Whoooo-oooo-wheeeee. Willamette Week is SO all over it; blowing the whistle on the creepy right-wing fascists who want measured accountability, competition and teacher merit pay in Portland's hurting public schools.

While Portland Public Schools loudly debates closing some schools and reconfiguring others, teachers and parents are worried about a much quieter but significant long-term development for local education. They're troubled by how entrenched billionaire Eli Broad's Los Angeles foundation, which is devoted to making schools more businesslike, has become in Portland schools. They're raising red flags about the private Broad Foundation's payment for all seven Portland School Board members to take weeklong training sessions in Utah and its help with funding two key district positions. Jeff Miller, incoming president of the Portland Association of Teachers, calls the foundation "a basically conservative organization whose goals are what you'd expect from most business-oriented groups."

Broad, founder of two Fortune 500 companies, was the 39th richest person in America last year, according to Forbes magazine. And he is very interested in putting a good chunk of his billions into K-12 public education. He says urban public schools are failing and must adopt methods from business to succeed, such as competition, accountability based on "measurables," and unhampered management authority—all focusing on the bottom line of student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. Broad wants to create competition by starting publicly funded, privately run charter schools, to enforce accountability by linking teacher pay to student test scores, and to limit teachers' say in curriculum and transfer decisions.

.....With help from the Broad Foundation, Denver and Minneapolis are implementing systems of teacher performance pay tied to student test scores, a proposal that the Portland Association of Teachers would fight hard against.

Omigod! Portland should run like hell from all of that nasty stuff. Why, did you know.......

....it's not just the teachers union that's alarmed by the foundation's influence. Parents like Anne Trudeau of the Neighborhood Schools Alliance, a grassroots parents group, see a right-wing tilt to Broad's ideas that she considers a poor fit for progressive Portland. "I don't think our school board are puppets of Broad," Trudeau says, "but I think the influence is insidious."

Absolutely. Portland has a robust tradition of "progressive" sensibilities that are quite obviously in the best interests of city residents. Trudeau is right: accountability and merit are "insidious" to progressive ideals, which cannot survive on their own.

But let's give WW a bit of credit. At the very end of the piece, they deign to briefly tell the other side of the story. BTW, according to his foundation's spokesperson, Big Rich Guy Eli Broad is a......Democrat.

TECHNORATI TAGS: PORTLAND, OREGON, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, ELI BROAD, BROAD FOUNDARTION, ACHIEVEMENT TESTS, ACCOUNTABILITY, TEACHER MERIT PAY, SENIORITY, TRANSFERS, CHARTER SCHOOLS, PROGRESSIVE IDEALS