Tag Archives: Portland Association of Teachers

by - 0 comments

Are Oregon Teachers Underpaid ?

When educators from across the Portland Public Schools (PPS) district’s 81 schools began their strike on Nov. 1, they had a lengthy list of demands, with a focus on teacher salaries.

“As costs have risen here, teachers’ salaries haven’t kept up,” the National Education Association asserted in a news release supporting the PPS strike.

Data suggests, however, that Portland’s teachers were actually doing fairly well in comparison with other teachers across the country, though there is no question inflation has eroded their financial position. The same is true of Oregon teachers in general.

During the strike, PPS said the average salary for a Portland teacher was $87,000; the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) union said it was about $83,000.  Pay can vary widely depending on multiple factors, including amount of education, certifications, additional skills, and the number of years spent in the profession.

PAT also raised concerns about pay for new teachers, with the lowest annual base salary in the district for a teacher with a BA starting at $50,020.

When the strike began, PAT wanted a 23% cost-of-living adjustment over three years; PPS offered about 11%. In the new contract, educators will receive a 14.4% compounded increase over the next three years (6.25% the first year, 4.5% the second and 3% the third) and about half of all educators will also earn a 10.6% bump from yearly step increases.

To get a handle on how all this translates into actual dollars, I asked PPS and PAT for their numbers on the current average and median salaries of educators in the district and what they expect the average and median salaries of teachers will be in the first year of the new contract?

PAT never responded. PPS responded to an initial request with a commitment to provide the data. Repeated follow-ups, however, brought nothing but excuses for the delay. Eventually my entreaties just went into a black hole. So much for public accountability.

In 2018, The Oregonian reported that in 2016-17, the average Oregon teacher made nearly $61,900 a year, higher than the national average of $59,700. Oregon ranked 13th highest for average teacher pay among the 50 states. “Oregon teachers have long been better compensated than most of their peers around the country,” the paper reported. 

In 2023, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the average Oregon teacher made $70,402 a year, higher than the national average of $66,745, and again Oregon ranked 13th highest for average teacher pay among the 50 states.

In other words, Oregon has actually been holding its own in average salaries, although the numbers for starting teacher pay are not as favorable for Oregon.

In 2023, the average salary for a starting teacher in Oregon with a bachelor’s degree and no experience was $40,374 (31st in the US, where the average was $42,844). Under the PPS contract with PAT, the salary for a starting teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience in 2023 was $50,020.

Averages, however, can be deceiving. Very high or very low salaries can skew the numbers. Median compensation represents a more accurate picture of how much Portland’s teachers are being paid, but neither PPS nor PAT agreed to provide median salary numbers.

The Oregon Center for Public Policy, a progressive economic research organization, argues that Oregon public school teachers are underpaid by about 22%. Even after accounting for the more generous benefits earned by public school teachers, the Center claims Oregon public school teachers are underpaid by about 9%. 

But the analysis is not based on compensation for other teachers. Rather, the Center claims Oregon teachers are underpaid “relative to comparable private-sector workers (in Oregon)…with similar levels of education and experience”.  The claim that public-school teachers endure a salary penalty with this comparison is dubious.

Less dubious was PAT’s assertion before the strike that recent inflation has eroded teachers’ wage gains over time. 

In an annual report that ranked and analyzed teacher salaries by state, the NEA estimated that the national average teacher salary for the 2021-22 school year was $66,397 — a 1.7 percent increase from the previous year. But when adjusted for inflation, the average teacher salary actually decreased by an estimated 3.9 percent over the last decade. 

In other words, teachers were making $2,179 less, on average, than they did 10 years earlier when the salaries are adjusted for inflation. A similar NEA report issued in 2023 concluded that teachers made on average $3,644 less than they did 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

However, comparing over a longer period, the average Oregon teacher’s salary in 1970 was $8,818. Inflation adjusted, that figure would have been $66,509.99 in 2022. In other words, although there has been a decrease in inflation-adjusted pay in recent years, average teacher salaries in Oregon have kept up with inflation over the long term. 

 

by - 0 comments

Portland’s Striking Teachers and Their Union Leaders are at Escalating Risk of Losing Public Support.

 Portland, Oregon, long a bastion of anything-goes progressivism, can’t take this strike much longer. 

 Facts are stubborn things. A city still recovering from the pandemic, buffeted by economic uncertainty and battered by homelessness, proliferating graffiti, rampant drug use and crime, simply can’t afford to keep its kids home.

The union says it’s fighting for the children, but they will have missed 14 days of classes by Thanksgiving and may miss more. 

This in a district which is already struggling with high rates of student absenteeism. In the 2022-2023 school year, 36.4% of the district’s students were “chronically absent”, absent for more than 10% of the academic year. Chronic absentee rates were 52.9% for Black/African American students, 48% for Hispanic/Latino students, 66.1% for American Indian/Alaska Native students, 59.9% for Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 31.4% for white students and 22.7% for Asian students.

“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.”

And then there’s the performance of Portland Public Schools kids on state subject competency tests, likely already exacerbated by high absenteeism. Although mostly better than statewide results, they are still disappointing, often showing declining scores as children move through the system. 

At Portland’s elementary schools, for example, 56% of tested students met or exceeded state standards in math in the 3rd grade in 2023, while just 40% met or exceeded state standards in the 8thth grade, 55% met or exceeded English standards in the 3rd grade compared with 54% in the 8th grade and 44% met the standards in science in the 5th grade versus 38% in the 8th grade. 

At the district’s high schools, just 27% of 11th graders met or exceeded state standards in Math, 50% met or exceeded the standards in English and 39% met or exceeded the standards in science.

Of course, all this probably matters less now that the State Board of Education unanimously voted to extend the 2021 law that paused a requirement that Oregon students show proficiency in Essential Learning Skills in order to graduate.

The District’s teachers also need to confront a public perception that a massive amount of money is already being plowed into the troubled system. 

Taxpayers are already spending an astronomical amount to support Portland Public Schools, as I pointed earlier this year in The Cost of Sending Kids to Portland Public Schools is More Than You Think, a Lot More. The commonly used number for spending per student is $15,000, but that’s actually way off. All funds available to the District in the 2022-23 school year totaled $1.9 billion. Divide that by 41,470 students and per student expenditures came out to $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 of 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. 

How can the union expect spending to keep increasing in the face of enrollment declines.  

Portland residents also aren’t likely to look more favorably on higher taxes or fees to help the district as the strike continues.  Portland’s income tax rate of 14.7% for earners is already second only to New York City, largely because of resident’s previous misguided willingness to support innumerable feel-good programs. Portland’s rate is even more punitive when you consider that an individual hits that high earner mark in Portland at $125,000, while a New York taxpayer would have to earn $25 million.

The Portland Metro Chamber recently noted that total taxes paid by businesses located in the City of Portland increased by about one-third, or from $781 million to $1.031 billion, just from 2019 to 2021, according to calculations by the global tax consultancy Ernst & Young.

Key changes during that three-year period, included implementation of a gross receipts tax for the Portland Clean Energy Fund, a property tax to fund city parks, a rate increase in the Multnomah County business tax, an income tax to support Preschool for All (paid in part by sole proprietors), property taxes for Multnomah County library renovations, and new business and personal taxes associated with Metro’s Supportive Housing Services measure.

The Preschool for All program, for example, is funded by a personal income tax based on the following thresholds:

  • Single taxpayers. All Oregon taxable income over $125,000 is taxed at 1.5%. All income above $250,000 is taxed at 3%. In 2026, the tax rate increases by 0.8%
  • Joint filers. All Oregon taxable income over $200,000 is taxed at 1.5%. All income above $400,000 is taxed at 3%. In 2026, the tax rate increases by 0.8%.

“Portland’s higher level of business taxation dates to the enactment of corporate income taxes levied by the City of Portland and Multnomah County in 1981,” the Chamber said. “ These local-level business income taxes are not common in other cities across the U.S.”

If the Portland Association of Teachers hopes to come out of this with continuing public support, teachers need to get back too work and kids need to get back in class. Parent and student patience is not inexhaustible. 

by - 0 comments

A Lesson for the Portland Association of Teachers

The Portland Association of Teachers isn’t going to get what it wants.

Voters in Salem just signalled why.

On Tuesday, Nov. 7, Salem voters smashed to smithereens a proposed payroll tax passed by the city council in July. 

A total of 82.14% of voters rejected the tax, which would have applied to anyone who worked in Salem, including people commuting into the city from elsewhere.

The fact is, voters are worried about their well-being and in no mood to bear increased government spending. Across the board, they feel that their incomes are being eroded by inflation, that their pay raises aren’t keeping up with inflation, and that their hard-earned living standards are threatened.

The teachers union says it’s on strike “for our students” and insists that the public is behind it. Before the strike, the union trumpeted the results of a poll it sponsored that found Oregonians were inclined to stand with educators and supported teacher strikes, especially in the Portland School District.

I don’t think the teachers can count on that support if it means more money out of the public’s pockets.

After all, taxpayers are already spending an astronomical amount to support Portland Public Schools. As I wrote earlier this year, The Cost of Sending Kids to Portland Public Schools is More Than You Think, a Lot More. The commonly used number for spending per student is $15,000, but that’s actually way off. All funds available to the District in the 2022-23 school year totaled $1.9 billion. Divide that by 41,470 students and per student expenditures came out to $45,533. That’s right, $45,533.

The state’s politicians, including the governor, have figured this out and have made it clear the state won’t bail out the district. And rightly so.  As OPB has noted, “It would be unusual — and scandalous in many corners of the state — for the Legislature to find a special pool of money just for Portland schools, particularly since other districts face similar issues.”

Multnomah County residents aren’t likely to look favorably on higher taxes or fees to help the district either. Multnomah County already has the highest marginal tax rates in the United States because of resident’s previous misguided willingness to support innumerable feel good programs. 

“I’m sure that when the voters in Multnomah County supported all of those different proposals and programs, they did it with good intent. But collectively, every time that we vote for an increase, particularly in marginal income tax, that definitely has a dampening impact on investment in our community,” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said earlier this year.

Multnomah County has already seen people vote with their feet against rising taxes. 

The county lost population in the year ended July 1, 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau said in its annual report on county-level changes. The county’s population stood at 795,083 on July 1, 2022, down 12,494 (1.3%) from 805,593 a year earlier. This followed a similar decline in 2021. 

Then, of course, the teacher’s union has to recognize that they want more money when the number of students in the system is declining. Enrollment numbers in the Portland Public School District have been dropping every year since 2019, with the biggest loss of students at the elementary school level. No business would give in to demands for higher pay if its sales were dropping like a stone. 

by - 0 comments

Lars Larson Got It Wrong On Portland Public Schools


Conservative radio host Lars Larsen missed the mark.

In an Oct. 24 column about the impending strike by Portland Public School teachers, Larson said the district “… spends 15-thousand bucks, per student, per year.” 

He’s off by a mile.

I’m not surprised, though, that he used the $15,000 figure. That number is frequently cited in news stories. It is also close to the number put out by the National Center for Education Statistics, which estimates the per pupil expenditure in Oregon’s K-12 public schools for 2019-2020 was $14,829.[1]

Earlier this year I asked the Portland Public School District if that number still holds. The district said the average of budgeted per pupil expenditures for next year (2023-2024) is actually $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. “

So, is Larson’s number too high? is $11,000 actually the answer?

Nope. 

Now stay with me. 

“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 told me.

This is getting confusing. Is $22,000 the final number then?

Nope, again.

It’s not so much a lie as an obfuscation, a deceit.  

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 by 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 of 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,  Angela Bonilla, president of the Portland Association of Teachers, is arguing , “We’ve been sounding the alarm to the district for nearly a year in bargaining sessions, but Portland Public Schools management has not been willing to fund what our schools need…”

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.

by - 0 comments

Portland Public Schools: Enrollment Down/Spending Up

Public school enrollment is plunging in Oregon and across the country. The New York Times calls it “a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools, “supercharged” by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Enrollment at the country’s public schools have declined by at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey.

In 2016, PPS said, “Based on demographic studies conducted by Portland State University, it is anticipated that enrollment will level off at about 54,383 students by the 2030/31 school year under the PSU Medium Growth Scenario .”

Oh well.

Overall enrollment in Oregon has declined by almost 30,000 students since 2019-2020, slipping from 582,661 in 2019-2020 to 553,012 in 2021-2022. Oregon’s experience has generally followed national trends which are showing enrollment losses in city districts and growth in rural, suburban and town districts, according to the Burbio school tracking site. 

Some of the enrollment declines are likely due to parents frustrated with remote schooling, some to frustration with curriculum and “woke” instruction. Declines may also be attributed to economic dislocation of families, a decision that home schooling or charter schools were simply preferable or simply demographic changes. 

Portland Public Schools, the state’s largest district, is seeing the largest enrollment declines. Total enrollment in the district has dropped from 48,559 in the 2019-2020 school year to 45,123 in the 2021-2022 school year. District officials are projecting total enrollment of 41,723 in the next school year, a decline of another 3,400 students.

And yet, the Portland Public Schools budget keeps growing.

On May 24 2022, the Portland Public Schools board passed $1.89 billion budget for the 2022-2023 school year, This compares with a $1.5 billion budget for the 2018-2019 school year, when enrollment totaled 48,677 students, 6,954 more than expected enrollment of 41,723 in 2022-2023.\

Portland Public School central staff has risen 67% since 2017.  Elizabeth Thiel, Portland Association of Teachers President said in The Oregonian, “Since 2017, for example, there has been a 67% increase in the number of academic administrators in the central office. Over the same period, the central office budget has grown twice as fast as what PPS spends on frontline educators and support staff who deal directly with students, based on Portland Association of Teachers’ analysis of PPS’ budget documents.”

On May 25, OPB reported that after the school board’s budget vote, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero,  board members, teachers, and the few parents remaining at the end of the meeting all agreed on the need to head down to Salem next year to lobby the legislature for more school funding.

More. Ever more.

by - 0 comments

Who owns Brad Avakian? Unions.

 

bradavakian2

I’m tired of all these wealthy donors thinking that because I’ve been bought and paid for, they own me.                                                                                                                      (With thanks to the New Yorker) 

Brad Avakian, a Democrat running for Oregon’s Secretary of State, insists that one of his highest priorities is campaign finance reform.

“Everyone’s voice should be heard in our democracy – but that’s not happening right now,” Avakian says. “The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was a terrible mistake. It’s allowing big corporate donors to drown out the voice of everyday voters…But what can we do about it? Here’s what: Oregon can lead the way. As Secretary of State, I’ll fight to reform Oregon’s campaign finance system.”

Really?

Mr. Avakian conveniently leaves out that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizen United Ruling not only removed virtually any restriction on corporate money in politics. It also removed virtually any restriction on union money.

So how does Mr. Avakian feel about jumbo contributions to candidates from unions? He seems to be OK with those, based on the union contributions he’s received to date, including:

Oregon Education Association –People for Improvement of Education (142)                                         $95,000

Oregon School Employees Association –Voice of Involved Classified Employees (2307)                                    $65,000

Citizen Action for Political Education (33)                                     $60,000

United Food & Commercial Workers                                                $50,000

Oregon AFSCME Council 75                                                                 $30,000

Pacific NW Regional Council of Carpenters, SSF                           $30,000

Laborers’ Political League                                                                     $25,000

Oregon, South Idaho District Council of Laborers                         $15,000

Local 48 Electricians PAC (4572)                                                          $11,000

Oregon AFL-CIO                                                                                        $10,364

Plumbers & Steamfitters Local Union 598                                        $10,000

DRIVE Committee (Teamsters’ political action committee)      $10,000

American Federation of Teachers-OR Candidate PAC (113)        $  7,500

International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees PAC         $  6,000

Working America (Political organizing arm of the AFL-CIO)      $  6,668

Portland Association of Teachers PAC                                                 $  5,000

IUPAT Political Action Together Political Committee                     $  5,000

 

Talk is cheap Brad.

What’s particularly striking is that union members accounted for just 14.8 percent of wage and salary workers in Oregon in 2015, but union contributions represent almost 40 percent of the total Avakian has raised in 2016.

So who do you think Avakian is going to represent if he’s elected?