Last month, Portland mayoral candidate Jefferson Smith said that Minnesota has more Fortune 500 companies because they’ve invested more in their public schools. He said this in support of a bond vote for Portland Public Schools. He was right, and it raises an important point: The way Oregon funds education damages our economy.
Last month, Portland mayoral candidate Jefferson Smith said that Minnesota has more Fortune 500 companies because they’ve invested more in their public schools. He said this in support of a bond vote for Portland Public Schools. He was right, and it raises an important point: The way Oregon funds education damages our economy.
PolitiFact Oregon gave him a grade of “mostly true” on this statement. They were looking specifically at the claim that education funding attracts Fortune 500 companies. Smith wasn’t totally in the right, but what he said held up against fact. It’s hard for companies to attract employees when the area doesn’t have good schools for their children. It’s probably not a major problem, but it’s definitely a factor.
But it goes beyond that. Having a good education system (which is hard to achieve without funding one) is good for the economy, plain and simple. Adam Smith had that figured out in the 1800s, but when it comes to budget season, Oregon legislators seem to forget it. Oregon has been cutting the budget for primary and secondary education since the recession hit.
Art programs and other electives are disappearing at alarming rates, and staff is being downsized, but the number of students enrolling keeps increasing. We’ll have less funding for the next two years than we did in 2008, but the system will be just as expensive to run, if not more so. The solution has always been making cuts rather than increasing education. Why?
Bringing your business to Oregon looks unattractive if you have kids who will be educated here. Being educated in Oregon also makes it harder to start a business or even to be smart with your money. We don’t require personal finance classes in high school, so when people finally start off on their own, they get to learn how to be responsible with money the hard way.
Preparation is a better solution than letting people fail.
A high school diploma is already next to worthless. Finding a job with a GED or diploma is getting harder every year.
Students already feel like they have no choice but to get a college degree if they want to find a job. Cutting funding for K–12 makes an Oregon diploma even more worthless.
When you go to a school that’s understaffed and overpopulated, it’s that much harder to learn. I can see this just from my first year out of high school. Many of the people I graduated with weren’t prepared for high school when they came in; when they went out into the workforce or started college, they still weren’t prepared. They’ve struggled to find jobs and they’ve struggled with college classes.
Oregon has left education by the wayside. At a time when we’re restructuring and reforming so much of the K–12 system, we have a lot of opportunities. Rather than taking money from education, we should be finding different ways to fund it.
Let schools partner with community colleges more; community colleges are overflowing, and high schools have more and more empty classrooms as they consolidate classes.
Intel donates millions of dollars to the Oregon Department of Education—so let’s partner with more Oregon businesses. These partnerships make money for the schools and can lead to job
opportunities for students.
Give less money to the Department of Transportation for miscellaneous roadwork (those lines don’t need to be repainted; you did that last summer) and give more money to ODE for hiring decent teachers and funding better programs.
Give students a chance to get more career-oriented skills in primary and secondary education (personal finance, shop classes, graphic design, better math and science options). A more educated population means a more productive workforce.
Oregon has been granted many opportunities for growth in the past couple years. Green energy is coming to the Pacific Northwest fast, and more and more tech companies are making Oregon a destination. We may only have two Fortune 500 companies headquartered here, and only one that most people have ever heard of (Nike), but we also have a lot of up-and-coming businesses.
The only way to ensure that this remains true is if we give Oregon students the opportunities they need. Investing in education isn’t a luxury or a money pit; it’s the best way of ensuring Oregon has a strong economy and a future.
What an outstanding opportunity for future and current students. “Preparation is a better solution than letting people fail.” I love this quote.