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Portland: the next Milwaukee?

From the Oregonian:

H ow long, Portland, how long? How much longer will we consign North Portland students and their parents to public schools that have systematically failed them for decades?

At the end of another school year in the Jefferson High School cluster — at the end of yet another year where we talk, talk, talk about doing something to improve the public schools there — the questions are worth asking yet again. Happily, they were being asked last month in a forum sponsored by the Cascade Policy Institute and the Black Alliance for Educational Options. By Portland parents who are more interested in actually educating at-risk kids than making more plans to educate at-risk kids.

About 100 people — half of them white, half of them black — gathered at the Emmanuel Temple in North Portland to listen to Dr. Howard Fuller, the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "I’ve seen the virtue of giving parents choice," he told The Oregonian editorial board earlier that day.

Too much good stuff to quote further.  Just go read the whole thing.