Policy Matters
We must think of Portland — schools, city, and county — as One City.
To get out of the many crises we are in, we must act with urgency and creativity across our school, city, and county governments.
Schools play a central role in our society. We cannot treat them like a vacuum. The problems facing PPS, the City of Portland, and urban America in general, are all connected.
School Policy is more than Education Policy
We cannot solve problems in a disconnected way, one at a time.
We need One City Policies that solve multiple problems at once. We don’t have the time or money for anything else.
Credit where it is due: PPS’s agreement to sell its headquarters to the Albina Vision Trust is a great example of a One City Solution. This will allow development of 1,000 new housing units, work to right generational wrongs of displacement, and, if relocated to downtown, help the central city’s recovery by using office space and adding workers. And it won’t cost PPS any extra.
One City Health Policy
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As animals, we have brains in order to move. In fact, there are animals like the Sea Squirt that lose their brain when they stop moving.
This brain-body unification explains why students do better in school when they get more exercise, as shown and explained in books like Spark.
One City Policy: Treat increased physical activity to and from school as the powerful educational intervention it is, and support it as such.
Addressing exercise solely through Physical Education and Recess has limits. There is only so much room in the gym, or on the playground, and this time comes at the expense of academic instruction.
But students often spend 20-60 minutes each day getting driven to school. Time which must be better spent if we want great schools.
PPS must explicitly encourage families and students to get to school by walking and biking, well beyond window dressing. They should work with Bike Bus PDX on creating daily Bike Bus routes at every PPS school, and a system that would allow children to attend without an adult, like the yellow school bus works.
One City Policy: Incorporate bike education into K-8 education at all schools to establish independence and healthy habits.
PBOT has a Bike Training program that is nowhere near big enough to support PPS. These classes, done during gym for 3 weeks (which I have taught for the last 2 years), are popular with students and give them the tools they need for independence and getting to school. PPS could provide bike training at all schools each year for low cost, much of it covered through grant funding.
Studies show this additional exercise could lead to a significant increase in test scores and attendance. It would also improve how kids get around the city, and help re-establish Portland’s cultural capital. And it would be basically free for PPS.
One City Policy: Figure out why more classrooms aren't running the air purifiers we already have.
Students do better with cleaner air. When we weigh the benefits of cleaner air against the costs of unclean air, the benefits are overwhelming. We need to support our staff in making sure classroom air is cleaned, and our students and staff are not exposed to unnecessary pathogens and pollution inside the classroom.
One City Policy: PBOT and PPS must work together to roll out Idle Free Zone signage and education district-wide.
Likewise, kids are exposed to harmful pollutants on their way into class. While many schools need private car access, parents don’t need to be idling their cars near schools. PBOT actually has “idle free zone” signage but the process to put it up is cumbersome and many schools don’t know or don’t bother.
One City Transportation Policy
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Did you know that 30% of car trips during Portland’s rush hour are trips to and from school? And that the majority of students are driven to school?
One City Policy: Reduce bussing needs to get better school start times.
Did you know that school start times are determined by the costs and availability of bussing?
Elementary schools start too early, at 8am. Middle schools start too late, at 9:15am. School start times are entirely a transportation issue.
Aside from the broad impacts, cconsider how inequitable the current regime is: bus riders are disproportionately lower-income, and in many cases kids are sitting on the bus for 40+ minutes for what would be a 10-minute bike ride. What would you give for 30 minutes of extra sleep and 10 minutes of exercise for your kid each morning?
If individual schools could “opt in” to alternative transportation schemes, like daily Bike Buses that cover certain bus stops, we could speed up bus routes, and potentially eliminate entire routes (the bus could serve a different school, pushing back pickup times so kids can sleep in more).
The need to provide yellow school buses is defined in state code, but changing it to allow exceptions would not cost any money.
One City Policy: All transportation should be the responsibility of the Transportation Director, and they should be evaluated on reduction of car trips at neighborhood schools.
But non-bus transportation is not under the purview of anyone at PPS. Schools need to be on the hook for increasing the numbers of kids walking and biking to school, which impacts carbon emissions, health, land use, enrollment, and will make significant impacts on educational achievement.
One City Policy: Support students walking and biking with reduced car speeds and less exposure to traffic on Safe Routes along Neighborhood Greenways and around schools.
PPS should be using its role as the region’s largest car-trip-generator to support policies that result in fewer car trips. For example, PPS should work with Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) Safe Routes to School (SRTS) to add infrastructure to Neighborhood Greenways that also serve schools. One of the major drivers of cost is public engagement— but by being a partner to PBOT, PPS can defray this cost and deliver schools that even young children are safe to walk and bike to.
One City Policy: Establish walking school buses supported by volunteer stipends, which are proven to improve attendence of at-risk youth.
Interventions like Walking School Buses and Bike Buses are proven ways to improve attendence. It is the most cost-effective, equitable way to reach many at-risk children.
These interventions continue to reinforce the need for a safe street network.
One City Climate Policy
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Today’s students are wrestling with a high likelihood of 2°C warming by 2050, and the ensuing destruction and instability it will cause.
School is one of the most important institutions in the lives of families, and PPS needs to do more to fight this existential threat.
One City Policy: Incorporate impacts that PPS influences but does not control outright, such as enrollment, into the Climate Crisis Response Plan to provide a more holistic view of PPS emissions reductions or increases.
PPS has an aggressive, but unfunded and toothless, Climate Crisis Response Plan. This plan exists in a vacuum, looking only at direct sources of emissions and how to replace them. For example, transportation decarbonization is based entirely on replacing the fossil fuel fleet. Unfortunately, this is expensive, slow, and unfunded.
Instead, PPS’s climate response plan should look at the bigger picture around Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Reduction, and prioritize what is practical and effective to change.
For example, urban households have 1/4 of the GHG emissions of suburban households. By increasing enrollment, PPS would have a large emissions reduction impact. Money spent on certain direct GHG reductions may be better spent on enrollment increases.
One City Policy: Incorporate home-to-school transportation into the Climate Crisis Response Plan to encourage pulling more levers to reduce carbon emissions.
Transportation is the largest contributor to emissions in Oregon, and it has almost no reduction over 1990 levels, largely because we are driving more. Yet the plan is silent on home-to-school transportation, even though these car trips have an emissions impact on par with all PPS transportation emissions. By replacing car trips with walking, biking, or the bus, PPS can reduce the emissions it is responsible for. Money spent on replacing vehicles may be better spent on getting families walking and biking.
One City Housing Policy
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The performance of students of color compared to their white counterparts is a persistent issue. PPS has been trying, and must continue trying, to improve outcomes through education policy. But we also need to look at simpler, broader solutions that PPS needs to be a partner in.
One City Policy: Advocate for broad upzoning and increased housing supply to improve student performance and increase enrollment.
We need to give families unhappy with their current school other options within PPS. But we know doing this through charters, lotteries, longer commutes, and bussing often results in worse outcomes overall.
So one solution is to increase the supply of housing around higher-performing schools, to allow families more places to move within Portland.
Unfortunately, most of the city is still zoned for large-lot residential, which limits mobility by economically disadvantaged families. If PPS were advocating for a broad upzoning, like the Inner Eastside for All plan, we would see more family-friendly apartments that are affordable to families of color, feeding into our higher-performing neighborhood schools.
More of these apartments could be located away from dangerous, unhealthy arterials, where most apartment stock is forced to be located now.
Increasing housing supply would also offset PPS’s enrollment decline. PPS’s projected enrollment declines are by far larger than our neighbors (most of which will grow), and the biggest factor in outmigration is by far the cost of housing. New families are leaving because they cannot afford to live in our city.
One City Policy: Lease unused property to raise funds, reduce maintenance and liabilities, and increase housing supply and enrollment.
On top of this, PPS is one of the largest landholders in the city. Many properties sit vacant, and PPS has resisted leasing or using them. There’s no reason we should be holding onto vacant properties. We can lease (or sell) them, which can raise funds, reduce maintenance and liabilities, and increase housing supply (and enrollment).
It gets better: increased enrollment is revenue-positive for PPS. Additional students are served by the same fixed costs that are already paid for. And of course, the additional housing leads to additional property taxes to fund PPS.
One City Fiscal Policy
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Please see May 2025 Bond for my detailed analysis of the upcoming bond.
PPS, like pretty much every public entity in the United States, is in the midst of budget crises decades in the making. The causes are largely the same: lower tax receipts, years of deferred maintenance coming due, and new capital projects exploding in scope.
It’s vital we see these problems for what they are: these are not revenue problems, they are structural problems.
There is more bad news: our structural tax problems are getting worse due to our old fire/police pension system.
Then there are issues with Measure 5 and Measure 50, which cap property taxes.
This doesn’t leave us with too many options. But we have a few.
One City Policy: Make growth-centered investments.
Population growth and increased density makes all of our fiscal problems easier to solve. This is one reason why I’m Yes on the May 2025 Bond.
One City Policy: Scrutinize spending by making tradeoffs and priorities clear.
While growth and density allows us to solve structural problems, it can also just kick the can down the road. We need people who will put spending under scrutiny, to make sure it is the way we want to spend our dollars and contributes towards the right outcomes.
One City Policy: Cut state spending in areas that hurt us.
Money for expanding freeways is an obvious first target.
In 2023, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) committed $1 billion of General Fund revenue to expand the I-5 Bridge. This money could have been used for schools. ODOT is now convincing the legislature that it needs even more money for operations and maintenance and to finish boondogle megaprojects.
One of those megaprojects is a freeway expansion that requires moving the Harriet Tubman Middle School. It is increasingly likely that this project will require General Fund dollars or increased driver fees, and that the freeway caps, which was the entire basis of the community buy-in, are not going to be built.
On top of this, the main point of moving more cars along I-5 is to shuttle Washington residents into and out of Portland, making it even easier for Portlanders to live in Clark County, exploiting our amenities while not paying a dime.
One City Policy: Better use PPS's bond-raising capacity.
While the City of Portland doesn’t have $3m to rebuild the vital Columbia Park Pool, PPS has plenty of money for capital projects. In fact, while schools can bond against 0.5% of property values, the rest of the entire city can only bond against 1%, and this 1% covers a lot of stuff (fire, police, pensions). The 0.5% for PPS is almost entirely for capital projects.
PPS could make an enormously positive impact on the lives of its families by taking on the most cost-effective projects from Portland Parks & Recreation, like renovating pools and recreation centers. PPS could buy part of the property, renovate it using its capital bond raising authority, and hand it back to Parks.
For another example, with SUN programs being cut in the Parks budget (something which really should already be operated by PPS), PPS could make up those cuts by taking on Parks capital spending, and allow Parks to continue to operate SUN programs.
Before we argue about whether this makes sense or not, consider how utterly arbitrary the school vs. everything-else caps on property tax rates are. This is another case where we can be revenue-neutral and make a tremendously better impact than our current plans achieve.
One City Policy: Unify on tax reform.
Finally, we know there are structural tax issues to work on reforming. We need to work with the legislature on:
- Reforming the State School Funding (SSF) formula so that we can raise more than what is allowed by current law before being penalized. If the state will not fund the Quality Education Model (QEM), which its own studies say we need to spend to successfully educate our kids, then it must allow districts to make the missing dollars through property taxes. This funding number, unlike the SSF itself, is just a law, not part of the constitution, so can be changed by the legislature.
- Align on Kicker reform. I am actually a fan of the Kicker, as it works to hold our government accountable to its own plans. But, we can certainly reform it to allow the government to work more effectively. Unfortunately, the prospect of free money initiates calls to “abolish the kicker,” which doesn’t seem feasible. Let’s get real on this, and PPS should be an entity leading the way. More on Kicker Reform
- Align on reforms to Measures 5 and 50. We need to be careful when pointing fingers at these constitutional amendments; saying they are responsible for underfunded schools actually means “you should be paying more taxes.” That said, Measures 5 and 50 have contributed to very bad incentives, such as holding onto property well beyond when owners should. This is another area where, if PPS can set the right direction, there is a real possibility that we can move the discussion on Measures 5 and 50 reform forward. More on Measure 5 & 50 Reform
One City Civic Policy
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The trope of angry parents yelling at the School Board or principal is only a trope if you’ve never been hurt by a decision, and left with no transparency, accountability, or course for reconsideration.
Schools are our most local public institutions, but the lack of civic involvement sets an embarassing example for a democratic society.
One City Policy: Ensure schools adhere to and enhance Site Council and Climate & Culture Team bylaws on democratic involvement to increase teacher and parent engagement.
How many school Site Councils adhere to their bylaws, which usually require elections, meeting minutes, and communications? How many Climate & Culture Teams make community-wide decisions with no community input?
We know people opt-out of engagement when they feel like it doesn’t matter. PPS is happy to ask parents to wash lunch trays and rake leaves, but we’re unwelcome when we want to be partners in decisionmaking.
One City Policy: Lead the way on democratic good governance by adding a PAT representative to the PPS Board, to help implement smart policies, and ensure a healthy, strike-free relationship.
Studies repeatedly show that corporations with union representatives on their boards outperform those without. Having union representation on boards is common in Nordic countries for example. We already have a Student Representative on the PPS board. We should add a PAT representative as well. They can start off with similar restrictions to the Student Rep, and we can evaluate how it works.
One City Policy: Create a process to identify and remove administrative roadblocks that parents and teachers run into when trying to improve their school.
We know parent involvement is one of the key predictors of student outcomes. By recommitting to include parents in designing and implementing solutions, we give them a reason to engage, rather than tune out. We know this will help our students. And experience says this also helps our city and society at large.
One City
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The City of Portland and Portland Public Schools view themselves as totally independent entities. Whether it comes to who is responsible for mowing a lawn, or managing traffic, or anything else, the relationship is frigid at best and adversarial at worst.
We saw this clearly during the PAT strike in November 2023. The city stayed as far away as it could, instead of helping to resolve the strike. We saw it in January when the City slapped Grant Bowl advocates with a $15,000 bill for a totally unnecessary traffic study. Parent groups see it frequently in issues big and small.
Our schools do more than teach our kids— they are essential to the health of our city. And our city is essential to the health of our schools! One example: the city’s lack of housing affordable to families has resulted in a flight to the suburbs; this reduces tax revenue, forcing cuts in PPS spending. Or how about: PPS’s poor performance pushes more children into charter and private schools, creating longer car trips (30% of trips during morning hours are to school!), which hurts city climate goals, creates congestion, and puts pressure on astronomically expensive roadway maintenance. The examples go on, because City and Schools are both essential parts of Portland.
I pledge to work with the City to streamline overlaps and inefficiencies, so we can do more with limited resources. To build safe streets so we have healthier and happier kids. To get more housing built so we can have more PPS families.
To support each other in our work, instead of antagonize. Portland the City and Portland the School District must learn to live together as family, or perish together as fools.
Public Testimony
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You should know who you’re voting for beyond what I’m telling you here. Here’s a list of some public testimony or comments I’ve given the last few years:
- Invited testimony to the Transportation and Infrastructure committee, asking for a Resolution for a ‘Bike Bus Friendly Neighborhood Greenway Pilot.’
- Public comment opposing the 2025 Capital Bond. (Note: I am now a Yes on the bond, as explained here)
- Testimony to City Council about visiting an alternative Portland in 2030 where they invested in active, sustainable transportation.
- Public comment to the PPS Climate Crisis Response Committee asking them to include family transportation emissions in their emissions calculations.
- Public comment to PPS about their Safe Routes and School Streets program, which is a typical example of PPS dysfunction where one group isn’t talking to another.
- Testimony to City Council encouraging them to vote to put Fixing Our Streets III (gas tax renewal) on the May 2024 ballot, which is vital for safe streets.
- Comments on the problems with the I-5 Bridge Replacement’s Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (spoiler alert, the books are cooked).
- Opposing an Urban Growth Boundary expansion in Sherwood. Suburban areas receive massive subsidies from urban areas, and opening up new areas to suburban development will keep damaging our school system.
- Opposing a land use exception to allow a private school to open in the heart of the most transit and amenity rich areas of the eastside, instead of using the massive parking lot for something useful.
- Testimony to the Planning Commission to support a broad upzoning in the inner Eastside. I grew up right next to a freeway!
- Public comment encouraging a stricter PPS device policy than originally proposed. I was happy to see it modified.
- Not testimony, but relevant: one of the more political rides I’ve organized was this Strike Bus during the PAT strike, which saw about 700 riders come out in support.