You Ask, I Answer

As voters ask my opinion on certain topics, I add them here so you can see where I stand on various issues. I believe this is important for accountability and transparency, so you can see I’m not just telling oyu what I think you want to hear.

Want a question answered? Email robg.pdx@gmail.com.

What are your views on the Portland Association of Teachers?

There’s no question: I support our teachers and their union.

When our teachers struck in November 2023, I wasn’t just on the picket line, I was cooking them breakfast and helping raise money.

Teachers and families picketing in front of a school

When teachers were marching, like this one Downtown from Lincoln, I wasn’t just with them, I was corking their march as protection.

Teacher on a strike march a block away.

And when the strike was dragging on, I didn’t sit on the sidelines. I led the organization of a 700-rider Strike Bus to show the District we were behind our teachers.

Hundreds of bike riders wearing blue carrying strike signs.

I do understand the criticisms of the PAT during the strike. But it’s naive to blame one side in a negotiation for pushing for a better deal. Why is it always our teachers and nurses who are expected to take a bad deal? My wife is an ONA nurse at Providence Portland, who just wrapped up her second strike in three years. The guilt game, sacrificing these essential workers who care for our kids and our sick, is always the same.

The strike was brought on my 7 years of poor communication and collaboration from our previous Superintendent. Teachers are fundamental to our schools. They are partners we should be working with, not a problem to be managed. It’s easy to forget that the strike happened amid a toxic environment that PAT didn’t create.

On top of that, Board leadership bears blame, both for allowing relationships to deteriorate so tragically, and also their behavior during the strike. While their only legal responsibility was to vote on contracts, they are also a democratically represented and neutral third party. They should have been working with both sides, as they are accountable to voters. Unfortunately, leadership lined up as part of management, we got a prolonged clash, and everyone suffered.

There are other ways the board could have acted. For an example, we can look at the City of Portland’s behavior with AFSCME. In December 2024, the previous City Council was threatening to sue AFSCME, and AFSCME would have certainly struck. Once the new City Council took office, some councilors joined a practice picket to demonstrate their established solidarity with labor, and avoided a strike.

We can do better! Why not add a PAT representative to the board?

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What is your position on school choice? Specifically, charter and lottery schools? What about vouchers?

The evidence shows that, in order to educate our kids well, nothing else beats public school systems. ‘School choice’ is an extremelist/fundamentalist religious attempt to destroy civic society (the religion may be a traditional religion, or a religious adherence to free market ideals).

That said, we also have to leave the door open that different structures for public school systems may be better than what we currently have, and should go where evidence leads.

That evidence clearly shows charter schools do not work for the broad population, and weaken the overall school system. But there may be compelling reasons a small set of the population may be served well by charter schools. PPS currently has 4 charter schools. This is a small enough amount that I doubt we can find evidence of significant negative impacts, but I would oppose attempts to expand charters.

Vouchers are a non-starter for me.

Lottery schools (Dual Language Immersion, or DLI, and Focus Options, or FO) are more of an interesting question. The reality of these schools is that, rather than being open to all students, they tend to attract the higher socioeconomic status (SES) families. Since SES is the primary predictor of a school’s proficiency scores, lottery schools end up negatively impacting neighborhood schools, and with it, negatively impact the student achievement gap and overall student achievement.

Lottery schools also don’t seem to keep families in the public school system. Based on what I could find, Portland’s private school enrollment rate is higher than similar cities.

If you look at the PPS K-5 Enrollment Page, you can see lottery schools get first billing, and neighborhood schools are just listed at the bottom, like they are supposed to be your fallback option. The parent page is even called School Choice.

PPS needs to have a serious discussion about the role of its lottery schools, what purpose they are supposed to serve, and if they are effectively fulfilling that purpose.

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You used to oppose the May Bond. Now you support it. What changed your mind?

What changed my mind is that I got my questions answered. I’m now able to make a very strong argument in favor.

Unfortunately tracking down answers to my questions and concerns took many, many hours. PPS is doing a very poor job of explaining this bond; many of the justifications are just not compelling for voters who are looking for accountability and transparency. This includes not just PPS families, but non-PPS families as well.

We need to do a much better job of explaining why this bond is vital to pass! If PPS had made a better argument from the start, and explained all the things I know now, I would have supported it earlier.

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What are your thoughts on labor unions?

Unions are the fundamental underpinning of a strong and broad democratic society. We are going to see, in the next 4 years of this kleptokratic federal administration, that unions are the ultimate bulwark against fascism and corporate greed.

The fact that Portland teachers have never struck before 2023, is an indication that PPS administration, the PPS board (which is distinct from the administration!), and the teachers and their union, can and traditionally have gotten along. It also speaks to how important having a good board, that understands the role of a board, is, because they are the ones bearing ultimate accountability for the strike.

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What are your thoughts on performance pay and teacher accountability more broadly?

Evidence and experience shows that nearly everyone is 1) doing the best they can, and 2) statistically average across most measures. If you believe #1 is false, then you must try to measure everything, and will fail. If you believe #2 is false, your hiring and retention process will be almost entirely random. It’s also obviously that threatening people produces worse performance.

So this is why I hate the word ‘accountability’. It often assumes people can be doing better just by telling them they’re doing poorly, and/or that the best way to better results is replacing poor performers. But the reality of high-performing groups of employees is that they are given the supports and environment to succeed. I have not been a teacher, so I don’t know what that support system looks like yet for teachers. But we should listen to teachers who want to be doing better, observe teachers who are doing really well, and find interventions that will improve the outcomes we’re looking for.

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What are your thoughts about investing in class size reductions versus other interventions?

We all know class sizes are too large. Unfortunately, class sizes are very expensive to reduce directly (it doesn’t make a difference if we are talking about max class sizes, or averages).

I would love if Portlanders and Oregonians made the investment to bring down class sizes way down, which would take increased revenue and likely higher taxes.

Short of that, we need to get creative about mitigating the impacts of large class sizes. It isn’t clear what levers we have to pull, as the research is hard to untangle.

I believe we’re at the start of this process; figuring out how to cope will require the involvement of classroom teachers, along with researchers, and a best effort from parents and the rest of our school communities.

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What is the role of technology in the classroom?

As someone who builds technology, I understand its many limitations. We have not seen productivity gains in education, because caring for kids is fundamentally different from what technology has traditionally been for from prehistory (automating labor).

It would be like asking “what is the role of technology in a marriage.” Our shared calendars are great! But I don’t think it makes partnerships fundamentally different.

There may be specific applications of technology that make sense. I’ll leave this to education and subject-matter experts to sort out. But we need to remember that educating kids is, and will continue to be, expensive.

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How can PPS best serve LGBTQ+ and BIPOC students?

I don’t know how PPS can best serve these students. That will be up to policies that members of these communities put forward.

I can best serve these students in my capacity as a board member by helping to make sure those policies are evidence based and effective, and being stalwart ally.

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What does school safety mean?

Three things that I’ll weigh in on, though the list can go on.

First would be safety from violence. I have not seen evidence that the presence of police officers or School Resource Officers improves the safety of schools or performance of students. This is a complex topic, and we should continue to dig-in and pursue evidence-based policies. Adding SROs is often a kneejerk reaction to tragic violence, or fears of it.

Second is safety from bullying. I was bullied, and was a bully, growing up. I am absolutely floored with the progress the school system has made in how it handles bullying and student conflict. There are still problems (we’re dealing with kids going through massive hormonal changes), but we’ve made so much progress. I will continue to listen to and support experts on this.

Third is safety from discrimination. This is more difficult as it’s another case where the school system is going to reflect larger cultural trends. That said, the school system also informs these trends, and I’ve been heartened the progress since when I was in school. Here again my role is to support experts and be a stalwart ally.

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What does “Kicker reform” mean? Do you want to abolish the Kicker/raise taxes?

No, I do not want to abolish the Kicker. I actually like it, as it forces a government to be accountable to its budget.

That said, it’s been 45 years since the Kicker law was approved, and 26 since it has been in the Oregon Constitution. Haven’t we learned some things that could improve implementation?

One major problem with school funding in Oregon is that our budget can fluctuate so much year-to-year, since it’s income tax, not property tax, based. In a down year, like a recession, we may have to make severe cuts to school budgets, but funding goes back up next year. All we’ve done is turn over staff and increase costs.

Kicker reform could look something like allocating a portion of the overpayment to a “rainy day fund” that is used to normalize the budget during down years. This would reduce staff reductions that are just a result of temporary economic conditions.

It would also make sense to hold back some portion of every kicker for the general fund, since more revenue than expected almost always means population growth, which means service delivery took more than we were planning.

Simply abolishing the kicker would raise taxes and probably result in even worse budget problems, like overspending on one-time programs, as Multnomah County has. But smart reform could make this well-intentioned program work even better.

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You want to “reform” Measure 5 and 50. Does that mean you want to raise property taxes?

No, I do not want to raise property taxes.

My problems with Measure 5 and 50 are that they create bad land use incentives (which reduces overall revenue by having fewer taxpayers), not that we need to raise more revenue per-household.

It’s important to understand that real estate taxes (what we call a property tax) are largely regressive. Most people with real estate, have it in their home, and if we increase taxes on real estate, it hits the middle class the hardest. Property taxes are also passed onto renters. Raising property taxes doesn’t really impact the wealthy.

The limit on growth in taxable value of property to 3% a year incentivizes people to hold onto property that they otherwise would have financial pressures to sell or develop. There are two distinct groups here: residents who don’t need the space (like a retired couple living alone in the home they raised children in), and investors who own under-utilized lots (either vacant, abandoned, or an underperforming land use like a surface parking lot).

Let’s handle investors first, since it’s easier. If you go to Portland Maps and find your closest long-vacant property, you’ll almost certainly find they’re paying very little property tax. If their property values grow 5% a year due to improvement in the neighborhood, but their taxes can only grow 3% a year, they are incentivized to hold onto the property. Even though this empty property is negatively impacting the neighborhood. This is a classic Free Rider problem. Reforming Measure 5 and 50 would allow something like a Land Value Tax, which would raise rates on these investor-owned lots, so they either develop them, or sell them to someone who will. This is a plus for the community and the city for both revenue and land use (it does raise taxes on these lots).

Let’s handle the hardest residential case now: seniors on fixed income who have owned their home for 40 years. Reforming Measure 5/50 would mean raising their effective property taxes and making them homeless, right?

Well, no. The difference in the taxable vs. real value of their home is actually the amount we’re subsidizing these taxpayers, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year in many cases. This is just the direct fiscal subsidy; there is also the opportunity cost of 1) lots that could be redeveloped for more productive use, and 2) families that cannot live in the city so move elsewhere, which depletes population (PPS enrollment!) and contributes to (expensive!) sprawl.

It would be cheaper and better for older adults, too, to directly subsidize their move to smaller houses or apartments. Keep in mind as well that older adults are the fastest-growing age group experiencing homelessness. Our current tax policies, which prevent improved land use and have restricted housing development, directly contribute to this crisis.

And to be clear, these things do not mean ‘raise property taxes’ in the aggregate. We could probably reduce many bills of those who are paying a higher share (usually lower wealth), while those who are underpaying (higher wealth) would see their bills increase. Reform would also result in better land use. The better land use, not a higher rate, would result in more revenue.

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