At a meeting with the Lents Neighborhood Association and interested community members in support of Marshall High School superintendant Carol Smith's executive assistant Zeke Smith publicly stated that this redesign is not intended to save money!!! If it is not to save money then what the heck is the purpose? It is a huge waste of time, money and collateral trust with the community that PPS is supposedly serving! I personally attended that meeting and called Mr. Smith on that statement and he reiterated exactly the same thing! "It is not to save money."

PPS, like many public agencies handling confidential, private information, invest in IT products like Novell because they give greater internal control of security levels. I'm not comfortable with my student's educational information transferred via a less secure platform like g-mail. Giving up that security is not a wise cost saving measure. But I agree there are other Admin services that should be tightened up. One idea from ODOT: the state transportation agency instituted mandatory furlough days for its executive/management staff. The premise is these cuts do not have as direct affect on the agency's public services as cutting maintenance and operations staff.

Rich - your column starts with a false premise, that PPS has any interest in students. PPS is run for the benefit of the teachers' union, which has learned long ago to always cut classrooms first. You pour buckets of cash into the top, and a tiny trickle ends up in the classroom. They tell you "you have to pour on more money!"

A simple and easy way to change this is to fund the schools directly with all dollars, and allow principals to purchase services like IT, HR, and so on from PPS.

By changing who controls the cash you'd see a dramatic shift in behavior, not to mention the way spending gets prioritized. Certainly the schools would see a sudden increase in attentiveness by the centralized service providers.

Worried they'll cut IT and HR to zero, or that each school will do its own thing? Then require the principals to negotiate as a group, and require them to spend (say) no less than 10% (pick a number you like) on these support services.

This in a nutshell is similar to how the Labor government of New Zealand dramatically improved government efficiency. It's echoed (I was delighted to discover) in the new book "Management Rewired: why feedback doesn't work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science."

I would question whether any in-house system run by PPS is more secure than a comparable system run by Google. I'm not saying it isn't -- I'm saying I'd like some evidence. Too many small IT shops treat security as a stepchild activity.

Thomas, having a good deal of familiarity with the dynamics between the PPS labor unions and PPS management, I can say with confidence that there is very little labor-management collaboration at the district. In fact, stronger labor-management partnerships would go a long way to resolving a number of issues, not just with the teachers but with the kitchen workers, custodians, etc.

That said, I do like your idea of giving the principals greater control over their budgets for support services like IT, HR and communications. That kind of spirit is much like the approach to teacher assignment recommended by Stand for Children. You could even give the teachers and the PTA at each school the opportunity to participate in the discussions, as well, so that the relative priorities might be reflected in decision-making. That kind of school-based labor-management approach, combined with public involvement, would be far superior to the conventional centralized public information strategies favored by the district.

Management and non-instructional furloughs are rough, but it's rough out there, and I'd go there before I'd close schools.

I don't really buy the security argument. Any really sensitive data can be kept secure using a number of approaches that don't imply paying huge licensing fees for basic software capability.

Rich:

Proposals like migrating PPS's email to gmail are nuts. Just one lost bit of information, and the slough of justifiable criticisms would come flying. Try and find one reasonably-sized business that uses gmail. It may vary by industry, but when I see a lawyer with a gmail account (it's very rare), I know I'm dealing with a novice.

@TomB - I'm sure you're right and the union leadership have only the students' best interests at heart. I'm surprised to hear that there's no tension at all between the union leadership and its rank-and-file -- that's unprecedented. Do you see none or am I over-stating your case?

As I understand it, every time the union has been offered a "keep teachers and cut pay, or cut teachers and keep pay high" they always go for layoffs over pay cuts. Not sure how that helps kids. Perhaps I'm mistaken there also.

@Jonathan - not to go overboard for Google specifically, but Sanmina-SCI Corp runs corporate email for 16,000 people on Google Apps, to take just one example, and both Google and I believe Microsoft's "Exchange Online" are SAS-70 certified. I'd be very impressed if PPS's in-house IT team could pass SAS-70 certification. (SAS-70 is more demanding than HIPAA, if that gives you some sense of its rigor.)

And no you won't see a gmail address because it's private label. Remember we're talking Google Apps not gmail. The quote above was "a comparable system run by Google" not "free web based email".

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One of the interesting things in your list is student transportation. It's a smaller piece of the pie, but it all adds up.

Traveling around the world, including to rich countries like the Netherlands, you'll often find people who don't understand the idea of school buses. That is, they've created neighborhoods and school systems and personal habits so most students bike or walk to school. I remember talking to one school administrator in the Netherlands who said, "Only 94% of our students walk or bike to school. We're working on increasing that number."

No school bus costs, little need for parents to drive kids to school, and healthier kids. Clearly, we've got some sunk infrastructure and land use patterns here, but a little investment in biking and walking infrastructure could safe millions on busing in more urban areas.

Thanks for starting the discussion and looking for actual ways to find efficiencies, rather than referring to unnamed "waste and inefficiency" as the folks across the aisle so often do.

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Rich, a few comments:

(1) Online education will fundamentally change high school education over the next decades. Some of that online education will take place outside of the current brick-and-mortar high schools. This can save money and expand educational opportunities. This will have two effects not accounted for in PPS planning: (a) the number of students in brick-and-mortar classes will drop (so that even seven high schools of the sizes proposed may be too much); and, (b) smaller size schools could/should offer a much wider variety of courses than is currently possible.

PPS is being very slow to develop online programs, particularly classes that can be taken independently. They rejected my very modest budget proposal that online Mandarin be available to every PPS high school student.

(2) PPS should offer every qualified high school student the opportunity to spend a high school year abroad paid for in full or in part by PPS (spending the same per pupil dollars whether the student is here in Portland or anywhere in the world). Concerns for our economic and national security futures should drive us to create such a program.

(Note to Tom Beckett: The Portland Association of Teacher’s Legislative Committee rejected my appeal that they support a pilot high school study abroad program in PPS. In doing so they were, in my opinion, putting some of their labor concerns ahead of both the needs of individual students and our collective pursuit of economic growth and world peace.)

If some students were to go abroad for a year of high school, the number of students attending PPS high school would be further reduced.

(3) I know there is a lot of nostalgic attachment to the current Portland high schools. The high schools have histories with alumni and have become part of the fabric of communities. But our next generations face enormous challenges in the global economy. We need to change our educational system to help them survive. Clinging to all the existing high schools, knowing such clinging brings a third rate educational system, is not a choice we should knowingly embrace.

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I don't know where to start.

Rich and Evan project transportation savings in a "neighborhood" high school plan but this belies their ignorance--PPS has not provided any sort of bus transportation (except for that required by NCLB) for at least a decade (perhaps longer; we moved here in 2001). Anyone who actually has kids in the local schools would know this...

More generally, Rich, I love your latter comment about integrating school planning with regional economic, transportation, and development planning. I don't know how you think we could have avoided the demographic shifts that our City is currently experiencing and at the same time retain our commitment to the UGB.

While the overall student population grew last year, this followed 15 straight years of decline.

The reality is that we have schools built for 1500 and serving 500.

Your proposal just nibbles at the margins. Email? HR? Really??

I wonder, given this posting, at what point we actually COULD muster the political courage to close a school. Sadly, the answer would probably be "never."

To me the numbers are devastating. What would YOU propose at a school where:

• Less than 1/3 of the neighborhood chooses the send their children
• It enrolls only 435 students in a building designed for over 1200
• Has a projected enrollment DECLINE over the next decade even though its surrounding neighborhood has the second largest proportion of high school age children
• Has the lowest graduation rate among the "full" four year schools.

This is a school in crisis. Yes, Jefferson is the state's only majority African-American school and it has a long and storied history. But the numbers leave little doubt that the school is failing. The neighbors know it, the rotating cast of principals know it, and the Board seems finally willing to acknowledge it.

I want to hear a proposal that would cure Jefferson without a) dramatically changing its character and/or b) sinking in tons of resources. Closing seems to me the only other option.

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