Kitzhaber, Bradbury disagree over education fix
LAKE OSWEGO, Ore. - Former Secretary of State Bill Bradbury and former Gov. John Kitzhaber - contenders in the race to win the Democratic May primary for Oregon’s top political office, agree on many things, but not on how to improve the state’s education system.
The difference between the two candidates emerged at a forum held by the Willamette Women Democrats at the Oswego Lake Country Club on Wednesday.
During the friendly debate, Kitzhaber said that the educational model the state has now is flawed and throwing more money into it will not necessarily improve education in the state.
“Stable funding has to fund the right model,” he said. “The model we have now (for K-12) … it’s really an outdated model. Kids go through blocks of instruction time and when that time’s up they move to the next block whether they’ve mastered the content of the first block.”
He said that model worked in the late 1970s when children could drop out of high school and find a good job at a mill. But, he said, all that’s in the past.
“I believe that we have reached a point in Oregon where we cannot bear the weight with our current system,” Kitzhaber said. “The central question, it seems to me in this campaign, is whether Oregon is content to survive for a few more years by patching together the status quo or whether we have the courage to chart a new course … by redesigning the way we provide public services.”
He said children need to get an education that means something in today’s world and will better propel them to get a two- or four- year degree.
He said by replacing the wood shop and metal shop classes - that have been cut in recent years - with classes that teach skills for the green jobs of the future, that that will help position students to succeed and for the economy to have a ready workforce in place.
“I would argue that green (jobs) are blue collar jobs,” Kitzhaber said. “They’re good middle-income jobs, and it’s a pathway to a middle-income lifestyle.”
But Bradbury said that the assembly line type of education that Kitzhaber referred to is caused by a lack of funding.
“What causes that problem is that they (teachers) don’t have teacher aides; they don’t have adequate resources in the schools to do what they know should be done,” he said.
He said while innovations can help “the fact is when you’re $2 billion under the level that we set in 1999 (and said) was the right level for schools to be at, when you’re $2 billion under that, I’m sorry, but it really is a funding problem.”
He said groups in the state who are working on education reforms need to first be adequately funded to get their reforms accomplished.
“You can’t pull off the reforms unless you are adequately supporting the educational system,” he said.
Bradbury said schools aren’t funded at the level they need to be because of voter-approved measures.
“Schools aren’t funded today because of us (the electorate) and how we vote,” he said. “I swear it was the voters in Oregon that made us not fund schools adequately.”
When asked why voters would de-fund education, he said anti-tax activist Bill Sizemore was “a master of saying, ‘here’s something you want’ and people say, ‘oh yeah, we want that.’”
Bradbury said Sizemore dangled before voters initiatives like having lower property taxes and he and his supporters argued that the state would take care of funding education.
“But guess what? There’s a consequence to saying, ‘Oh, the state will just pay,’ but Bill Sizemore doesn’t have to talk about that,” Bradbury said.
The primary for both Republicans and Democrats is on May 18.