There's a 19-year-old Liberian-born challenger to a train-wreck of an incumbent on Portland's school board. The election is in May. The train wreck is Derry Jackson; the challenger is Charles McGee, a political science major at Portland State University.

In this KOIN-TV story on McGee, he identifies some priorities, and they're at least plausible, within a larger context the candidate still needs to articulate:

McGee says he wants to close the achievement gap between white and minority students, advocate for stable school funding from Salem and help manage the superintendent's big school reorganization.

Stable state funding is certainly desireable but it needs to be coupled with an awareness that school success is not at all just about how much gets spent. And "closing the achievement gap" is easy enough to assign to school officials, but much of the responsibility for that lies with parents of low-achievers. Print media rarely address that component; it should be raised during the campaign.

One problem in Portland stems from the common tendency of parents in urban systems to flee the low achievers, exercising expanded local choice options under NCLB. There are sharply declining school enrollments in parts of North and Northeast Portland.

A candidate's policies are one thing, the candidate's perspective another. In this Willamette Week Q&A McGee makes a plausible case for how his youth and recent experience as a Portland public high school graduate could be an asset.

Every now and again, we need a fairly young person to shake the tree up and say, 'What else can we do to improve a system that obviously is not serving everyone properly?'

...Although there are certain things that you get with age, there are also certain things you don't have with age. I can walk into a high-school classroom and sit down any day and act like a high-school student. I can sit down in a meeting with the teachers union and tell them what didn't work in our class. I can also call up some friends who go to Franklin, and Grant, and say, 'What's happening?' I can do that; these folks can't. When they hear information, they hear it through administrators and teachers.

Yeah. I like that.

A candidate's personna also matters. In the WW interview, McGee shows impressive media savvy, refusing to get baited into saying the board has been ineffective, causing the interviewer to become slightly aggravated. He also refuses to take the standard liberal bait about the presence of racism, pointedly declining to use the word.

If I were a voter in McGee's northeast Portland school board district, I might not be sold on this young man yet, but I'd sure want to hear what else he has to say.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 17, 2005 01:26 PM

---

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rosenblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/773

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 19-Year-Old Runs for Portland School Board:

---

» From high school to school board from joannejacobs.com
A 19-year-old college student is running for school board in Portland, Oregon. He just graduated from a district high school and thinks there's room for improvement. Matt Rosenberg praises the Liberian-born challenger's media savvy.... [Read More]

Tracked on March 18, 2005 12:51 AM

» adult lingerie from
leather lingerie tights trashy lingerie see through lingerie pantyhose womens lingerie [Read More]

Tracked on July 30, 2005 04:58 AM

» exotic lingerie from
leather lingerie nylons sexy lingerie trashy lingerie trashy lingerie models lingerie models [Read More]

Tracked on July 30, 2005 04:59 AM

» credit card application from credit card application
You can also visit the sites about cash advance credit card application [Read More]

Tracked on August 14, 2005 06:19 AM

» credit card application from credit card application
You can also visit the sites about cash advance credit card application [Read More]

Tracked on August 14, 2005 06:21 AM

» credit card application from credit card application
You can also visit the sites about cash advance credit card application [Read More]

Tracked on August 14, 2005 06:21 AM

» brutal dildo from
anal rape forced anal forced sex forced anal rape sex fantasy forced sex [Read More]

Tracked on August 22, 2005 07:39 AM

---

---

---