What is the purpose — and the future — of public education?

OPB spent over a dozen years following a group of students from kindergarten through the end of high school in 2025. The result of the “Class of 2025″ project was an amazing body of stories of the real lives and experiences of students, teachers and families as they negotiate our public education system.

One of the questions we have now is: How do you measure the success of education?

We’ve gathered a group of big thinkers for a conversation about public education — what it is designed to do, who it is for and how it might be changing for a new generation of students.

We talk to Kali Thorne Ladd, CEO of the Children’s Institute, Ann Ishimaru, professor at the University of Washington College of Education, Jeffrey McGee, director of education at Rosemary Anderson Prep, and Ryan Carpenter, superintendent of Estacada School District.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. As you might have heard at some point, OPB spent more than a dozen years following a group of Oregon students from kindergarten all the way to the end of high school. They were the “Class of 2025.”

OPB hosted a public event earlier this week celebrating the project, including a screening of an hour-long documentary about these students. After the screening, I hosted a discussion with four education leaders and thinkers. It was a wide ranging conversation, but it was animated by two overarching questions: what should K-12 education look like in the future and how do we get there? We’re going to bring you that conversation today.

Kali Thorne Ladd is the chief executive officer at the Children’s Institute, a nonprofit that supports kids in Oregon from birth through fifth grade. Ann Ishimaru is a professor at the University of Washington College of Education, and the author of the books “Doing the Work” and “Just Schools,” which focuses on Salem-Keizer schools. Jeffrey McGee is the director of education at Rosemary Anderson Prep, an alternative community-based school with four campuses in Portland. And Ryan Carpenter is the superintendent of the Estacada School District.

The “Class of 2025” project was tied to an audacious goal set in 2011 by then Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, that all Oregon kids would graduate from high school. We were curious what goals our guests would set now. I started with Kali Thorne Ladd:

Kali Thorne Ladd: We talk about it a lot at Children’s Institute. We want all children to be great by age 8. And by that, we want children to be thriving by age 8 – that’s about the time they hit third grade. There was a researcher, James Kim, I think, out of Harvard, his research showed that we know at the end of kindergarten whether a child is on track to reach third grade literacy. Children that were at the bottom quartile in literacy and math at the end of kindergarten were the same kids in the bottom quartile in third grade.

So, we know that early childhood builds the foundation for where they are in kindergarten, and not just academically, social-emotionally in terms of their cultural identity, their sense of belonging and who they are. So we know that to be true. Why aren’t we doing everything in our power to ensure that children are doing great by age 8? And that they have the supports that they need not just academically, but socially, emotionally? That they have those caring adults, the greatest protective factor.

Kids will go through hard things. They will go through trauma. Unfortunately, many kids … we live in a world that we are witnessing traumatic events happening every day. Last week is a perfect example. The detrimental impact that has on children is great, and yet children are resilient. And a loving, caring adult is the greatest protective factor that supports resiliency in those children.

We tend to break up the continuum into two chunks of nine years, essentially. But if we get those first nine years right, we have a much greater likelihood of getting the rest. We have a much greater likelihood of seeing kids graduate. And I have not seen this community or state make deliberate effort to invest and support children in those ages.

Miller: So how much there are you talking about policies specifically at the, say, pre-K to five level? And how much are you talking about societal shifts?

Thorne Ladd: I’m talking about both. But I think we can do more on the policy side. For those who are based in Portland, we’ve had a long debate over the last year about preschool. Preschool has become a dirty word. Ninety percent of the brain is developed by the time a child is at the end of kindergarten – 90% of the brain. Our teachers are brain architects. We pay preschool teachers less than Uber drivers and we’re losing them to do these other tasks. We would not do that if they were neurosurgeons. They are brain architects in the same way.

I would say we do not invest and support children in the early years. We don’t support the alignment. We don’t support kindergarten. Our kindergarten attendance rates are one of the lowest in the nation. Kindergarten attendance rates are also predictive of attendance later on. We don’t even capture and produce that information for everybody to see that we can actually track it. We don’t track student achievement in terms of the system. There are formative assessments that districts use, there’s MAP and i-Ready; but we do not necessitate that those assessments are given in kinder, first, second grade. Those are formative assessments. They’re not high stakes assessments. They’re a way for us to see how are kids doing, are they on track?

Miller: How are specific kids doing in ways that the teacher can recognize over the last three weeks, as opposed to ...

Thorne Ladd: And teachers do want to support children. That’s data they want to use to support them. But not every school district has the ability, especially our rural communities. We work all around Oregon and we have schools in Oregon that don’t go to school five days a week. Many districts only go four days a week. We have the lowest number of school days in terms of number of days learning in the nation. There are all these things [that] add up in terms of what we’re serious about.

Miller: I wanna hear a lot more from you. But Ann, what would your goal be, your big sort of north star for the next decade?

Ann Ishimaru: Well, I think that actually we get in trouble when we say, like, “there’s only one thing.” And actually, there’s been movement on that. The latest accountability regimes are really trying to think about multiple things that we need to be tracking. Certainly, the early learning and strength in the early years is crucial. But especially in the wake of the pandemic. We think about the transitions and you saw it in the documentary, what happens in those transitions as kids move from preschool – if there is any – into elementary, and especially from elementary into middle school and then middle school into high school.

And we have a mental health crisis in schools amongst young people right now. I think there was a hope or expectation that after we got back into schools and the pandemic was over, then that would also decrease, but it hasn’t. So I think that’s one of the things that we need to be attending to and providing resources for, and that would be one of the things that I would add to the mix.

I think in addition to really being thoughtful about the kind of academic measures we’re using, not going back to the old school high stakes accountability, “let’s punish schools or educators if they’re not achieving these kinds of things,” but really thinking carefully about what are the supports that schools need and how do we think about that holistically? We’re recognizing things like attendance. When you unpack it, there’s so much under there. Why are kids not attending school? We have to be thinking about the barriers that they’re facing, we have to think about their engagement at school, we have to think about the relationships with the adults.

So I think that in addition to the academic indicators, especially as we think about kids in those transitions, that we also need to be thinking about their well-being.

Miller: I take your point about the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket or focusing on one particular goal. So Ryan, let me sort of change the question a little bit to make it even bigger in some ways. What do you see as the purpose of K-12 education right now?

Ryan Carpenter: Well first of all, I do want to say one of the things I liked about Governor Kitzhaber’s policy and rules was that it was aspirational. And by nature, the public educator really lives in an aspirational environment. We want to really encourage our students to dream but also guide them towards the pathways of what it would take to achieve those dreams.

So I like the aspirational aspect of it. And I think one of the things that’s critical for us is, so often, we’re criticized from people inside the business world, where we’re trying to maximize output in the most efficient dollar system. But in all honesty, our responsibility is to spend as much as we possibly can to support students’ successes through the taxpayer dollars that are given to us. And I just wanted to really talk about that, because how we’re held accountable oftentimes is viewed under the lens of what the business world sees, different than how we really promote all kids to have the opportunity. And that aspirational piece is critical because, as we talk about realism in today’s graduation rate, the last thing we want to do is walk into a classroom and say “OK, 70% of you are going to make it.” That is against our nature altogether.

So what a great public school system should look like in today’s world should be really threefold. First of all, we have an obligation to make sure students are learning at grade level in order to equip them with the skills that they need to either progress into a two-year or four-year system, or prepare them with the soft skills to be workforce ready right out of the gate, where they can get a high wage, high demand job and become productive members of our society.

But secondly, a great school system also needs to provide a space for students to be able to explore. And this is where I’m happy to see a pendulum swinging back right now, which has a heavy emphasis on career technical education. One of the things, at least in my own personal story, is I became a teacher because my father was a teacher. That’s all I knew growing up, this is what you do. And in so many different kids’ stories as they progress through our school systems, when you ask them what they wanna be, they have dreams. But at the end of the day, they end up reverting back to what they know in terms of what their life experiences were like. So I do believe that high schools play a significant role in really exposing kids to different opportunities.

And then my third and final point about what schools I think need to continue to prioritize is – I thought Ann said it well – that schools are a microcosm of the world. And we really need to embrace the fact that this is the only time in a kid’s life where they get to be in a little mini byproduct of the world, but yet in a controlled environment where they have adult support, they have safeties and securities and systems set up in a place for them to discover who they are and how they engage and interact. And as we know, parent choice, charter schools and home schools continue to be the buzzword. And I do think public education has a responsibility to compete, to make sure that parents continue to choose to send their kids to public education. But at the same time, we need to make sure that the environment we’re creating not only prepares them academically, but gives them the body armor that they need to be able to go out in the world and be successful. So that’s my dream for public education and I think we’re working hard to get there.

Miller: Jeffrey, what about you? From an alternative high school’s perspective, how do you view the purpose now of an education?

Jeffrey McGee: So a few of the things were said. But I think definitely weighing heavy on the CTE. A lot of kids learn better with their hands, and those type of things also lead to the next step of your life, what avenue you wanna go. I would be remiss not to say that culturally responsive teachers, but then more teachers of color overall is also a huge thing that needs to happen over the next few years.

And then lastly, I’m gonna jump back on it, I really do think individual plans for each kid. If a kid has to leave school every day at 2:45 because they have to pick up their little brother and walk them home every day, they should not be penalized. That should not be an absence that somehow now further down in their career, “oh, you only attended at a 70% clip because you’re leaving school early every day.” Schools have to start to understand that kids have lives outside of school. And the only way you can hold on to those kids who have those other things going on in the community is to make sure that you let them know, “I understand, and I’m gonna support you with that.”

Lastly, I would say we need to bring community into the schools. Just like our churches, just like everything else we do, the community needs to have a say. We need retired grandmas, grandpas, everybody’s sitting in there, saying hi to the kids. We’ll get you coffee and donuts, whatever we need to do. But it needs to feel like a place where everybody is welcome. And I’ve seen it for too long now, being a part of not just Rosemary Anderson, but Portland Public Schools for 11 years, that we don’t do it enough, engaging the community in our schools on a daily basis.

Miller: What difference do you think that would make for kids?

McGee: Huge. I had it when I went to Jefferson High School in the ‘90s. It was like that. The same little lady that you knew had the house on the corner, she might walk through your building. And you better not be cussing when she’s walking in that building. [Audience laughter]

I think really what it does is it starts to be bigger than just oneself. We talk about community, but if you don’t know, the Portland community is fragmented. North and Northeast Portland is not North and Northeast Portland that I grew up in anymore. All the people that look like me got pushed out to The Numbers, that’s what we call everything past 82nd.

But the difference that I think that it would truly make is kids need to have those uncomfortable conversations with adults about what is my next steps. My son just went through it the other day. A coach that he doesn’t know, but he knows me, started asking him, “So what’s your plan?” He’s great, 3.5 GPA, doing everything he needed to do. But he don’t have his plan cemented. That’s what community builds. You got people asking you stuff that maybe only your parents or only that one aunt will ask you. Now you’re getting it every single day. So it makes you have to think and deal with it on a regular basis.

Miller: Ann, twice now, Jeffrey has mentioned his desire for every student to have something like an IEP, an individualized education plan or program. What goes through your mind when you hear that? And I guess what I’m specifically wondering is how you imagine, if not the legality of that, the actual everybody having an IEP, but the spirit of that scaling up? How do you do that?

Ishimaru: I think it’s exactly the kind of thing that you’re talking about. If you think about the stories of the kids that we saw, they were struggling and something happened, and they were able to, whatever it was, access the credit recovery or get into a different program, it’s really having other adults around. It might have been the counselor, but it could have been a teacher, it could have been a family member. I think that that’s the only way we’re gonna be able to do that kind of thing is if we’re all hands on deck.

I think one of the things that one of the teachers said that is challenging about this time right now is so much gets put on teachers alone. As we think about the aunties and uncles in the community … and I think a lot of us may not feel like, “oh, I’m not an educator,” or, “I don’t have that role.” A lot of the folks that I work with are parents who feel like, “well, the educators know best, I need to stay out of the way.” I think the spirit of that is only gonna happen if we all step in and we all step up. We can’t just leave it to the few who that is their full-time paid job. We also need to step in and be part of that.

And the thing is that, especially as we think about the inequities and the racial inequities that exist in schools, there are folks in our midst who are experts on young people, their priorities, their dreams, the challenges that they face. And those experts are amongst us, they’re already there. The young people themselves ask them. It’s their families. And it may not always be the people who are biologically related to them, it could be their aunties and uncles from the community, their churches, other community-based organizations.

I think the only way that kind of thing could happen in spirit is that we really invoke a broader ecosystem of education. And we don’t think of schools as the only ones who are responsible for educating, but that all of our institutions and all of us as individuals are stepping forward into that.

Miller: Ryan, I take all your points about aunties and uncles. But the way I hear it, the idea is that that would be a way for kids to feel welcomed, to feel supported, and to actually erase maybe some of the existing division between schools and the outside world.

But if we’re talking about the nuts and bolts of teaching math, which falls I think more squarely on the shoulders of teachers, I can imagine a teacher maybe in your district or in one of the other [197] districts so saying, “That sounds great. I wish I could do that. I’ve got 30 kids at very different levels, and some of them really need help and I’ll focus the most on them. Some of the others, I’ll do my best, but I cannot meet every single kid exactly where they are every day. It’s just physically impossible.”

So what would you say to them?

Carpenter: First of all, I would say to them, that’s OK. We’re just happy kids are here today and we’re going to continue to work through the process each and every day, based on their needs. I had a great conversation earlier with Jeffrey about being motivated to come to school. There are some days where we just need to say, “Hey, we’re glad you’re here today in whatever spot that you’re at,” and really bringing that welcoming environment together is the first part. I cannot emphasize enough how critical the relationship is in order to be able to remove the barriers necessary to be able to get students to learn. And that relationship is so paramount in that process.

One of the challenges, particularly when it comes to math and reading … those are the two very hardest jobs I believe that exist in education today. And while I agree having the volunteer come, and they may or may not be a math expert, what it does allow the teacher to do is to really be able to chunk things in an individualized basis where they might be able to work specifically with one group on this specific thing, while still getting help and support from the volunteers.

And really it’s been since COVID that schools have been ultimately closed to the outside help. And it’s not that schools don’t want it, we’re begging for it. And it’s not that the community doesn’t want to be a part of that as well. It’s just the fact that really since COVID, that connection really hasn’t been established back together. But I do think there’s a time and a place. I do think we need to be careful about who we’re bringing in to support those specific things.

At the end of the day, the teaching math and teaching reading is one of the most difficult things. We do need our experts involved in that piece. But there are so many other supports such as a paraeducator, a case manager. And as we try to encourage a more inclusive environment into our general education classroom setting, the more people we can pour in to help support not only the learning, but the behaviors, and allow our teachers to do the good work and remove those barriers is paramount to that success.

Miller: Kali, I think you want to jump in.

Thorne Ladd: I think some schools want community, and they’re definitely school districts and schools specifically that do not invite community in, that don’t want community there. And part of why community is important is because schools are too often a microcosm of society. We need schools to be better than society. We need schools to be safer and more protective of our babies than society. And unfortunately, the biases that exist in society play out in the classroom. Bringing community in gives children a chance to connect with people that look like them, that speak their language, that understand their cultural nuances. And that belonging actually primes the brain to be better at learning. Emotions and intellect are intermingled in the brain, so how a child feels impacts how they’re able to learn.

It has become this bifurcation of schools or community. We are seeing huge losses in Multnomah County to the SUN school system, the system that we built to create and bring community into schools. We’ve decided to not fund it in the same way. So in terms of systemic change, there are things that do work and make a difference, but often we do not intentionally bring them together.

McGee: I forgot to bring this up, but I was at PPS when the pandemic hit, and whoa, did we make a quick shift to proficiency grading.

Miller: What do you mean by that?

McGee: So proficiency grading is, you’re gonna have a multitude of ways to show that teacher that you understand, that you know enough that you can get the grade to pass it. Where did that go? Because I know for a lot of kids, they can’t do it in one way. They might be able to do it in a different way, but if you don’t have that as an option …

To me, proficiency grading also leveled the field for a lot of students because I may not be able to be at school 80% of the time. And I’m not gonna tell you what’s going on because I got a lot of trauma going on in my family, but when I’m here, I do my work. If I could come in and show you that I’ve learned just as much as the kid that was here 90% of the time, why can’t I do that and pass your class? We literally don’t pass kids and graduate kids because they don’t attend enough school right now. So I think proficiency grading could at least start to level some of that out, because there’s a bunch of smart kids that just don’t have the ability to walk through those doors on a regular basis.

Miller [in studio]: At one point, I asked Ann what accountability, a major buzzword in education, means to her.

Ishimaru: We have to ask, to whom and for what? We have state and federal accountability, and there’s a lot of conversation about how are resources being used. I think a lot about how are we accountable to young people themselves, and to families and communities. I think each of those young people had these dreams, and the parents and the families had dreams for them as well. So I think that’s kind of an untapped resource as we think about accountabilities. What does it look like to enact practices – could be grading, it could be other kinds of programs – in ways that are accountable to those folks, who are then are gonna be able to tell us and be part of co-designing or co-creating with educators the things that are gonna work the best for them.

Miller: You didn’t mention reading the third grade reading scores there. Obviously, you didn’t mention that on purpose because you had a more holistic, bigger picture. But what do you think about third grade reading tests?

Ishimaru: One of the things that has been really striking is the way that education has become so politicized, and there are all of these debates now around things like early literacy and the science of reading. From a research perspective, there’s actually not a debate, there’s not an either or, right? Those technical, foundational skills are important. And it matters what kids are reading, who they are, and how that connects to who they are, what they care about, what they’re passionate about. Sometimes the broader policy narratives can make it seem like there’s this false choice between these two things.

I do think that the early literacy goals are really crucial. I think that the test scores are only one indicator, that we need to be paying attention to other things as well. So yes, those are important, but they don’t stand alone.

Miller: Ryan, how do you think about this as a superintendent of a district?

Carpenter: Well, first of all, I do think accountability does have an importance and a place. At the end of the day, coming from the superintendent’s chair, we are a collector of our local taxpayer money. And I do believe we have a responsibility to share with our local community how we’re doing with children and how we’re preparing them for the future.

But that being said, I think that we need to be careful about, as you talked about, that one SBAC standardized test being the only indicator of a failing or successful school district. And I also believe that that couldn’t be a more inequitable measure, particularly when you compare rural Estacada with Lake Oswego, right? We’re talking about two completely different entities of students and demographics that we’re working with. But at the same time, as think about the standardized test, there is a role for that. I do think it’s important to take that snapshot and just see how we’re doing in comparison with other local communities.

But the problem with the standardized test is it’s a look backwards, and so you’re asking real public school districts to make right now decisions based on lagging data or things that happened in the past. In addition to that, one of the things – I’m just going to go on a tirade here for just a quick second – that drives me nuts …

Miller: It’s a very gentle tirade.

Carpenter. [Laughter] I’ll be quick on this part. But one of the things that does drive me nuts about how we’re compared, when it comes to accountability, is if we have a third grade group now, they’re compared to last year’s third graders to determine if we’re growing or declining. And that’s not a fair comparison, when really we need to look at the growth trajectory of each individual, specific group to make sure we go through that process.

I do want to say that one of the things when it comes to accountability that’s important in today’s work is using more of an evidence-based model. And the Estacada School District is a fully inclusive school district. But in addition to that, we’re also fully implementing the standards-based grading through that process. And one of the things that’s been paramount to our overall data change is the fact that we don’t care when a student learns it, we just care that they learned it. And so time becomes the variable when you do an evidence or a standards-based grading perspective.

So our ability to really hold ourselves accountable, not just in the SBAC metrics, but making sure that we’re using something like the University of Chicago readiness standards, which really measures our students passing with grades of 80% or better in their classes, are they turning in 80% of their homework and work completion, and are they attending school 80% of the time or more? These are things that we’re able to use as real-time data to have the opportunity to intervene and do some individual work with students.

We’re also empowering our teachers, which is so critical, through the PLC process and a collective group of experts, to be able to look at locally-created student learning data, and then make adjustments as a team based on talking about what strategies are working versus what strategies are not working. And by the way, we should always celebrate failure by failing forward. If we can identify a strategy that we know is not working, let’s celebrate that, because we know it’s not working. This gives us an opportunity to make a real-time change and make adjustments in order to support our students and where they’re at today.

And then obviously we also need to make sure that we’re measuring student satisfaction and student experience inside our school systems. We need to make sure that we’re measuring parent voice, to make sure that our local school district is truly implementing the mission, the vision and values of that community. Because at the end of the day, our number one responsibility is to educate this community’s children and we need to make sure that we’re doing that in alignment with our community’s values.

As a result of that, we’ve seen significant gains as we talked about some of the statistics in the film tonight. The Estacada School District in 2012 had a 51% on-time graduation rate. As of this last year, we almost met Governor Kitzhaber’s goal, with a 91% graduation rate, a 40% increase in that time. [Audience applause] Our attendance has grown, our parents’ satisfaction has grown and we’ve been able to retain our students, as well as a growing enrollment in Estacada. And for five years in a row, we’ve been recognized as one of the Oregonian’s top workplaces.

So we’ve been able to find a great balance of being able to empower our community through this process, to really hold ourselves accountable to the metrics that we deem most important, which allows us to make quick time decisions. And that environment and culture is being recognized by employees in a way to allow us to have success overall.

Miller: Kali, if I gave you a year to look at a school district somewhere, how would you decide whether or not you thought that that school district was serving its students well? What would your own personal version of analysis or accountability focus on?

Thorne Ladd: Oh wow. I think when you were talking about “fail forward,” part of what I was bringing up is these interim assessments where you can tell where a student is and how a student is growing. It’s not the snapshot assessment, it does give us more data. Teachers can pivot, they can adjust instruction so that the children are learning.

I would look at, are the children happy to be there? I have a student who will be the class of 2027, so she’s a junior in high school now. And I asked her, “what do you think the future of education should be,” as we were driving to school today. She said, “well, it needs to be engaging, I wanna want to be there.” The world is way more exciting now than it was when I was growing up, there are so many things that could distract a student

Miller: And way more terrifying too, in a lot of ways.

Thorne Ladd: And way more terrifying. But I don’t know that schools have evolved at the speed of society. And engaging children in really dynamic ways … She mentioned hands-on learning, experiential opportunities, ways to use their full selves. I would look at a district’s ability to engage students. Students tell us what they want and they tell us what they want at much younger ages than we realize. And children know at a young age whether or not they belong, whether or not a teacher likes them or not. And that can either engage or disengage a child, whether they’re in first grade or ninth grade, if they don’t feel like they are seen or valued.

I would look at dual language. We have an increasing number of dual language students in schools. We know that when we start with dual language learning, dual language kids can actually be biliterate and literate faster, if we give them access to a language education. But instead, we put them in ELL and we say you can only speak this one language. Most countries that have multiple languages don’t do it this way. So I would look at how are your bilingual learners thriving? Are they speaking the languages, both English and their home language well?

I think attendance matters. I would look at the communication and the relationship between the adults in the building because adults have a huge impact. And one of the things you mentioned were the teacher satisfaction. Teachers are burned out. And they work so hard. I started my career as a middle school teacher. It is not an easy job. I’m not a middle school teacher now. And I would be a veteran teacher, 20-something years in the classroom if I had stayed. How do we retain teachers and support them in the classroom to thrive? And I think the building administrator, but also believing that teachers have agency. Teachers know what they’re doing. And giving them the opportunity to create space for children in the way they envision – I’d look at that as well.

So accountability has many, many layers. And then family engagement. I was gonna share a data point. You asked about literacy and everyone has talked about Mississippi, and it’s kind of known as the Mississippi Miracle, but it’s not really miraculous. Mississippi prioritized high-quality preschool, strong early literacy instruction, family engagement and early intervention. And together those things led to better outcomes. Now they do, policy-wise, have a different system. They held kids back when the kids weren’t doing well, that gets to the proficiency part. But at the end of the day, they went from being one of the lowest, 49th in fourth grade reading on the NAEP, which is the gold standard, to the top 10 nationally by 2024.

This is not rocket science, but it’s not a single bullet like you said. And science of reading teaches basic understanding of text. It does not teach comprehensive reading. It does not teach a love of reading. And all of those things are part of how we get children to be literate. So this idea of one thing and not looking at the comprehensive package, I think is part of what is hurting us in our system.

Miller: I don’t think we’ve talked about money once yet in this conversation. I’m wondering – and maybe Jeffrey you can start with this – what do you think could be improved in the Oregon educational system without more money?

McGee: Well that’s kind of where we’re at right now.

Miller: That’s why I phrase it that way.

McGee: So just to break down what alternative school looks like for us at Rosemary Anderson Prep, we basically create contracts with school districts. And as you can imagine, we’re basically taking the kids that they identified as not being successful, being behind, or just done, they brought an Airsoft gun to school, “OK, you got them from here on out.” I would say at least 80% of the students that are referred to our alternative settings are behind when they get to us. Very rarely will you get the student that’s “I’m on track, I just didn’t wanna be there. I wanna mess with y’all.”

So as we build these contracts out, different districts wanna give you different rates. Why? So that they can hold on to a little piece of the pie. They tell families, like for special education, “oh, your student will get more support if they go to an alternative school.” Most of our schools split like a 0.8 or 0.7 person with two or three other alternative schools, so that’s a lie. They don’t get more special education support in alternative settings. But more importantly, the districts aren’t willing to even pay what they would get for the student, but they still want to attach them to a cohort. So the conversation becomes, do you really want to win? Or do you want to look good losing? Because that’s how I really look at it. To know that somebody’s willing to step in and get your student across the threshold who’s 14 credits behind from graduating, and you just say, “hey, you got them,” that’s idiotic to me.

And so when I think about funding and stuff, I do think that beyond the community connections and stuff, I really think we need to get the investments from businesses. We need to start bringing the Nikes, the Adidas, all these people that set up shop here, come to these schools, give these students something to strive for, something to hope for. Show them what they can do if they complete school. But I think as far as what the districts are willing to give up, I think the writing’s on the wall. They’re not willing to invest in the kids that they don’t think will be successful in the end. And that’s where the money issues become for us, because the district will not pay us the amount that they actually get for housing a student, but they’ll send them to us and pay us less after they’ve already put the student at a deficit. That makes no sense to me.

Miller: Ann, how do you think about the funding issue, in terms of improvements in public education at a time of enormous unprecedented federal disinvestment and a huge state-level cliff that we’re looking at in the coming years in terms of the overall budget?

Ishimaru: I think sometimes there’s a tendency to feel like, “we’ve allocated more money to the schools and they’re mismanaging it.” That’s the sort of business narrative sometimes. I think the reality is, especially in special education, we have students coming in with more needs and then we have fewer supports. We have this gap between what the state will fund and then what we’re getting from the federal government. And then we’ve have active threats now to the funding that we have, for students who are low income, for students who are experiencing homelessness, all of these things are right now under threat. We don’t know what will happen.

You mentioned it’s also more terrifying right now to be in school. I just think about what’s been going on in the last week especially, like Minneapolis public schools are closed down and they’re on remote learning now. And as we relive that, what that was like and what that does to young people- not to mention the kind of trauma that young people and their families are experiencing as a result of ICE and the attacks that are happening right now.

So, I think unlike COVID, there was nothing that most of us could do about that. And I think now we’re facing the threat of these kinds of things and trying to think about, this is a different situation, how might we all step forward and figure out a way so that this kind of situation, this kind of attack doesn’t continue or doesn’t escalate into what Minneapolis is experiencing?

Miller: In the time we have left, I just want to go down the line here. I’d love to hear what gives you hope right now. Kali?

Thorne Ladd: Our children always give me hope, because they’re incredible. And they’re resilient. Many of them know more than we … I read something recently that that’s part of what challenge that educators have is often students, especially high school level, because they have access to information they sometimes know more than the teachers, and the teachers see it as a threat, insubordination. I think we have children that are more inclusive and kind and caring than my generation is. I don’t wanna project on all the generations, as a Gen Xer, I would say I see things in my daughter and her peer group that I never heard kids talk about. And I think actually the pandemic generation treat each other with particular care, maybe because of what they went through. And that sort of love, care and attention, the desire to be inclusive and care for our neighbor, I think is something that gives me great hope.

And that we’re having this conversation. We have to continue to have the dialogue, talk about public education, look at what’s happening and figure out how we can make it better. I’ve been using this quote a lot and I’m gonna use it now, Bryan Stevenson is in the criminal justice movement, and he helps get people off of death row. I went to the Legacy Museum in Alabama, which is a museum he set up, and he has a t-shirt that I bought that said, “Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists. Hope is your superpower.”

Carpenter: I’m also extremely hopeful. I believe that Oregon public education right now is in transition, and I’m really excited about the pressures that we’re experiencing from both our students, our parents and the community at large. Because in order for us to reimagine what schooling looks like from 2026 onward is gonna be quite a challenge. You think about even the components of artificial intelligence, which is one of the more common things that I’m talking about today … I think often about the math teacher from 30 years ago or when we were growing up when the calculator became a thing, and the difference between learning long division by hand and using the calculator. Now, we don’t even bat an eye at the calculator, but the struggle now is with writing your own essay or using artificial intelligence. And that’s a great struggle for us to have to productively work for, as we think about what preparing tomorrow’s kid actually looks like.

And in conclusion, just to go back to the funding piece, I wanna say first of all, I’m appreciative of our taxpayer funds and I think that the Oregon school district is very adequately funded. We’re paid $11,000 per kid. But here’s the thing that most people miss, because it’s kind of in the back end. While I do feel like we are getting adequate funding from our local taxpayers of the state of Oregon, the things that are often missed of that $11,000 is PERS retirement continues to exponentially grow. Health benefits and insurance premiums continue to exponentially grow. What we’re required to do for unemployment and other unfunded mandates coming particularly from Salem are also becoming more and more expensive.

So I do want you to walk away with knowing that, while we receive $11,000 per kid, about a third of that comes right into the school district, and right back out again into the system. And so this is where we’re truly underfunding our students, not necessarily in the income that we’re receiving from the local taxpayer, but how it comes in and goes back out.

And the other piece that’s important for people to understand is in the 1980s and 1990s, we were primarily focused on teaching reading, writing and math. Today’s public institution has, in addition to academic outcomes, also become a social service hub for children and the communities. And when you think about a rural community such as Estacada, there is no DHS office space. There is no mental health counseling inside a small city like ours. The school district is the heartbeat. We’re the place where parents come crying and begging for help.

So in addition to teaching reading, writing and math, we also have social work, food banks, different types of mental health services. And none of these things are a part of the state school funding formula. So I just want you to know, as a taxpayer, that your local school district is stretching every single dollar we possibly can to serve our community.

It’s been a pleasure to speak with you this evening. Thank you.

Miller: Jeffrey McGee?

McGee: Just briefly, I would like for us to come up with new ways of accountability. We’ve been on this attendance kick for a very long time. What about engagement? What about what do they do when they’re actually here, when they actually can make it? Just thinking of alternative ways to kind of look at some of the things that we’ve been doing for a long time that still keeps Blacks and Native Americans at the bottom of the list. Because that’s my biggest fear is that we can invest all the money we want to. I think we all could pretty much predict who’s gonna be at the bottom of that scale no matter how much money is invested. So really looking at, holistically, what do we need to do to even out the playing field for all people, from anybody that’s coming from the reservation, to just a kid that has no high school graduates in their family? What does that look like?

And then lastly, I think we’ve talked a lot about the teachers needing support, and I absolutely agree. And I also think that in the city of Portland, we also have to be very intentional on getting more teachers of color and making those connections. Because like we heard in the video, it’s gonna help all of our students. So I just don’t want that to be missed. We need to get more teachers of color in the system.

Miller: And Ann, last word for you, either what gives you hope or what you’re hoping for?

Ishimaru: I think one of the things that gives me hope is that all of you are here, that we’re engaged in this conversation, that OPB is stepping in. A couple of the comments have really gotten me thinking about imagination. So you asked also, what can we do without a whole lot more money? I think one of the things sometimes that we lack is imagination, about what could be possible, what could we do. There’s actually studies that have come out recently that the act of imagining something with other people builds the kind of social bonds that help us to actually realize those futures in the current moment.

I have just published a book that is a collaboration with a number of other scholars and practitioners about equity leadership in particular. And we talk about that time frame, that there are mornings, middays and evenings. And now we’re saying we’re in this time of night. And what do you do at night? The final chapter is called “Dream.” It is a time of a whole lot of danger. There are folks who are gonna continue to do this kind of work, to really continue to be connected to young people in ensuring that they get what they need. But we also can dream during this time. It is a time when we are gonna need to strategize, because there is gonna be eventually a new dawn.

So I think that’s one of the things that my hope is, that we can collectively be courageous and reimagine what’s possible.

Miller: Ann Ishimaru, Jeffrey McGee, Ryan Carpenter and Kali Thorne Ladd, thanks very much to all four of you.

All: Thank you.

[Audience applause]

Miller [in studio]: Ann Ishimaru is a professor at the University of Washington College of Education. Ryan Carpenter is a superintendent at the Estacada School District. Kali Thorne Ladd is the chief executive officer at the Children’s Institute. And Jeffrey McGee is the director of Education at Rosemary Anderson Prep. We spoke in front of a live audience at the Redd in Southeast Portland.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.