Portland Public Schools on the start of the school year, test scores and a possible strike

Students at Portland Public Schools are nearly a month into the new school year, but their teachers and the district are at an impasse on contract negotiations. Meanwhile, recent test results from Oregon Statewide Assessment System showed steady and improving rates in English language arts and math for grades 3-8 in PPS. Sharon Reese, chief of human resources for PPS, and Renard Adams, chief of research, assessment and accountability, join us to talk about what the district thinks students and teachers need to succeed.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. With a planning day, and Veterans Day, and a week off for Thanksgiving, November has already cheekily been called No School November by parents. But for Portland public schools, the phrase could take on new meaning this year. Teachers and the district remain at an impasse on contract negotiations. And the first ever teachers strike at Oregon’s largest school system could be a month away. Last week we got the perspective of the president of the teachers union. Today, I’m joined by Sharon Reese, the chief of Human Resources for PPS, and Doctor Renard Adams, the district’s chief of research, assessment, and accountability. Welcome to you both.

Renard Adams: Thank you.

Sharon Reese: Thank you for having us.

Miller: Doctor Adams first, we’re talking a little after noon on October 4th right now. How likely do you think a strike is?

Adams: Well, we’re committed to being at the table to avoid a school closure. We know that based on what we understand of students after the pandemic, our kids need more time with us and more time with their teachers and educators and trusted adults, and not less. And so we’re committed to staying at the table. So we are very hopeful that if we remain at the table, we can reach an agreement with the association.

Miller: What kinds of preparations are underway at the district level in case there is a strike? What are the conversations that are happening in preparation for that worst case scenario?

Adams: Well, I would say one of the ways we’re preparing is first by trying to be transparent and communicate with our community. We try to let parents and families and caregivers know that this strike is a possibility. And we’ve lifted up a website to try to talk about what things may be impacted, like child care, athletics, college admission support for our high schoolers. Internally, there’s a team that continues to have conversations about what a potential work stoppage might look like from a district standpoint. We know the schools would have to close, and we know that would be a major disruption for the entire city of Portland. And we want to avoid that.

Miller: Sharon Reese, we’re gonna talk about some of the things that the two sides are at loggerheads about in just a second, but sticking with the possibility of the strike, what would happen and what wouldn’t in terms of school activities?

Reese: We are still working on what exactly that would look like. But we know the bottom line is we would not be able to open up our schools to our communities. We can’t do that without our teachers and our teaching staff. That is why we are so committed to continue to stay at the table and not get to a point where PAT decides to strike.

Miller: PAT, the Portland Association of Teachers, which is the official name for the teachers union.

There was a teachers union strike in Camas at the beginning of the school year, it lasted for about a week and a half, and then school did start there after the two sides came to an agreement. And the district said “hey, kids, and school community, at the end of the school year we’re going to add those missed days on so we’ll still have a full school year.” Would the same thing necessarily happen with Portland? Or is it that you can’t even answer that question yet?

Reese: We can’t yet answer that question because that has to be negotiated with our teachers union.

Miller: That would be part of the negotiations that would be necessary even just to end the strike, you’re saying, whether or not days would be added?

Reese: If the teachers union decides to strike, then what makeup days would be possible would be a topic that we would have to address at that time.

Miller: Doctor Adams, let’s turn to where negotiations are right now. How did things go two days ago? That was, if my calendar is correct, the first mediator session since the impasse was declared, one of three that had been scheduled for this month. How did it go?

Adams: Well, we thought it went very positively. We wanted to clear up some financial misunderstandings between ourselves and the association. So we did present an up to date financial situation of the district to the association and we had a side conversation where we talked a lot about special education and supports for our special educators. So we believe it went positively.

Miller: That’s sharing information that you feel like hadn’t been a part of the conversation before?

Adams: It had been a part of the conversation. One of the things that we continue to understand or learn is that when we share our financials, there’s a question of are we being as forthright as possible? And we want to continue to be as transparent as possible with the state of our financials, because almost all of the proposals that are on the table have a financial impact. And so we just wanted to make sure that we were clear based on the most current financial data we had to date about where we are financially in terms of our fund balance and our reserve and our operating budget. We do not wish, as a district, for us to argue over the facts. We want to be able to bring our sides to consensus, but we will need to agree on the numbers and things like that.

Miller: Did you feel at the end of that meeting, and with only two scheduled ones left, that the two sides are any closer to a meaningful agreement?

Adams: Well, I would say we didn’t exchange additional language and proposals, so we still have a lot of work to do.

Miller: One of the biggest sticking points, Sharon Reese, is pay for teachers. The president of the teachers union was on the show last week and she says that they’re still pushing for what would overall be something like a 22% cost of living increase over three years. But she did say that an 8.5% increase in year one would go a long way towards parity with other districts, and would, in her words, “put some wiggle room in the negotiations.” Obviously, we’re not going to do bargaining on a radio show like this. But I am curious what your response is to that, and how close something like that is to where the district is right now?

Reese: Sure. We agree that more teacher pay is better. We acknowledge the impact of inflation on our workforce as well as on our district operations. Where we disagree is what we can afford.

Miller: The last numbers that we saw were a 4% increase, a 3% increase, and a 3% increase. Is that where you still are right now?

Reese: Yes, that is accurate. We started out at 2.5% in the first year in January when the state legislator voted in a larger state school fund budget than we were originally budgeting for. We upped that to 3%. And since then, we’ve increased it to 4% in our final offer.

Adams: Dave, I would first like to share that we want our educators to be among the highest paid in the state. And our proposal does that. Over the three years of our proposal, 62% of our educators would make at least $90,000. 40% of them would make $100,000 or more based on our current proposal for their 192 day work year.

Reese: In addition, we’ve raised the starting salary for teachers. Our current offer is a 7.4% increase which would be effective this year, and a special educator stipend of $3,000.

Miller: Hearing the both of you today and Angela Bonilla last week, and this jives with what has been reported before, I just don’t see too much wiggle room here. It seems like both sides are relatively dug in about this very basic first question about pay. If they’re saying we really need 8.5% for the first year and then increases after that perhaps, and you’re saying we’ve gone to 4% and we don’t see a way to go higher, I don’t see a path forward just for this very basic mathematical question. Am I missing something?

Reese: Where I would say that we’ve made movement is that we started with an offer and we’ve raised it twice since then. And we are trying to be clear and transparent with our educators about what the impact of our offer would mean to them in the bottom line of their household budgets.

Miller: Another issue, Dr Adams, that Angela Bonilla brought up, is class sizes. They want more teachers in the system to reduce the size of classes, and they also want to end the way rebalancing, meaning how many students are in any particular class, works. They said that that happens in October, which is disruptive to kids. What’s your response?

Adams: Sure, I appreciate the question. First and foremost, we share the value that there are optimal class sizes, although we might not agree on the exact number. What the association has actually put forward is a proposal that would implement class size caps, which would mean, let’s say that Ms Reese is a third grade teacher, she has a class of 25. She’s supposed to have a cap of 25. The 26th student would not be able to enter her classroom. And we have some schools where there’s only one third grade teacher and fourth grade teacher. And so then what happens to that student? That student would have to attend the next nearest neighborhood school, and wouldn’t necessarily be at his/her/their home school.

Miller: I thought the idea was that then you’d have to hire two third grade teachers in that school. Isn’t that the point of this smaller class, is not making kids move?

Adams: It’s an and/both, because we can’t always hire another teacher. In some buildings, there’s not space to put another class. And so we have soft class size caps, we call them overages, one of the few districts in the state that does that, where we currently pay educators additional funds when their class sizes exceed what we believe the maximum should be.

Miller: So in a sense it’s giving a bump for the extra work that the teachers are doing, but not necessarily doing it in a way that’s best for kids. If everybody agrees that the more kids you have in a class, the less attention somebody can get, I can see why it makes sense to pay teachers more for that extra work. But I don’t see why that’s good for kids.

Adams: That’s a great question. And again, we’re always working within the fiscal constraints that we have. We costed out their initial proposal for their class size and caseload caps. And that came in at us adding over 500 additional educator staff at a cost of $65 million above and beyond where we currently are. And as Ms Reese often says, we can’t give what we don’t have. This fundamental funding structural issue is an issue at the state level, with us not having the Quality Educational Model in place.

Reese: So the solution of hard class cap sizes, it simply doesn’t work. It means that in schools, and I was at one last night, where we have classes of 28 and 30 students, that’s well above our average. In that particular school there isn’t another classroom. So could you hire another teacher at the sort of costs that Doctor Adams is referring to? Yes. But you would also need space. That doesn’t happen in all of our schools. In that particular school, we would have to move neighborhood students, and any newcomers that come in October, or November, or January. The solution, by our teachers’ contract proposal, have to move them outside of those neighborhood schools. That’s the K-5 experience. In middle school and high school, what we believe is important is to have engaging electives and offer core requirements for graduation. Those would also be impacted.

I think it’s important to understand what our starting point is at Portland Public Schools too. We have the lowest class size of all the largest districts in Oregon right now. So what that means is an average elementary classroom is 23 students. Not every school experiences that, but where they don’t is where we’re most likely to run into space and staff issues with this proposal.

Miller: Sharon Reese, one of the things that was striking in the conversation with the union president Angelo Bonilla last week didn’t exactly have to do with bargaining provisions, it was more about tone. This is something that I’m sure you’re familiar with and I think you said that you had heard that conversation. But for folks who didn’t hear it, this is one of the things that Bonilla said: “The problem is that our district managers do not see the urgency that we are feeling on the ground, and it feels like they do not believe us when we are explaining how unbearable this work has become for our educators.” She added that the “lack of respect and lack of acknowledgement of our lived experience makes it really difficult to find a compromise.”

The sense I got here was that this is not just about dollars and cents, about cost of living adjustments. It’s also about a sense of respect, teachers here explicitly saying we’re not being listened to. What’s your response to that?

Reese: Our teachers work miracles in our classrooms. We have tremendous respect for them. The fact that President Bonilla is not feeling that is of concern. It’s part of why these negotiations happen at the bargaining table, and part of the dialogue.

One of the things that we have on our bargaining team is a number of people who have served, serve currently in schools, and are teachers themselves. So much of where we disagree is not on the values or not believing what the conditions are, is about what we can afford in our constrained, restrained environment.

Miller: I want to play a little bit of tape from when Angela Bonilla was on. She talked about what she sees as administrative bloat. I don’t know that she used that word, but that’s really what she was getting at. Basically, she was saying that too much money now goes to central administration and not enough money goes to schools or classrooms in particular. So I asked her what she thinks the district is spending money on right now that it should not be. This was her response:

Angela Bonilla [recording]: The answer is when you start clicking through all the organizational charts. So we have a lot of folks in charge of a lot of different work that does not seem that different from the ground, and is not impacting our ability to do our work.

Miller [recording]: I’m asking what are some of those things for people who haven’t clicked through yet. Can you name names of projects or programs?

Bonilla [recording]: Yeah. So right now, we have a lot of folks in special ed really focused on the idea of inclusion, which is really important and awesome when implemented correctly, because to implement it correctly, you need additional staff so that students can be supported and given their free and appropriate education in a general education classroom. And as that project continues without conversation with the union, we’re seeing less special educators being able to do their work, they’re being overloaded with staff with cases. And then the conversation becomes “well, if we had inclusion, it would look a little different.” So I think sometimes it’s around positions in departments that are looking into initiatives and goals that the district has placed forward, and then those goals are not necessarily directly impacting students on the ground.

Miller: Sharon Reese, what’s your response?

Reese: Some level of infrastructure is required to support a complex, highly regulated organization.

Miller: I don’t think she would disagree with that. The question is how much, right?

Reese: Right.

Adams: What I would offer is that there are positions that are charged to the central office that are working every day in schools with students. So while you may look at a budget book and see an increase of x amount of administrators, we have, for an example and a proof of concept because it worked this year, at some of our schools we have learning acceleration specialists who are licensed educators who are centrally funded and through the budget book, look as if they sit in the central office. And they’re actually in schools each and every day working with Black and Native students in order to improve achievement for those students and teachers who are teaching those students.

Miller: That doesn’t seem like the kind of positions that she was talking about there. Maybe this is a way to put it in terms of the HR perspective. Given that, as you’ve said over and over in various ways, “the problem here is a money one, we wish we could do more, we agree with many of the points broadly being brought up by teachers, but they’re not being clear eyed about the budget. We are, we don’t have the money to do what they’re asking for.” Given that, are you looking at all of the paid positions right now, and saying “is this vital?” If we all agree that we want classes to be small, we want kids in the end to have everything that they need, is anybody taking a fine tooth comb to say “you know what, we can get rid of this VP of X, this third administrator of Y?”

Reese: We wrestle with this balance every year in budget season. I think some of the outcomes you see that is that we have the average class size of 23 students in our elementary schools. The challenge is there isn’t enough in the positions that you described that would make up the hundreds of millions of dollars in gap between PAT’s proposal and what we think that we can offer. That’s the challenge. So as we experience as a district and as individuals, 18% inflation, our revenues as a district have increased by 9%. That’s half of offering current service level. So we look at that every year. 90% of our operating revenue goes back into schools. So even if we were to dramatically cut that baseline infrastructure that provides support to schools and to the district, we wouldn’t be able to bridge that gap.

Miller: Doctor Adams, we could spend an hour talking about this. But, there’s a lot of other news going on, including a lot of stuff that you’re very intimately tied to. And I’m thinking about the recent statewide test scores that were released. Maybe this is an unfair, short version of the picture. But basically, to me, it looks like PPS did better than some dismal statewide numbers. I’m curious, what’s your first, big picture take on the district’s performance in relation to the state?

Adams: Sure. Well, I’d first like to start by saying we’re pleased with the numbers that we achieved, but not satisfied. We saw and understood from national trends that there were decreases in English language arts student performance and even steeper decreases in math. And we did not see that overall. And so that lets us know that some of the investments we’re making are gaining traction and we have some proof of concept. The goal is 100% for every student group for all students and we’re not there.

Miller: We have about half of that right now.

Adams: Right. And we have a lot of work to do. And we need to even accelerate further achievement for our students of color because we know they’re further behind and we need to make up those gaps. And so what I would first say is, it is typically unusual for a large urban district to outperform the state. I’ve come from another state and have lots of friends in other districts across the country, and they’re really asking us what we have been doing that’s getting those results. I’m not saying it’s enough. I’m saying that it’s a positive trend in the right direction, after not having movement for some time.

Miller: With all the data that you have access to, can you confidently say “this is why we have made these improvements this year?”

Adams: I believe so, because we first saw improvements last year in math, which was the first year of our elementary mathematics curricular adoption. And so we have a three pronged approach that we believe will bring us to educational equity for all of our students.

First, we met with stakeholders including educators and created an instructional framework. That’s a unified vision of what teaching and learning should look like in every classroom in every school for every student. Then we know materials matter, the research tells us that putting high quality materials in the hands of educators will make a difference. So we’re doing that and we did that. And third, we know that we can’t just give materials and develop a unified vision without providing the professional job embedded support that educators need. So we’re also doing that. Those are the three big levers that we pushed on, and we see the results in student achievement.

Miller: What’s the timeline for the statewide changes in terms of how reading has to be taught to the youngest learners? How long before that means changes in how reading is actually taught for kindergartners or first graders?

Adams: Well, we’d like to believe we’re already on track for that based on our curricular adoptions and the materials that we right now have in the hands of educators of our youngest students.

Miller: Meaning, already in kindergarten, first grade, in PPS, they are so called “science of reading connected curricula” already in classes right now?

Adams: Yes.

Miller: So PPS won’t have to make changes to conform to the statewide requirements that are on the way?

Adams: Well, I wouldn’t say we may not have to make any changes. But I’d like to note that we have a lot of the pieces in place now in terms of the curricula that are in the hands of teachers.

Miller: What about the participation rate? Am I right that Oregon is one of very few states where it’s relatively easy for kids to opt out of these tests?

Adams: That’s correct. That was new learning for me when I joined the district two years ago.

Miller: What went through your mind?

Adams: That I hadn’t seen something like that before. Because it’s a federal requirement that we assess at least 95% of our students. We meet that requirement at the elementary level. At the middle school level, we reach and assess over 90% of our students in English language arts and mathematics. And then at the high school level, with the removal of the requirement to pass the assessment for graduation, participation is very, very low. And so we don’t even attempt to interpret those results because the participation rates aren’t at the 90% threshold.

Miller: Is it bad enough that you don’t even know what you don’t know? Or can you make some guesses about what the numbers would look like if a higher percentage of people were taking the test? Does that make sense?

Adams: It does make sense. And I say we do know what we know at the elementary and middle level, because we have 90 to 95, 96%. It’s within range.

Miller: But at high school, you’re saying the number is low enough that you can’t know for sure what’s happening in classrooms?

Adams: Well, the best way for us to know what’s happening in classrooms is for us to walk classrooms and observe with our own eyes. And we do have teams, and I visit schools as I can within my schedule, because I was a middle school teacher and I love being back in the school culture as many times and as often as I can. But based on assessment results at the high school level, yes, it would be very difficult to make determinations based on the high percentages of opt outs that we have for students.

Miller: Sharon Reese, just before we go, I want to give you one last chance to talk directly to Portland Public School parents right now, and kids if they’re playing hooky and spending their free time listening to a public radio show. I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but the sense I get is that it’s maybe more likely that many parents feel like they have an emotional and even just a personal connection to their teachers than they do administrators like you, the district, which can be this more amorphous thing. And so as a result, it’s possible that they are more understanding right now and more on the side of teachers who they feel like they are just closer to. If you were talking directly to parents right now, what would you say about the next month?

Reese: Well, first of all, students, get back to class.

Miller: Yeah, turn the radio off. Listen to the rebroadcast at 8pm tonight.

Reese: I would request that parents stay informed about the issues around what our constraints are. And I would offer up that a strike is not inevitable. We have an option here of continuing to negotiate at the table rather than having to close schools again with this generation of students, mine is one of them, who have gone through the pandemic school closures, which have had a massive impact as we know on our students. So we have another option. We can stay at the table.

Miller: Sharon Reese and Dr Renard Adams, thanks very much.

Reese / Adams: Thank you.

Miller: Sharon Reese is the chief of human resources for Portland Public Schools. Dr Renard Adams is the chief of research, assessment and accountability for the district.

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