Civil Rights Complaint Filed Against Portland Public Schools

5 min read

UPDATE - July 6: According to Willamette Week, Paul Anthony met with Carole Smith on January 26, 2016, and documented the core findings that drove his civil rights complaint. He filed his complaint on May 26, 2016. Between January and May, the Portland Public School Board - of which Anthony is a member - reviewed the District-wide Boundary Review Advisory Committee (DBRAC) recommendations. On April 12th, Anthony is quoted in this DBRAC-related story talking about implementation plans moving forward for East side schools. As noted in this document about the goals of DBRAC, ensuring equitable access to resources is a key goal.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, a school board member had evidence that, in his estimation, rose to the level of a civil rights complaint. He had this evidence in January, and was part of a review process that was designed, in part, to address these very needs. Yet, during the entire review and discussion process, the documentation was never shared. Why not? Why sit on data that documents the exact issue the district is trying to solve when you are part of a group of people providing guidance and input to this process?

If I am mistaken here, and the documentation used to drive the civil rights complaint was introduced during a public school board meeting, please share the link to the meeting video, and I'll watch the video and update this post accordingly. But, if this information was never shared publicly as part of the DBRAC review process, or as part of any budget review process, I'd love to know the rationale for keeping it private, rather than for sharing it publicly in the middle of a process where the information could have been put to good use. END UPDATE.

ORIGINAL POST

Paul Anthony, a Portland School Board member appears to have filed a federal complaint alleging racial discrimination. According to the Oregonian, the complaint was filed in late May.

The Oregonian story linked above has some quotes from the complaint (note - I have not read the complaint, save for the excerpts covered in the Oregonian story), including:

"Superintendent Smith permits her staff to discriminate on the basis of race, color and national origin in access to educational course offerings and programs," the complaint says. "PPS data proves that students of color cannot access courses tied to long term academic achievement. For example, they disproportionately are not offered access to foreign language, academic supports, and electives that white students access."

I'm glad to see this issue getting increased attention. It mirrors and amplifies what people with kids have been saying for years. It also mirrors trends we see with how parent fundraising amplifies and enshrines the inequitable distribution of resources. But no one has the appetite or will to take on inequities based on parent fundraising. We allow the Equity Fund to apply band-aids, when what we need is surgery.

The Civil Rights complaint also begs the question of why the school board didn't use its oversight of the redistricting process to address inequitable access to resources. True leadership would have used that opportunity.

And while this might be covered in the text of the complaint, it would be great to see the ongoing problems with racial bias in discipline within Portland Public Schools addressed. We should have school and classroom level data about the source of referrals and suspensions. Looking at this data will make a lot of people very uncomfortable, but in an ideal world, this would have full teacher's and prinicipal's union support within the context of ongoing professional development for their members. Suspensions, expulsions, and disciplinary referrals don't happen out of thin air - they represent choices by teachers, principals, counselors, and other school staff. But, for all the obvious reasons, taking the needed hard look at this issue would almost certainly face strong and determined resistance.

Quoting again from the Oregonian article:

(Paul Anthony) said after painstakingly seeking the data and arranging it in spreadsheets, he couldn't get the traction he wanted on the issues.

In the imediate aftermath of the ongoing issues around lead in our school's drinking water, many people defended the school board by saying that the board doesn't have the ability to request detailed information outside of a general supervisory role. However, what we are reading about here is real, actual inquiry - and that's a very good thing. That's exactly what we want and should demand from members of the school board. The fact that this didn't happen around issues of lead - despite a well documented history of lead in school water in Portland, going back to 2001 - calls into question the role of the board in Portland's ongoing lead issues.

It's easy to beat up on the district. It's much harder - and more politically costly - to tackle the ossified issue of school funding. It's even more difficult to engage the teacher's and/or principal's unions over issues of racially biased discipline. If we're serious about equity, we can't approach this piecemeal, and we can't just take on the easy fights. An engaged school board willing to listen to the community, and take on the hard issues, is an essential piece of what school improvement will look like.