By Abby Sewell

When the Sisters in Action for Power take on a campaign, they usually get results. The group, based in Northeast Portland, is a non-profit devoted to developing leadership and organizing skills among low-income girls, especially young women of color. Many Portlanders know them as the group that successfully lobbied Tri-Met to lower the price of its monthly bus pass for students from $32 to $16. Now the Sisters are challenging the Portland school board to resist the Bush-sponsored No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which they believe is contributing to school closures and eroding neighborhoods in Portland.

Anyone who has had contact with the public school system in Portland should be aware that it has its share of troubles. In 2003, Portland teachers agreed to a pay cut to keep the school year from being cut short due to lack of funding. And in 2004, district-wide enrollment dropped by 2,600 students. Superintendent Vicki Phillips’ program for the next year involves closing six schools, three of them in North and Northeast Portland.

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in January 2002, mandates yearly achievement tests for students in all public schools nationwide. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly improvement” for two consecutive years must offer students the option to transfer to another school in the district, with bus passes for this purpose to be funded by the school district. While this, in theory, is supposed to increase student choice and allow low-income students greater opportunities, Sisters in Action, and many people working within the school system, believe that it is really a thinly veiled move towards privatizing the U.S. school system.

Camille Kent, 17, who has worked with Sisters for the past four years, said, “Overall, what we feel like No Child Left Behind does is set up our schools to fail and leave them open to private hands.”

As schools in low-income areas, many of which already suffer from declining enrollment, are labeled “non-achieving,” more students transfer away from them, leaving them with fewer and fewer previously “adequate” public schools, as they receive an influx of students from other areas. Meanwhile, when schools close, the land is put on the market and often bought by private investors.

Ashley Jones, 16, said that as schools are increasingly privatized, “I think there’s going to be a lot of students without a high school education because they won’t be able to afford to go. And if they don’t have a high school education or a college degree, it’s going to be hard for them to get jobs and to get the other resources that they need.”

What Sisters Do

Sisters in Action for Power is set up to act as an incubator for community leaders. Girls may come in to the office just for the weekly youth night, what they call a “healthy girl space,” which is mainly a social event with pizza and movies. Or they may show up for campaign meetings and political discussions on topics like gentrification and colonialism. After three months or so, if people are coming regularly and are interested in getting more involved, they enter into the leadership program. These young women are expected to take on more responsibilities in the campaigns and to fulfill a list of 16 requirements, from public speaking and developing critical thinking skills to learning self defense. Once they have completed this tier, they can become an intern, mentoring other girls and leading programs at the office. Some women graduate from high school and go on to work as staff with Sisters in Action, doing community organizing, fundraising, and overseeing the “healthy girl space.” At all stages of development, the women are given the power to decide the goals and methods of their own campaigns. Whether or not they continue on to careers as political rabble rousers, the girls who get involved with Sisters in Action grow up into strong, empowered women.

Many opponents of No Child Left Behind around the nation have complained that it sets high achievement standards for public schools and then fails to provide any funding, leaving individual school districts to pay for the changes themselves. For Sisters, the problems with No Child Left Behind are not simply in the funding but in its whole approach to measuring school achievement.

Nearly every public school in Portland has failed to meet the standards set by No Child Left Behind. One of these requirements is that 95 percent of students in all different categories must be tested, including students with disabilities and students learning English as a second language (ESL). Some schools where the overall test scores ranked above the national average still failed, because they did not test 95 percent of disabled and ESL students, or because these categories of students did not rank high enough.

A look at Portland’s numbers shows that schools with the highest percentage of low-income students tended to show lower than average test scores. But even in schools with a low percentage of low-income students, where the overall scores were above average, low-income students as a group scored below average.

The problem for these students is more than just what is happening in the classroom. Students from low-income families deal with stresses in their homes and neighborhoods that higher-income students do not; and they are less likely to have parents who have graduated high school or gone to college. Meanwhile, schools in higher income areas have a larger tax base to draw on, meaning that they get better resources. But as struggling schools close down and more students flock to the “better” schools, these resources get spread increasingly thin.

Elisha Williams, 17, has been involved with Sisters in Action for Power for the past six years. She is also a Jefferson High School student whose experiences are typical of many young people in North and Northeast Portland. Over the past several years, she has seen property values go up in her neighborhood and many of her neighbors are no longer able to afford to live there. Students who previously attended Jefferson have moved out of the area, as their families have relocated to the lower-rent suburbs of Portland. As enrollment drops, the school struggles to stay open. Williams’ own family recently moved to Gresham, but she continues to attend Jefferson, making a two-hour bus trip to school every day.

Out of the 2,600 students who left Portland’s public school system in 2004, 1,000 of them were minorities. Meanwhile, those who do remain in their neighborhood schools are faced with the public perception that they are underachievers, no matter what they do.

Jefferson High has consistently scored low on federally,-mandated achievement tests. But Williams points out that Jefferson has had a 99 percent graduation rate for the past five years; that over the past year, sophomore reading test scores have increased by 14 percent, and math scores by 11 percent; that all freshman get a student mentor, and that 42 percent of its teachers are specifically trained to assist ESL students.

One of Superintendent Phillips’ proposals for Portland schools is to close Harriet Tubman Middle School and send its students to Jefferson, in an attempt to deal with low enrollment. A statement issued by the school board stated, “Many students now have difficulty making two separate transitions, from grade school to middle school, and then again to high school. Based on research, moving to a model with a single transition should improve student achievement and improve graduation rates.”

However, many parents in the district are not happy with the idea of mixing middle school and high school-age students on the same campus, and many of them came out to school board meetings and public comment sessions to say so. They were also unhappy with what they saw as the school board’s lack of support for their community.

Kent noted, “A ton of community members came out from all different communities saying, ‘We oppose this.’ I don’t remember hearing anybody say they were for [closing and merging schools], but that decision still got made.”

Over the past year, the Sisters in Action for Power have put together a comprehensive campaign they call Save Our Schools and Students (SOS2). The girls have done research through interviews and surveys in the schools, published a newspaper, and put together a number of public events to call attention to the connection between No Child Left Behind and school closures. On June 8, 2005, the students held a community forum, where they presented their demands to Superintendent Phillips and School Board Member Bobbie Regan. They showed a video documentary in which they had interviewed students and teachers at Jefferson regarding the effects of No Child Left Behind on their classrooms. In conclusion, they presented four resolutions for change they are asking the school board to adopt:

1.) Preserve Title 1 money designed to support low-income schools. “Title 1” money is set aside by the federal government for schools where 40 percent or more of students are eligible to receive free or reduced-price school lunch, based on their families’ income. Originally, the money was used to buy textbooks and supplies for the classroom. Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, however, the money has also been used to provide bus vouchers for students transferring away from “non-performing” schools. It has also been used to contract out after-school tutoring services to private companies or faith-based organizations, rather than to certified teachers within the public school system. Additionally, schools identified as “in need of improvement” may be threatened with losing their Title 1 funding altogether.

2.) End the use of No Child Left Behind labels like “non-performing schools.” The students believe that labels like this simply undermine the accomplishments students and teachers are able to make with the resources available to them. They want to see more positive recognition of their schools in the media and from the government.

3.) Call off high-stakes standardized testing. Williams said, “We’re not against testing completely, we just think there’s a more adequate way of doing it.” Currently, the federal standards rate schools based on students’ scores on multiple-choice tests. Sisters in Action believes that evaluations of student achievement should include portfolios, group work, and test formats other than multiple choice.

4.) Stop privatizing public school land. The land on which public schools are built, obviously, is public land. In the past, when a public institution like a school closed down, other public institutions were allowed the chance to bid on the land before private investors. Now, however, private and public entities may both bid at the same time, and as private institutions often have more funds, this leads to a smaller amount of public land overall.

Superintendent Phillips responded to the presentation with promises to address the students’ concerns and asked them to attend the September 12 school board meeting to present their research findings and resolutions. Asked whether she thinks that the board will live up to its promises, Kent said, “We’re going to make sure they follow through on their commitment — because that’s just what we do.”

Abby Sewell is a local writer and former Alliance intern.