Op-Ed: A Time In the Affairs of Men... Oregon Educational Funding On Brink of Catastrophic Failure

(Salem, Ore.) - This week`s specially-summoned 100-person `top leaders" conference in Portland seeking solid reassurance --and promised action-steps to save heavy, wholesale impacts on metro-area schools-- sharply illuminates the realities now faced in Oregon.

It`s mind-boggling, as well as embarrassing, to consider the hands-raised when `the question" was finally posed there -- so I will avoid the actual count: No real need to further emphasize the complete and compelling message thus sent to all-concerned with reasonable action-now.

That embarrassment with `political reality" only multiplies the impact on those understanding something radical and real must be accomplished to save what we still preserve in this system.

Since this `meeting of minds" was surely solidly symptomatic of realities imposed by manipulations long underway, building both myth and misstatement re educational truths in all American communities, we must understand it as reflecting the heavy workload still to be accomplished, if Oregon is to continue as the home we long-loved --with good reason-- and now become strongly attractive for others, too.

There`s no question-left, given any rational/reasonable cogitation, that money is the major measure of degenerative process now driving cumulative attack on all Oregon education --K-12 through our receding- retracting `research-oriented" universities, decried by the very leaders we should be attracting.

Many seeking rationale for support-slashing by previous Legislative edicts, during particularly pertinent demand-for-change driven by many complex factors --and factions !!-- find it still incomprehensible that we have actually allowed ourselves to fall into this pattern of profound disregard for one of the widely accepted major principles for any working democracy:

Strong, constantly improving education for every citizen, through the common-schools system for long the very bellwether of democratic opportunity.

We long ago surrendered in Oregon on that basic promise of `equal education for all, to equalize opportunity" -- surely reflected in Constitutional obligations forced into painful and perhaps unproductive review by judicial-system decision, with confusing furies sure to be encountered.

Whatever comes from that now-demanded search for that surely questionable solution --sure to be imposed on citizen will since the legislature `will-not"-- there remains the uncertain possibility of retorting-response generated in our national history by that partially-quoted statement at our start-above.

Mine own only opportunity for `higher education" came from the GI Bill, conferred by Congress on all who served and consequential for many millions of others.

Starting earlier with a three-year `normal school" in my small-town Maine residence in `Real Depression days", that led to Oregon`s own OCE years later, then to OSU and Indiana University -- not otherwise achievable for me, still highly appreciated despite the `checkered past" now achieved.

I wonder how many of those whose hands were NOT raised, at this `meeting of minds" in our major metro-area leadership-strip, may have profited over all these years, via the same route of GI-reward, by extended learning leading on to active opportunity -- profiting every community and the entire nation over and over again ?

How many days-worth of Iraq-wreck costs will it demand, to make that lesson irrevocably meaningful, once again?