Zarwen — interesting to hear some place else has come up with my pairing idea. I didn’t know that. Houston used my minority hiring idea years ago. Didn’t get it from me, of course.

Early in my employment with PPS, I was part of a team sent on a recruiting trip to a college in California. The college was selected because of the high percentage of minority teacher graduates. We identified strong candidates and PPS paid for them to visit Portland. One particular candidate was a standout and two PPS principals were prepared to hire him. HR administrators delayed making him an offer then said PPS couldn’t hire him because he’d never had his own classroom. No shit. That’s what happens when you recruit from a college.

In my first position in HR, I was responsible for collecting and tracking the college information of PPS paraprofessionals. No Child Left Behind requires papraprofessionals to have 2 years college or meet NCLB requirements through an alternate route.

Prior to my arrival in the department, foreign transcripts were completely ignored. This left many paraprofessionals concerned about losing their jobs because they didn’t meet NCLB requirements.

I found that many bilingual educational assistants had college degrees from other countries. Many were teachers in their home countries.

NCLB allows the use of Title I funds to create career ladder programs for educational assistants to become teachers. It seemed like a no brainer to support the bilingual educational assistants in getting their teaching licenses. I pushed the idea but none of the HR administrators were interested in doing that.

HR’s HRIS had the capacity to track staff language but PPS didn’t even utilize that feature.

PPS has a 20 year history with the Portland Teachers Program (program developed to increase the number of teachers of color) but treated the program like a bastard. They kept transferring responsibility of the program to new staff. Often staff that had no experience living in or working with communities of color.

PPS isn’t having any genuine courageous conversations because the leaders (superintendent and the board) don’t have any courage.

Since #2 is the easier solution, that’s the one I’m betting on.

Lest you think this is only rhetoric, an example of the “meaningful way” to help a school would be to redesign (doncha just love that word?) the Portland Schools Foundation to create a sister schools program, pairing up wealthy schools with poor ones so they share resources, including volunteers. This is not a new idea—it has been done successfully elsewhere—but it doesn’t involve philanthro-capitalism, which may be why PPS doesn’t want to hear anything about it.