PAGE 2 Long Read
PPU's Response
PPU's Responses
LOTS of districts', across the country, discipline programs and codes are being reformed, but we don’t think reform is what we need. We need and ask for a revolution. Meaning changing the discipline system into something else, a "PARADIGM SHIFT", if you will?
It might not be an easy task but we can do it if we are open, intentional, persistent, consistent, and inclusive. As S.E. Phillips once said: Anything worth having, is worth fighting for.
10 Reasons the u.s. education system is failing
"Doing something "status quo" and getting same poor results shouldn’t surprise anyone. What is the point of doing something new and different if we get the same results in the end". Why this quote? Our impression: It feels like PPS just wants us to conform, comply or maybe just go away! We are convinced that there is fear of real change? Maybe the systems are just to complicated!
see "MRC intro/who are we/ where are we".
– Henry Ford
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.
Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.
We are asking the PPS Equity Department to remember more, our agreements, intentional commitments and continue striving for an equal playing field with families. Lets begin again with equal responsibility. We are convinced that PPS only responds to us when we respond to them first. The responsibility has been on us to keep the MRC process going. If PPS does not hear from us they seem to put the commitments aside! Usually because of contractual pressure from the teachers' union and other commitments deemed more important?
When will PPS recognize that the commitments with families and communities are binding contracts as well, not written down of course but through the taxes families and communities pay, saying yes to bonds, federal/state funding supplements generated by the amount of our children that attend and their needs, as well as contributions families and communities make directly by making donations, volunteering, or just by making sure their kids attend school. If families and communities did not send their kids to school there would be no schools/employment. More and more families are rethinking education! The children's EDUCATION WINDOW IS VERY NARROW?
Saying that it has always been this way, doesn’t count as a legitimate justification to why it should stay that way. PPS, Teachers and administrators all over the DISTRICT are doing good things, but some of the things PPS is still doing, despite all the new solutions, research, educators and community input and ideas out there, are incredibly concerning.
PPU came to PPS with an idea we call a "Paradigm Shift" of school discipline processes that have been harmful in it's current state. Reforming the discipline code. MRC Success and Failures
We are not saying we should just make the current Discipline School Code better… we should change it into something else all together. Model Code
“We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” -John Dewey
What Does an Effective Partnership Look Like? Navigating the Report Card Project Prezi
This document the PPU REPORT CARD PROJECT 2015 a snapshot of our experiences with PPS, the school board and the teachers union. This Reporting is pushing for a paradigm shift!
PARADIGM SHIFT (Click link for definition)
Our Keys to a Successful Reform
Promoting A Paradigm Shift
Supporting The Model Code on Education and Dignity
Presenting a Human Rights Framework for Schools
Believing in Balanced Collaborations=Collective Impact
PPU says “Parents should be involved in developing, implementing, and evaluating school programs.”
We would like to get ideas about what people are thinking about the role of PPU and PPS-– about where these roles overlap, and where they are unique. see RC SECOND PAGE
-
What do you think PPS wants from PPU?
-
What do you think PPU wants from PPS?
-
Where might their interests converge?
-
What can be the vision for an effective partnership between PPS and PPU? Is this even possible the way the current attitudes/systems are set up?
The stories of PPU and their parents presents a refreshing approach as well as an alternative to put in place of reforms that do little to address pervasive educational inequity. This report is compiled with the intention of raising awareness of the PPS system's failure to meet the needs of our black families- sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentional
BEGINNINGS OF MORATORIUM RECOMMENDATION COMMITTEE
PORTLAND PARENT UNION RECOMMENDATIONS SEE
THE DSC MORATORIUM MOVEMENT
CAMPAIGN: SOLUTIONS NOT SUSPENSIONS
PPU Recommended PPS place a moratorium on the practice of out of school suspensions and invest in support and resources for administrators, teachers and other educational staff to implement positive approaches to discipline. Schools should be a place for young people to learn, not just about academics but also positive life-lessons learned both from their successes and mistakes. http://portlandparentunion.blogspot.com/
PPU Recommended PPS replace the PPS School Code with the DSC Model Code on Education and Dignity or some parts of it.
This is what we asked for- featured with dignity in schools august 2013 (timeline). We started out with a trust circle 2014.
We are here now (offering up a Moratorium Campaign, the successes and failures)
This Report above and Statement below came from the 2015 Report Card Project which was asking for Trust Circles that would create a "Paradigm Shift". Six years later we are asking for the same thing!
We wanted to model the trust Circle we did in 2014-2015
https://simplysheilas.wixsite.com/website-7/ppu-trust-circle
Our Theme for Race Talk Feb 2020
https://simplysheilas.wixsite.com/letter/presentations
Portland Parent Union Reporting Project
Beginning Feb. 2020
Theme "The Letter"
Restarted June 15,2021
End Exclusions In public schools
If you have come to help me, you are waisting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together…”
--- Lila Watson, Australian Aboriginal woman "Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s.
A Statement from PPU Report Card Project
Since we started writing this report (Feb 2015 )it has been amazing how the things we pointed out as concerns for PPU through our experiences has now escalated and we are seeing departures of those we targeted. The targeting has come by others, whom because of the unfair pressures, created an overshadowing of the real voices that needed to be heard, the Families'!
We will get no answers?! Carol Smith is gone, the board has changed, some of our allies are gone in PPS and other places, the teachers' union has escalated their demands around safety, rightfully so and astute families gate keep. Escalated Proofs have shown up everywhere. It is almost like we expected some of these things before they happened!
PPU suggested by assessing parents' thoughts and experiences on the climate of the school and PPS's feelings about parent involvement, schools could get a better idea of how they need to improve in the area of Discipline Disparities. They can solicit targeted help from their parents/families. Personal interviews, listening dialogue circles and focus groups can be used to solicit in-depth information about parents' experiences, attitudes. Few schools can manage such intensive ways of soliciting information. Parent organizations like PPU and others are key to help getting information from families. This report card tells you of such efforts by PPU with PPS only to count it as failure in the end. Again it solidifies education institutions are not interested in parents input. It is only when parents push back or make a legal complaint do they respond!
Written and verbal stories, surveys, and one on ones can be a much more efficient method that can yield good results. The system must rely on parents to help to run the systems. These are their children! Who better knows how to meet their needs. PPS pays for professional experts who usually don't have children or have never been impacted by push out, to give input of what is needed for families. They get paid but they come to us to get the information. Why is that?
see : https://www.tamarackcommunity.ca/latest/trickle-down-community-engagement
The act of conducting a process for parent-feedback helps the system know what they think. It gives both parents and students a voice in articulating what works and what does not work. Related to best practices for their children to get all out of learning. This report is an example of parent feedback with concerns and sometimes down right anger.
PPU Says so much for good faith efforts!
PARENTS need an open dialogue between/among Administrators and Teachers
https://www.slideshare.net/ppuportlandparentunion/notes-from-trust-circle-solutions-not-suspensions
We are unapologetic for the contents in this report. All this comes from our heart as well as the experiences. It is our story that needs to be told. We are not a black organization, even though our founder director is. Our mission is to help all children but when we got started, it defaulted to calls from black families? The subject was always a discipline disparity problem. The stories were always similar....
What was this all about , getting calls constantly from a particular group of families. The stories were always the same! We soon leaned towards that problem and made it our major work. That is keeping us busy 24/7. This is our D.N.A.
We soon researched what major group we could align with who also worked only on discipline disparities. We found Dignity in Schools.
We continue today to get phone calls from black families at an alarming rate. It is important for us to articulate a black narrative in this report. Hoping this narrative will create a dialogue. The report is written from the lens of our PPU leaders and the black families or white and Latina families who have black children who have come our way as well as the Dignity In Schools Model Code. See Executive Summary
We are grateful to Carol Smith and the PPS Equity Department director Lolenzo Poe for making a concerted effort to support a moratorium on school push out. We hoped we could come to an agreement. That hasn't happened. This report chronicles what went wrong! PPS still doing things on their own fragmented terms? A BROKEN SYSTEM.
This document has become a living document. Since we started writing positions, policies, protocols have changed rapidly!
WE ENTERED into this deal with a large amount of distrust but hopeful. The reassurance of support came from Carol and Lolenzo? Carol has been pushed out!
In the history of anyone working with PPS knows that there is always fragmented supporting which looks like holding back for one reason or another.
Good collaborations could be good collaborations regardless. The strategies outlined in our work together seems clear but PPS's efforts to be on the same page with our families have been frustrating to say the least. Our determined efforts to change the way that PPS views our marginalized families has landed in an impasse. We sense in our interactions that institutions like PPS don't have the capacity or the wherewithal to build true grassroots' relationships.
The education system is so complicated that even though the district is claiming they are doing the best they can. It is literally impossible to be effective when lots of indicators are missing. PPU gets more upset around people who are claiming they are doing the right thing. It is not logical to us because the district only stops to hear certain voices! It would be believable if all sit down with us on a routine schedule. PPS's distractions are the lining up with those folks and organizations that unreasonably demand their time constantly.
We ask this question; How does one have successful programs if one has a broken system in the first place? It is the PPS education system with its lack of cultural knowledge, understanding of history, empathy, human caring and concern that ought to be on trial. Its failure to teach the historical realities of Oregon along with the capacities for self-awareness and critical thinking is what produces "fragility".
This report is culturally specific (comes from our own eyes as folks of color and white and latina folks of biracial children) This is our narrative! THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORIES
We started this report in Feb 2015.
When we say PPS it is directed at those who claimed they are interested in reducing the disparities. Those we are working with and have worked with. Carol Smith (now gone), equity department as well as the teaching and learning department, special education and student services.
When we say PAT it is the Association of Teachers' management. Not the teachers who often have different opinions about this whole thing. We know there are 30% of the teachers that feel unsafe in the classroom. What about the other 70%?
Someone told us in a meeting one time after they rejected our asks for support. "This is not personal. It is business!'' This is personal for us our children are who we protect!
CAPTURED EVIDENCE
SUBSTANTIATED CULTURAL RELEVANCE RECOMMENDATIONS Gloria Ladson-Billings defines the concept of culturally relevant teaching (CRT) as 'a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes.' This approach to teaching involves teachers building a bridge from students' experience at home to their experience in the classroom, bringing elements into their daily learning at school which validate their culture and make lessons 'hit home' because of those connections.