The state of Oregon’s public schools is the most important issue facing our community today.

Its impact is wide ranging, touching on every other area of public policy in our state. Good schools mean a well-trained workforce that in turn means a healthier economy. Giving children hope and opportunity means we will spend less in the long run building prisons for those who see a life of crime as their only chance to get ahead in life. Further, an economy based on skilled workers tends to be more environmentally friendly.

I’ve written this paper for the same reason I am running for re-election to the legislature—I want the people of our community to know that I have a plan to improve our schools and that together we can make it work.

My Experience With Our Schools

My experience with schools, as is true for most of us, started when I was a student as a youngster in schools in district 11. For the most part, my school experience was positive and certainly established in me the basic skills I needed to eventually qualify as an attorney and psychologist.

My own children came along as I was studying psychology. I learned about human development from the books at the same time as my first child, my daughter, was teaching me what it is really like to be responsible for another human life. She was so lively and changed so fast as an infant and young child. She was often a puzzle for her mother and me. But we were lucky. She was healthy, as was her brother after her, and the big mistakes we could have made never happened.

When our children were young, my wife and I worked to love, and nurture them. We established a consistent discipline in the house. Our children have done well, partly out of good luck, but partly because we worked hard to be good parents to them. Now they are civilized young adults and have been making their own decisions for years.

We were soccer parents when our children were in elementary and middle school and I got so involved in the game that I worked as a referee for several years. As those of you who have done it know, parenting is mostly a lot of daily work with many details from care and feeding of children to driving to volunteering in school. I am very proud of my kids. They are their own people, but they are also the products of a lot of hard work by their parents, their teachers, and the other adults in their lives.

I got involved in school governance by accident. In 1993, the school district laid off over 100 teachers including my son’s fifth grade teacher. She was the kind of teacher we all want every child to have. She loved her students without reservation; she had very high standards and expected her students to measure up; and she knew her craft and knew it well. I saw her crying in the hallway after school the day she got the notice. I got angry and decided then and there to work to reverse this terrible waste and injustice. That incident started me on the path to the school board and later to the state legislature.

The school board was a great training ground for politics for me. I learned a lot about the structure and operation of schools and what they can and cannot do. I learned some of the ways they are fragile and some of their unexpected strengths. Our motto on the board was to do what is good for children. When it is necessary to refocus, I come back to that idea now: What is good for kids and what is good for Oregonians in general. That is what I want to do.

On the board my main focus was to promote schools and school funding and to find ways to do things more efficiently and effectively. It amazes me, even now, how well dedicated teachers and parents can do with the limited resources available. We have many great teachers who are fiercely loyal to their students. But classes have become very large and programs children need very thin, especially art, music, library services, and PE.

I helped establish the Eugene Education Fund and my wife and I continue to be big supporters now. I continually urged the board and other school boards to become active in Salem to promote school funding at the state level. School boards have always been good at promoting their local levies, but in the new world of Measure 5, school boards must be very active in Salem to protect the interests of our children. When the opportunity arose, I ran for a seat in the legislature and won in 2000.

I joined the education and health committees in the Oregon House of Representatives and went to work. I became one of the leading advocates for school funding. I spoke out many times against measures that would have the effect of reducing resources for schools. I proposed legislation that would have helped fund schools only to see it languish in Republican controlled committees. I quickly saw that many issues raised last year looked like policy questions for the legislature to solve, but were in reality a part of our funding problem. For example, the education committee spent a lot of time deciding whether or not the state should mandate school nurses in every school. The number of school nurses has been declining rapidly. I pointed out that school districts would hire school nurses along with many other important professionals if they had the resources. A mandate from us would simply require a school to lay off some other employee in order to hire a nurse. That decision should be the local school board’s decision with the help of the local community of teachers and parents, not the legislature. If the legislature wants more school nurses in schools it must first provide more resources. I did manage to help reduce some requirements that we are simply unable to pay for as well.

Despite my best efforts and the efforts of a number of my colleagues, we still have a way to go before we solve Oregon’s public education woes.

The Goals We Have For Our Children

We want children to become adults who can compete in the global economy and make wise career choices. These same children must grow up with good citizenship and character to become the leaders of our society and keep it free and strong.

In order to achieve the goals we have we must provide sufficient resources to reduce class size so that students will have the individual time each needs with the teacher for optimum learning.

Every school must be guaranteed the resources needed to provide the basic programs necessary for our children’s learning regardless of school size.

We must teach the basics well. Students who learn to read by the end of the third grade are far more successful in school and in life than those who don’t. Every child is capable of learning to read, write, and do math. All must be able to do so as a foundation for the additional skills needed in our technological economy.

We must expose our middle and high school students to the practical world of work so that they can understand the practical value of what they study in school and appreciate the necessity of good skills and knowledge.

College is becoming a necessity for most of our children. We must find ways to make it more affordable. Too many students are priced out of college, take too long to finish because of work, or leave it with crushing debts. We should do better by this generation of students so that they can do better by the next.

The Obstacles to Success for Our Schools

Since the passage of Measure 5 in 1990, the state has been forced into the business of funding our public schools, something it hasn’t fully learned to do. Prior to Measure 5, the state funded about 30 percent of our public school budget. Now that number is closer to 75 percent. Yet, state funding for education has grown at half the rate of inflation and increased population. The results can be read in the newspaper on a daily basis.

School districts are now facing significant program reductions as a result of recent budget shortfalls. As a school board member I faced cutting counseling, music, art and athletics from the curriculum because we simply could no longer afford them.

The system of higher education, including the university system and community colleges, has also been harmed by this problem. They have been forced to make deep cuts along with all state program areas as a result of Measure 5.

What this means for Oregon’s schools.

The effect of program cuts on public school systems has been profound. My son’s high school classes had as many as sixty students in them. Small schools cannot increase class sizes very much so they lose classes all together if funding shortfalls become bad enough. Marcola, a small school district in House District 11, is considering a four-day week and combined grade elementary classes. If the problem worsens, a merger of small districts, with the loss of local schools, may be inevitable. Small schools serve as community centers in small towns, and their loss would deprive rural Oregon residents of their town centers.

A different dynamic is occurring at the community college level. Community colleges are hugely popular in Oregon because they provide lower division college work as well as training programs for those in specialized jobs or retraining from jobs that no longer exist to ones that can provide a good family income. Community colleges, including Lane Community College and Linn-Benton Community College, are cutting the programs they offer and raising tuition, thus making it more difficult for low-income students or those who are retraining for work to actually attend or benefit from community college.

The Oregon University System has been under the gun since the passage of Measure 5. The budget crisis has forced huge increases in tuition, which have the effect of pricing many Oregon students out of college, or leaving them strapped with huge student loan debts after graduation. The class I taught in the psychology department at the University of Oregon had over sixty students in it when twenty-five would have better allowed for discussions needed for learning. After graduation, at the time that we want our young adults to be marrying, establishing homes, and having children, we are instead saddling them with an average of $17,000 of student loans to be repaid. The University of Oregon will limit enrollment this year and will deny admission to many students who are perfectly qualified to handle college work at the university level.

The solution

1. Reduce class size: Children need individual attention from their teachers. Reducing class size is one of the most important changes we can make. It puts more teachers in school buildings where they can help children and gives each child more time and attention from a well-trained caring adult.

2. Invest in early childhood education: In 1994, when I first joined the Eugene School Board, I visited many site councils to learn about the problems in our schools. I found out that a growing number of our children are arriving at school at age 5 or 6 not ready to learn. The kindergarten and first grade teachers were worried then and the problem has only gotten worse. The solution is early intervention. For some children this means early education. For many other children, inexpensive parent training and support are all that are needed to prepare them for a successful life. Young parents love these programs because they give them the tools to be successful parents, the most important and gratifying task of all who have children. Early intervention pays huge dividends in lower costs later. It is much easier to prepare a child for school than it is to help the child catch up. That shortage of dollars now becomes very expensive in dollars later and in the anguish of children who fall behind in school, perhaps never to catch up.

3. Teach the basics: Children who are unable to read by the end of their third grade year are far more likely to have behavioral and academic problems in middle school and drop out in high school than other students. The ability to read, write and do math are foundations for all other skills students need to learn and tasks they must be able to perform. If we are to reduce the drop out rate and prepare our children to be able workers and responsible citizens, they must learn these basic skills early in their school career. I worked to earmark funds to require schools to concentrate teachers and other resources on the primary (k-3) grades so that all children will learn these basic skills. We must watch carefully to be sure that our children are not left behind and allocate more resources if need be.

4. Get parents involved: Most active parents are involved in their children’s education either in the school as volunteers or at home as helpers, homework monitors and cheerleaders or both. These parents know, almost instinctively, what many studies have shown, that children do much better in school if parents are involved with their education. We must make it a priority to explore ways the legislature can assist schools and community leaders to encourage parental involvement.

5. Change the funding structure: Schools today are funded in Oregon on a per-student basis. The more students the more money. I will explore ways to establish minimum program standards so that small school districts can provide a good school program even though they cannot meet the economies of scale of the large districts. Small districts comprise a very small proportion of total students in the state, but small schools are disproportionately important to the small communities in which they exist. If rural economies are to rebound after a long decline, residents must have the assurance that their schools will provide a complete program for their children.

6. Support the Quality Education Model: The Quality Education Model (QEM), first proposed by then Speaker Lynn Lundquist in 1997, establishes the programs necessary to allow our K-12 students to reach the educational goals we have established in Oregon. Actually paying for the programs the QEM tells us our children need will cost at least one billion dollars more in the next biennium than the amount budgeted by the legislature for this one. We should work toward this level of funding.

7. Make college more affordable: In addition, the community colleges and universities of Oregon need at least $400 Million more in order to hold down tuition and pay for the most needed improvements. This will be money well invested in our and our children’s future if we can only find it!

8. Cuts we can make now: We should scale back the statewide assessment program that requires so much paper work for teachers that they have less time to spend with students. Accountability is important but testing and assessment are no replacement for teaching and learning.

Revenue Principles and Proposals

Education is the best long-term investment we can make in our children and the future of our society. But if solutions to problems of the kind I’ve been describing were easy, they would have already been accomplished. During the last legislative session I was the most outspoken legislator supporting our children’s schools. I opposed all bills to cut taxes on big corporations, polluters and the wealthy because tax cuts reduce funds for education.

I will support measures that increase the fairness of our tax system while raising revenue. I will oppose measures that increase taxes on ordinary taxpayers or balance the budget on the backs of our children. Corporations and the wealthy pay less as a percentage of their income. After the property tax cut, homeowners pay three percent more while corporations pay twenty-nine percent less. The shortage in Oregon’s budget can be made up by making the income tax fair and by establishing a real rainy day fund.

We should eliminate the corporate tax kicker, which returned $203 million to out of state stockholders from 1995-1999. We need to reverse the tide by closing corporate tax loopholes and making corporations pay their fair share. I opposed the Republican corporate tax cut plan and the corporate pollution tax credit bills last year.

We should increase the tobacco tax by fifty cents per pack. This would raise about $100 million and reduce new teenage smoking, saving billions in health care costs long-term.

Conclusion

Finding the political will to solve our education problems will not be easy, but it is necessary if our children and our state are to thrive in the future. You have the right to know where I stand on the most important issues facing us today before you send me to the legislature to make the decisions that so profoundly affect our children and their future.

I share your values. Caring for our children and their schools is not lip service for me but the reason I went to Salem in the first place. In my session in Salem, I learned why the legislature has done so poorly in dealing with these problems. The special interests there want legislators to believe that our most cherished program, our children’s schools, can operate with less and less and do more and more. The changes we need to make will not come all at once. They will involve political risk and leadership. Oregonians will rise to the challenge but not without a lot of work.

I want to paint a bright future for Oregon. I will go to Salem remembering that our goal is to do what is best for our children and for Oregonians in general. I will use my experience to take on the special interests and do all I can to provide for the next generation. Civilization is only one generation deep. In future years, as we hand on the baton in the great race, let us be proud of our running of it and confident that the next generation will run their lap even better than we ran ours.

If after you read this short paper you have specific ideas or questions for me, please call my office, 484-5119, email me at phil@philbarnhart.com or write me at PO Box 12181, Eugene, Oregon 97440.