15,711, representing 37.79% of total charter school enrollment.
Charter schools in Oregon, including virtual charters, are publicly funded, so parents don’t pay tuition. Instead, the Oregon Department of Education distributes money from the State School Fund to each school district that sponsors a charter school based upon that school’s enrollment.
Oregon law 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.
While the rest of Oregon school districts sponsoring virtual charter schools sponsor only one, the Mitchell School District is taking full advantage of the funding model, sponsoring three virtual public charter schools with total enrollment of 1054 students in 2022-2023:
Each of the virtual charter schools sponsored by the Mitchell School District contracts for the use of technology and curriculum from K12, a profit-driven Stride Company (NYSE: LRN).
I asked Melissa Hausmann, Head of School at all three schools, for copies of their contracts with K12 to get a better understanding of payments made by the charter schools to K12. Although Oregon Public Records law requires that a public body acknowledge receipt of a public records request within 5 business days of receipt, Hausmann has not responded to repeated requests for the contracts..
Given the voluminous data maintained by the Oregon Department of Education (ODOE), I assumed securing information on the state money going to the Mitchell School District because of its sponsorship of the three virtual charter schools would be a simple request. Accordingly, I asked ODOE:
How much money did the State School Fund distribute to the Mitchell School District for the 2022-2023 school year for each of the three virtual public charter schools the district sponsors?
School district sponsors are allowed to keep a portion of per-pupil funding provided by the state, usually 20% for K-8 schools and 5% for high schools. The rest goes to the charter school. I asked what percentage, and how many dollars, of per pupil funding provided by the state to each of these three schools was retained by the Mitchell School District in the 2022-2023 school year?
Surprisingly, ODOE said it was not the custodian of records that contained the specific information I requested. It suggested I contact the school district directly.
The Oregon Department of Education says it doesn’t know how much it is spending in support of virtual charter schools.
Mitchell School District Superintendent Vincent Swagerty acknowledged that the district had some of the records requested, but said it would cost $800 “to summarize, compile, review and forward these records.”
Oregon’s public records law allows for “reasonably calculated” fees to be imposed for responding to a public records request, but I considered an $800 fee exorbitant, prohibitive and even silly. Was the district really not able to quickly and easily find out. how much money it’s getting from the state in connection with its sponsorship of three virtual charter schools?
So I pursued an alternative, calculating estimated state payments using ODOE guidance on available data posted online by the department. A review of the Mitchell School District’s contracts with the three virtual charter schools then revealed the percentages of state school fund money passed on to the virtual charter schools.
Those calculations led to a rough estimate that the Mitchell School District retained the astonishing amount of approximately $727,000 of the state school fund money it received because of its sponsorship of the three virtual charter schools in the 2020-2021 school year.
The estimated total broke down as follows:
INSIGHT SCHOOL OF OREGON – PAINTED HILLS
The state sent an estimated $3,777,660 to the Mitchell School District. An estimated $130,656 (20% of the state’s money for students in grades 7-8) and $156,773 (5% of the state’s money for students in grades 9-12) was retained by the Mitchell School District. The remaining $3,392,445 went to Insight.
CASCADE VIRTUAL ACADEMY
The state sent an estimated $7,622,080 to the Mitchell School District. An estimated $357,764 (5% of the state’s money) was retained by the Mitchell School District. The remaining $6,797,516 (95% of the state’s money) went to Cascade.
DESTINATIONS CAREER ACADEMYOF OREGON
The state sent an estimated $1,681,164 to the Mitchell School District. An estimated $84,058 (5% of the state’s money) was retained by the Mitchell School District. The remaining $1,597,105 (95% of the state’s money) went to Destinations.
Estimate of $ retained by the Mitchell School District in 2020-2021
From Insight contract: $287,429
From Cascade contract: $357,764
From Destinations contract: $84,058
TOTAL: $729,251
Does the Mitchell School District agree with these numbers?
I asked Superintendent Swagerty. He responded that he had accepted a position in a new school district and referred me to two officials from the Mitchell School District. Neither responded to my follow-up inquiry spelling out estimated payments retained by the Mitchell School District in the 2020-2021 school year..
Whether or not my calculations are on the money, is the Mitchell School District using Oregon’s charter schools law as a cash cow to generate revenue for minimal effort?
Are the estimated 2020-2021 revenue numbers typical of annual payments retained by the Mitchell School District?
Does this put conservatives who oppose reckless government spending, but support school choice, in a quandary?
Are the district, the virtual charter schools and K12 in a parasitic relationship, each feeding off the other and Oregon taxpayers?
Is the funneling of so many taxpayer dollars to public school districts sponsoring virtual charter schools what the legislature intended with the charter school law?
For that matter, is it acceptable that the Oregon Department of Education, which dispenses millions of taxpayer dollars to school districts sponsoring virtual public charter schools, can’t, or won’t, tell the public precisely how much money it is sending to the sponsoring districts, how much those districts are keeping for themselves and how much they are sending on to the charter schools? Is that responsible governance?
The time has come for oversight that ensures public money is meeting its public purpose.
And then, of course, there’s the question of whether the taxpayer-supported virtual public charter schools are a public good in any case.
A June 2023 analysis from the US Census Bureau linked statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. “Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor’s degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools,” the study concluded. “Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.”
BACKGROUND
Insight School of Oregon
Insight opened its doors in Oregon in 2012 as Insight School of Oregon Charter Option sponsored by the Crook County School District in Central Oregon. To operate the school, its board contracted with K12, Virtual Schools LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of publicly traded for-profit K12 Inc. (LRN:NYSE] ). Insight’s Oregon headquarters was located in a nondescript one-story office building at 603 NW. 3rd St. in Prineville.
In its first three years, Insight’s K-12 enrollment grew to more than 500 students from around the state.
But all was not well.
K12 Inc. argued that. its education program was “proven effective,” but the numbers told a different story to the Crook County School District. Even though the district netted $231,592 in the first year of its contract with Insight and $436,554 in the second, it began to have serious reservations about continuing the relationship.
In Nov. 2014, the Crook County School District sent a blistering letter to Insight expressing grave concerns about the school’s operations and academic performance. School Superintendent Dr. Duane Yecha and school board Chair Doug Smith told the school they had major concerns about Insight’s: inadequate tracking of student attendance and enrollment; academic achievement; poor test participation; low four-year graduation rate (16.18 percent in 2013-2014); and failure to meet financial requirements stipulated in the district’s contract with Insight.
“…these issues have given the district reason to consider whether Insight is able to meet its ongoing obligations under the Charter Agreement and under ORS Chapter 338,” the letter said.
In 2015, even though the district was set to net $480,710 from its sponsorship of Insight in the 2014 – 2015 school year, it decided not to renew the sponsorship.
So Insight went shopping.
It quickly found a new partner, signing a sponsorship contract with the Mitchell School District 55 on April 29, 2015. The district had just one school serving a few local kids, some teens from around Oregon and a few international high students from Germany, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The international and regional students all lived in a school dormitory at the school.
With a new sponsor in hand, Insight changed to a grade 7-12 school and renamed itself Insight School of Oregon – Painted Hills.
Another change was the financial arrangements. Under its contract with the Crook County School District, Insight had agreed to the district keeping 5 percent of the State School Fund money it received for Insight students in grades 9-12 and 20 percent of what it received for kindergarten-8 students. Under the new contract with the Mitchell School District, the district agreed to keep just 10 percent of the total State School Fund money.
Destinations Career Academy of Oregon
Destinations Career Academy of Oregon, a full-time online public charter school authorized by the Mitchell School District, began its inaugural school year on September 4, 2018. It initially served students in grades 9-11, expanding to offer 12th grade for the 2019-20 academic year.
As part of the Oregon public school system, Destinations Career Academy is tuition-free, providing parents and families the choice to access the curriculum provided by K12 Inc. (NYSE: LRN) a provider of K-12 proprietary curriculum and online education programs.
Cascade Virtual Academy
Cascade Virtual Academy, a full-time online public charter school, began its inaugural school year sponsored by the Mitchell School District on September 4, 2018, offering a tuition-free to option students statewide in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Confusingly, there is also a Cascade Virtual Academy based in Aumsville, Oregon that provides a comprehensive online education for students in grades six through 12 who live within Cascade School District #5. The district , which operates six schools, serves approximately 2,500 students living in Aumsville, Turner, and Marion, Oregon.
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.
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.
Political parties “…are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government…” said George Washington.
Washington may have preferred that the United States go forward with no parties, but since we’ve got them, the next best thing is to prevent one-party rule that strangles wise and fearless public policy and emboldens the perpetual winners.
That’s where Oregon has failed over a long time and all at once.
The Shemia Fagan scandal is just the latest illustration of rot in the body politic.
Secretary of State Fagan wouldn’t have signed up for a $10,000 a month consulting contract with Aaron Mitchell and Rosa Cazarest, owners of the La Mota chain of cannabis dispensaries, if she hadn’t thought she could get away with it. The cannabis entrepreneurs are, after all, high-profile Democratic donors.
Before the Fagan scandal erupted, the Democratic recipients of La Mota funds happily accepted them. Willamette Week’s Sophie Peel did some spade work, revealing La Mota contributions to the following Democrats:
Gov. Tina Kotek – $68,365
Secretary of State Shemia Fagan – $45,000
Senate President Rob Wagner (D-Lake Oswego) – $12,500
Senate Democratic Leadership Fund – $10,000
State Treasurer Tobias Read – $1,800
Rep. Andrea Valderrama (D-Portland) – $500
Labor Commissioner Christina Stephenson – $7,500
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson – $1,000
Rep. Dacia Grayber (D-Tigard) – $1,000
Rep. Hoa Nguyen (D-Portland) – $500
Rep. Annessa Hartman (D-Gladstone) – $500
Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt – $2,000
U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer – $3,500
Prior to the Fagan scandal, none of the Democrats who were recipients of La Mota money were apparently bothered by the fact the company was failing to pay its bills and taxes, according to an investigation by Willamette Week. Only after the Fagan scandal erupted did Democrats decide campaign contributions from La Mota were dirty money and scrambled to show their purity by pledging to donate those contributions to other worthy charitable causes.
Oregon’s Democratic Party also wouldn’t be so cavalier about all the campaign contributions it took from disgraced executives at FTX, the now bankrupt crypto company if they didn’t think they could get off scot free.
In their unbridled pursuit of power, Tina Kotek and the Democratic Party of Oregon chose to keep company with Nishad Singh, the 27-year-old wunderkind director of engineering at FTX. They welcomed his $500,000 contribution to the party’s campaign coffers in 2022.
But the wheels of justice have turned since Singh made the contribution. On Feb. 28, 2023, he pleaded guilty to six criminal counts, including conspiring to commit securities and commodities fraud, during a hearing in federal court in Manhattan.
He also pleaded guilty to defrauding the U.S. in a campaign-finance scheme in which he made illegal donations to political-action committees and candidates using funds from disgraced cyypto manager Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund Alameda Research.
John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, wants the $500,000 back, but the Democratic Party of Oregon has so far refused.
Fagan’s behavior is also reminiscent of the sudden downfall of Jennifer Williamson, a former House majority leader and a leading contender to be Oregon’s next secretary of state in 2020. Williamson suddenly dropped out of the race, attributing her action to a forthcoming story in Willamette Week about questionable expenditures of campaign funds when she served in the House.
Then there was Democrat Governor John Kitzhaber, who resigned in February 2015 amid a growing influence-peddling scandal involving him and his fiancee, Cylvia Hayes, becoming the state’s first governor to resign in disgrace.
Gov. Kitzhaber and Cilvia Hayes
Kitzhaber ‘s resignation came in the face of a state criminal investigation and a string of demands from top state officials to step down.
There have also been questionable actions by other Democratic leaders.
At one extreme, there was Neil Goldschmidt, a former governor, former Secretary of Transportation under President Jimmy Carter and ex-mayor of Portland. Goldschmidt, while Portland’s mayor during the mid-1970s, had sex on many occasions with a 14-year-old girl. Goldschmidt tried to define his actions as “an affair”.
He started having sex with the girl when he was 35 and married. She was a babysitter for his young children and the daughter of a neighbor who worked in his office.
A key element tying all these scandals together is the long Democratic rule in Oregon. It has led too many in the party to act with impunity, just as Richard J. Daily and the Democratic political machine ran Chicago with bare-knuckle politics for 21 years as dozens of politicians fed on the city’s political corruption.
Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1982, when Gov. Vic Atiyeh won re-election. Republican s have also failed to achieve majorities in the Senate and House for ages.
Oregon has been ill-served by the concentration of political power in Democrat’s hands for so long that the party has an overpowering stench to it. As former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) put it, “Unchecked power pushes parties to excess regardless of which party is in power.”
In Oregon, it’s been the Democrats for far too long.
Gov. Tina Kotek has taken every opportunity to wax eloquent about the promise of legislation she signed on April 13, 2022 to attract semiconductor-related investment and good-paying jobs to Oregon.
“This bill is an absolutely essential tool for leading a coordinated effort with the private sector to ensure we can compete for federal funds to expand advanced manufacturing in Oregon,” Kotek said in a news release. “We are poised to lay the foundation for the next generation of innovation and production of semiconductors.”
She’s been less forthcoming about exactly how she intends to implement the legislation.
Under Oregon’s innovative statewide land use planning program, created in 1973 with passage of the Oregon Land Use Act (SB 100), each of the state’s cities and metropolitan areas has created an urban growth boundary around its perimeter – a land use planning line to control urban expansion onto farm and forest lands.
Senate Bill 4 granted Kotek a blank check to bring some plots of land into Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, changing land use restrictions at her whim, to entice investment in Oregon’s semiconductor industry.Kotek will be able to designate up to eight sites, including two more than 500 acres in size, for manufacturing facilities.
In an April 21 KGW-TV interview on Straight Talk with Laurel Porter, Porter asked, “If somebody doesn’t want to sell, will the state be able to take that land?” A skilled politician, Kotek sidestepped the question, saying it isn’t yet clear yet whether land outside the current urban growth boundary will need to be accessed.
Of equal or greater consequence, Kotek has also been less than forthcoming about whether she would use her authority under the legislation to site data centers.
Data centers house networked computers, storage systems and computing infrastructure that organizations use to assemble, process, store and disseminate large amounts of data. Enterprise data centers increasingly incorporate facilities for securing and protecting cloud computing resources and in-house, on-site resources.
Senate Bill 4 says the governor can designate land that relates “to the semiconductor industry, advanced manufacturing or the supply chain for semiconductors or advanced manufacturing.”
Seeking to clarify the governor’s intentions, I asked her office, “Does the governor interpret this to mean the bill would allow her to designate sites to be used for data centers?”
The governor’s office asked me to give them a date/time I was seeking a response by and I did so. After that, crickets.
Repeated requests for a response drew a blank.
The question deserves a clear answer from the governor.
In my view, the legislature did not intend to give the governor authority to commandeer sites for data centers, which already enjoy substantial financial subsidies and access to abundant water and energy. Any attempt to do so should be aggressively challenged.
The primary motivations behind Senate Bill 4 were to secure not only investment, but also a sizable number of high-paying jobs to bolster Oregon’s economy.
If there’s one thing data center investments do not bring, it is an abundance of high-paying jobs.
The cavernous highly automated data centers that have been proliferating in Hillsboro and elsewhere in Oregon are mostly devoid of people.
Intel’s multiple campuses in Hillsboro and Aloha serve approximately 22,000 employees, the company’s largest concentration of facilities and talent in the world, and likely an equal number of contract workers.
In contrast, while Hillsboro is considered one of the fastest growing data center markets in the country, workers at the centers are sparse.
For example, The Oregonian reported earlier this year that Twitter employs only 18 people at its Hillsboro data center while Digital Realty Trust’s data center had just three Hillsboro employees.
Not only are data centers underpopulated, the workers in them are not generally highly paid. While the average annual wage of Intel Oregon employees exceeds $132,000, the average annual wage of data center technicians in Oregon is $46,800 per year for entry level positions and $62,400 for the most experienced workers, according to Talent.com.
In other words, the last thing Oregon needs is for Gov. Kotek to bypass Oregon’s land use laws to attract more massive data centers that gobble up even more land..
And she needs to make it clear now that she will not do so.
Parents of Oregon’s K-12 public school students are between a rock and a hard place. Stay with their faltering public school or push for more school choice.
As a whole, it’s a dark moment for Oregon’s public schools:
One of every five Oregon high school students don’t graduate in four years.
A depressingly small percentage of Oregon students in grades 4 and 8 tested at a proficient level or higher in mathematics and reading in 2022 in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Severe mental health challenges and behavioral issues have ramped up in schools as students have shifted from online to hybrid learning and back to in-classroom learning.
Oregon’s young people have been abandoning public schools at an distressing rate. Enrollment declined 3.7%. in the 2020-2021 school year, another 1.4% in the 2021-2022 school year and 0.1% in the 2022-2023 school year. Public school enrollment statewide dropped by more than 30,000 students, or 5%, from October 2019 to October 2022 statewide, the second highest in the country, according to Stanford University. Only Mississippi, not a state we want to envy, lost a larger share.
Conservative public policy research organizations such as the Portland-based Cascade Policy Institute, say the time is ripe for more school choice.
“Oregon families urgently need more options so they can find the right fit for their children to learn effectively and safely,” says Cascade. “Traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, online learning, private and parochial schools, homeschooling, and tutoring are all paths to success for students.”
The frustration many parents have with Oregon’s underperforming public schools is understandable as well.
As a conservative, it’s tempting to unreservedly join the school choice chorus and to think that going full speed ahead in broadening school choice will calm down the tempest and enhance learning.
But some caution is needed.
The problem is that for all the handwringing about traditional brick-and-mortar public schools by school choice evangelists, they too often fail to acknowledge that the “do your own thing” alternatives aren’t necessarily better. And some are worse, much worse.
No matter how bad some public schools are, the fact is bad teachers, weak curriculum. incompetence and sloth are not found just in public brick-and-mortar schools.
Options school choice advocates usually trumpet include public brick-and-mortar charter schools, public online charter schools, private schools and homeschooling.
There are currently 133 public charter schools serving 46,275 students in Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Education. Of those, 102 are physical brick-and-mortar schools and 31 are virtual/online/cyber schools.
Under Oregon law, a charter school is a separate legal entity operating under a binding agreement with a school district sponsor. Charter schools in Oregon, including online charters, are publicly funded, so parents don’t pay tuition. Instead, the Oregon Department of Education distributes State School Fund money to each school district that sponsors a charter school.
Unfortunately, the performance of Oregon’s charter schools is all over the map in terms of tested proficiency in key areas, graduation rates, parent satisfaction and other criteria.
For example, at Oregon Charter Academy (formerly Oregon Connections Academy), a heavily advertised online charter school sponsored by the Santiam Canyon School District, just 35.1% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 54.6% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 51.4% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
Some other online public charter schools in Oregon are much worse.
At Cascade Virtual Academy, an online charter school sponsored by the Mitchell School District, just 21.7% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 35.2% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 24.8% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
The experiences of many Oregon children during the pandemic also revealed that exclusive online schooling led to depression, undue stress, low levels of social inclusion, anxiety and learning losses for many students.
Oregon’s brick-and-mortar charters have an uneven record as well.
For example, at The Academy for Character Education, a K-12 public charter school in Cottage Grove, 58% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 63.8% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 48.8% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
In contrast, at the Ione Community Charter School, a K-12 public Charter school in Ione, just 26.8% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 40.8% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 13.3% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
The same variability in quality exists with private schools in Oregon.
At private schools, parents, not the state, pay the bills. There are 483 private schools serving 57,768 K-12 students in Oregon, with about half religiously affiliated (most commonly Christian and Catholic) according to Private School Review.
The Cascade Policy Institute, which asserts that the K-12 public school system is a “dysfunctional government school monopoly,” wants to establish an Empowerment Scholarship Account program under which a portion of state-level education fundingwould be converted to portable accounts for students to use wherever they want, which would benefit private schools.
Cascade praises a new Arkansas law which creates Educational Freedom Accounts for all K-12 students, to be phased in by 2026. Individuals choosing a Freedom Account will get 90% of what public schools get per student in state funding from the previous school year, equal to $6,600 for the current year. They can spend this money on private school tuition, textbooks, tutoring, and other approved educational expenses.
But “private” does not automatically mean “superior”. The academic performance of private schools can vary widely and it can be hard to pin down their performance because they are not required to participate in statewide testing.
So parents take their chances when they send their children to private schools.
School choice could become an even more contentious issue in Oregon if there’s pressure to provide taxpayer dollars to religious schools.
Wisconsin, Iowa and Utah already offer vouchers to parents to enroll their children in approved private and religious schools. An effort is also underway in Oklahoma to extend publicly paid vouchers to online religious schools. The Catholic Church in Oklahoma City and Tulsa wants to create St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the country’s first publicly-funded religious charter school.
For many Oregon parents, the preferred alternative to public or private schools is homeschooling.
Oregon law (ORS 339.035) allows a child (between ages 6, and 18, grades 1-12) to be taught by a parent, guardian, or private teacher in the child’s home. Homeschool families may choose their own curriculum, and may use the Oregon’s Academic Content Standards to guide their instruction; however, there is no requirement to adhere to Oregon academic standards.
Oregon education officials estimate that most of the more than 20,000 students in Oregon who are not in public schools are being homeschooled, about 40% more than in 2019, before the pandemic moved classes online.
Parents of students between the ages of 6-18 are supposed to notify their local Education Service District (ESD) of their intent to home school within 10 days of beginning to home school, but compliance is not comprehensive.
A homeschooler is expected to take standardized testing by August 15 of the summer following the completion of 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 10th grades, as long as the child has been homeschooled since at least February 15 of the year preceding testing (18 months before the test deadline).
The required tests include grade-level math (concepts, application, skills), reading (comprehension), and language (writing, spelling/grammar, punctuation, etc.)
With the above information, you might think that public oversight of homeschoolers is comparable to that of public school because the state knows how all homeschooled students are performing. You’d be wrong.
As Earthsong Homeschool says, “Homeschooling in Oregon is easy. There are no laws specifying record keeping, attendance, or mandatory subjects. You do not need a college degree or teaching degree to teach your child. You register your child as homeschooled and test every few years. It’s that easy. In Oregon, you do not have to use grade level curriculum. Your child does not have to do what their public-school counter parts are doing.”
Homeschooled students are not required to take common standardized tests that measure academic progress. They can opt out, and many of them do.
Homeschoolers’ tests are also scored on a percentile, so the score a child gets represents how many people taking the same test got a lower score. In other words, the scores don’t represent how well the child knows the material, only how well the child performs relative to every other homeschooler taking the test. Even then, if a child scores at the 15th percentile or above, then the ESD simply files the report and there’s no follow-up.
Homeschoolers also don’t have to report their scores to anybody unless their education service district (ESD) asks for them. But the state cares so little about how these children are doing that ESDs almost never request test scores, according to the Oregon Department of Education.
Not that it would make much difference if ESDs did request the scores.
That’s because homeschoolers only need to report their composite percentile score. This is an almost useless single percentile representing a child’s performance on all three subjects together. It’s almost as though the state doesn’t really want to know how homeschoolers are doing.
Earthsong points out that Oregon homeschooling parents “can even legally be radical unschoolers”, relying on a child’s innate curiosity and desire to learn by not following any set homeschool curriculum.
Psychologist Peter Gray, author of “Free to Learn,” wrote in Psychology Today that unschooling parents “allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests,”
Unschooling advocate Akilah Richards frames it as a social justice practice, defining unschooling as a “child-trusting, anti-oppression, liberatory love-centered approach to parenting and caregiving.”
Critics of unschooling assert that it ignores research on the benefits of direct instruction for mastering skills in math and reading, which can leave children without basic literacy or numeracy skills, and is correlated with higher rates of drug use, delinquency, social isolation, and poor academic performance.
So, what to do?
As King Mongkut reluctantly cries in the play, The King and I, “Tiz a puzzlement!”
There is some validity to the view that the traditional public school system in the United States, a monopoly financed by taxes whether or not your child attends, and a one‐size‐fits‐all approach that doesn’t respond to the needs of diverse students, provides few incentives to innovate or respond to families’ needs.
It’s also true that opinion on public education is souring, with Americans now giving lower grades to schools both locally and nationally than before the pandemic. Today, only about one in five Americans give the nation’s schools an A or B. Last year, Gallup found public satisfaction with K-12 schools was at its lowest level in more than 20 years.
In a June 2022 poll, Gallup found that only 13 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. public schools.
A shift to an education system that offers more choices could drive quality improvements in traditional public schools, because there would be a financial incentive for them to retain students.
Broader school choice would also allow parents to seek educational institutions that fit their children’s needs better than their traditional public schools.
“A universal (school choice) program would generate enough demand for robust market entry in the long run, meaning more choices for all families,” argues the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank. “If parents do not perceive that certain schools or services will be appropriate for their children, they will not choose them—enticing schools to improve or force them to close down. The schools that are a quality match for many children will be financially rewarded and expand in the long run.”
“If the primary school choice mechanism is the supply of high‐quality schools, we should allow the market to determine which institutions are high quality,” says the Cato Institute. “The choices of individual parents, rather than bureaucrats, can determine which schools remain open and which ones close.”
Clearly, it’s criminal to keep children in lousy underfunded public schools with lousy teachers and lousy administrators, and with no ability to opt out, to choose a better alternative.
But let’s not fool ourselves. More choices could mean a further splintering of the body politic.
A shift to an education system that offers a multitude of taxpayer-funded choices could end up shattering efforts to foster national identity and rich common values that foster mutual respect and active citizenship.
As Kwame Anthony Appiah, a British-American philosopher and writer, put it in a graduation address at the University oi Pennsylvania, education is “a means both to foster the autonomy of the child—the capacities to make his way in the world—and to promote the welfare of the polity.”
If American parents all “do their own thing”, as many school choice evangelists advocate, the divisiveness and polarization inflicting American society today is likely to increase and we’ll become even more atomised.
Disadvantaged and vulnerable children may also be shortchanged in the maelstrom. And as more children are taught only what their parents want them to learn, shared values will erode. School choice shouldn’t be a license for parents to handicap their children. America has an interest, after all, in an educated populace.
In short, the pell-mell rush toward more school choices will not be an unalloyed good if it undermines academic achievement, community, justice, common principles, mutual respect and political coexistence.
All this suggests teacher unions, parents and the legislature need to move forward with care if Oregon’s children are to be well-served in their education.
Oregon’s legislature seems to be hell bent on ceding its authority to the governor. That’s a mistake.
Senate Bill 4, signed by the governor on April 13, granted Kotek a blank check to bring some plots of land into Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, changing land use restrictions at her whim, to entice investment in Oregon’s semiconductor industry.Kotek will be able to designate up to eight sites, including two more than 500 acres in size, for manufacturing facilities.
The usual tension between legislative bodies and executive branches of government is because legislatures insist on jealously guarding their authority in the separation of powers. Separation of powers, coined by the 18th century philosopher Montesquieu, refers to the division of government responsibilities into distinct branches to limit any one branch from exercising the core functions of another. The intent is to prevent the concentration of power and provide for checks and balances.
Separation of powers issues usually arise at the federal level, where constitutional scholars have long been arguing that Congress has been negligent in ceding powers to the Executive. As Brian McKeon and Caroline Tess have written in Foreign Affairs, “A Congress that delegates its powers or consistently acquiesces in the face of executive action not only ignores that invitation; it abdicates its responsibilities.”
But as the National Conference of State Legislatures has written,”There is an inherent measure of competition and conflict among the branches of government,” so state conflicts can arise as well.
Under Oregon’s innovative statewide land use planning program, created in 1973 with passage of the Oregon Land Use Act (SB 100), each of the state’s cities and metropolitan areas has created an urban growth boundary around its perimeter – a land use planning line to control urban expansion onto farm and forest lands.
“These (land use) regulations have resulted in 50 years of success protecting our farm and forest lands, containing urban sprawl, and protecting natural resources. Senate Bill 4 throws that out the window,” Republican state Rep. Anna Scharf has observed.
Republican state Rep. Ed Diehl expressed similar concern, saying, “I cannot in good conscience give the governor what is essentially a super-siting authority to take lands and bring them into the urban growth boundary. That is not the Oregon way.”
No, it’s not.
The desire of some of Oregon’s legislators to attract investment and good-paying jobs associated with the semiconductor industry is valid and worth pursuing with wise legislative action. But giving so much power to the governor is an unwise move that legislators will regret.
When a piece of legislation is flawed from the get-go, fiddling with it is fruitless.
Oregon’s Senate Committee on Housing and Development voted on April 3 to amend a rent control bill (SB 611) and send it to the Senate floor for a vote.
The original bill capped rent increases at 8%, or 3% plus the consumer price index, at buildings more than 3 years old. An amendment changed that to 10% or 5% plus the consumer price index.
But the problem isn’t the percentages. The problem is that rent control doesn’t work. Any short-term benefits, including the applause of some constituents, are always overshadowed by the long-term problems rent control creates.
In a review of 140 economics studies on rent control in Economics Journal Watch, economists overwhelmingly agreed that, “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” From the abstract: “I find that the preponderance of the literature points toward the conclusion that rent control introduces inefficiencies in housing markets. Moreover, the literature on the whole does not sustain any plausible redemption in terms of redistribution.”
Oregon foolishly started down this road in 2019 with a law prohibiting landlords across the state from raising rents more than 7 percent per year, plus the annual change in the consumer price index (CPI) at buildings more than 15 years old. Now, rather than abandon the whole idea, Democrats in the Senate, backed up by tenant groups, continue to ignore economic realities.
Potentially compounding the problem, the legislature is considering House Bill 3503 which would allow cities and counties across the state to enact their own rent control laws.
In testimony submitted to the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness, Ariel Nelson, a lobbyist for the League of Oregon Cities, endorsed the bill, arguing, “The current state preemption prevents local governments from enacting rent control policies that are tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of their communities. Local governments are closer to their communities, more responsive, and are able to act more quickly. HB 3503 will provide local governments with a critical tool to address the affordable housing crisis for their residents.”
But, as with SB 611, the measure would likely do more to hamper than stimulate the construction of more affordable housing in Oregon.
As Deborah Imse, Executive Director of Multifamily NW told the committee, “… this legislation opens the door for 417 municipalities to enact their own rent control. That is 417 different sets of requirements that not only do nothing to address the underlying cause of rising rents, but create a regulatory hellscape for housing providers in every corner of the state. That is arguably irresponsible state policy and simply not sustainable for any housing provider, large or small.”
But, hey, what do Democrats care. No matter how compelling the case against rent control, advocates can position themselves as saviors against the forces of evil. And that can translate into votes.
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