On this day, November 28, 1999, A float plane crashed into the Columbia River shortly after takeoff 45 miles east of Portland. William S. "Tiger" Warren, chairman of the Macheezmo Mouse restaurant chain was killed with his three sons.
Also on this day, November 28, 2007, 28-year-old Joseph Hokai Tang, musician and violin dealer, was arrested for fraud following a performance in Eugene, Oregon. In 2008 he pleaded guilty to 10 fraud counts and admitted to bilking at least 120 people out of $400,000 worth of instruments. In 2008 he was sentenced in San Francisco District Court to 37 months in prison.
Also on this day, November 28, 2010, an Islamic center in Corvallis was firebombed, 2 days after Somali-born Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested in a sting operation for trying to blow up a van full of explosives in Portland. In August, 2011, federal officials arrested 24-year-old Cody Crawford for firebombing the mosque.
The public education system has systemic weaknesses
Oregon public schools are seeing declines in enrollment.
Oregon public schools have enrolled 29 fewer students for 2020-21 than they did a decade ago for 2011-12 -- that after 10 years of year-over-year increases to enrollment. The decline in enrollment isn't as bad as the chart makes it look, as it's only showing the tip of the iceberg, but a decline of 3.9% is not sustainable. In raw numbers, it's a loss of 22,000 students from a pool of half a million.
On the other hand, the 2020-21 numbers represent just the first year of COVID-19 and the school policies that were accepted by many in the beginning. What does the next set of numbers look like?
As teachers' unions flex their muscle and make demands of the system, parents are ultimately downstream from those demands. It's not lost on a parent that the same teacher who demands full pay, yet no in-person classroom duty might not be making a great statement when they bump into the unhappy parent at Costco.
One might look at the graph and simply conclude that the cause is nearly entirely COVID-19 and that, once the outbreak and society get repaired and back to normal, the graph will snap back, or at least make a partial recovery. This might not be true. The public education system has systemic weaknesses, most significantly its inability to educate and graduate students. Time spent on
critical race theory, what some consider
inappropriate sex education, as well as other speculative curricula may have led to a leveling off of enrollment which began about 2015.
The consequence of declining enrollment? Once a critical mass is reached -- one can imagine that it's less than 50% -- a group of people, resentful of having to pay for a public school system that no longer delivers results, will find a way to no longer pay -- perhaps through a voucher law. While this obviously leaves a social mark, it also leaves a political mark. It has the effect of shutting down two of the largest public employee unions in the state, the Oregon Education Association which represents teachers and the Oregon School Employees Association which represents all the classified employees.
--Staff Reports| Post Date: 2021-05-14 11:47:39 | Last Update: 2021-05-13 12:14:14 |
