WWW . THESKANNER . COM
D ECEMBER 19, 2012
P ORTLAND , O REGON
V OLUME XXXV, N O . 11
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C HALLENGING P EOPLE TO S HAPE A B ETTER F UTURE N OW
Teachers
Discuss
Equity
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Rudy Crew tells
teachers they must
confront inequality
By Helen Silvis
Of The Skanner News
PHOTO BY JERRY FOSTER
W
hen Oregon Schools Superinten-
dent Rudy Crew was in school,
his father asked his teacher what
he needed to do to get to college. The
teacher told his father that simply wouldn’t
be able to keep up. He wasn’t smart enough,
was the message.
If Crew’s father had simply accepted the
teacher’s biased view, that could have
become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead,
breaking the unwritten rule for a Black par-
ent in a mostly white school, he said,
“Ma’am, Your job is not to tell people who
can go to school.”
The rest is history. Crew went on to grad-
uate from Babson College and later earned
his doctorate in education administration
from the University of Massachusetts.
Crew shared that story with educators at
the Oregon Leadership Network’s Fall
Leadership Institute: Putting Equity at the
Center of Policy and Practice. The institute
brought together more than 300 educators
from across the state, to plan how to raise
achievement for Oregon students and elimi-
nate disparities based on race, class and first
language.
Crew’s talk came at the start of a day filled
with sessions on how to help children
achieve at every level. Crew’s talk looked
the state of education in Oregon, currently.
He discussed the graduation rate –not best
in the country but not worst –and the
achievement gap that leaves Oregon’s poor
and minority students behind, when it
comes to college and career prospects. He
also talked about the need to support pre-
kindergarten initiatives to help children suc-
ceed.
Yet he also said Oregon has the will and
the creative talent to raise the bar and to
keep on raising it. And he urged educators to
be courageous and committed to change.
“This is a systemic problem,” he said.
Happy Holidays to all our readers from everyone at The Skanner News. We remind you to have a safe holiday season,
and to be careful on the roads and in the streets. Remember, never drink and drive, and if you see somebody who
has been drinking head toward a car, offer to call a cab.
Sen. Merkley Plans 2013 Agenda
Appointment to powerful Appropriations Committee is a milestone
By Lisa Loving
Of The Skanner News
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley has
had a good year. Repeatedly sin-
gled out by news media for
courageous stands on an array
of issues including home fore-
closure, ending the war in
Afghanistan and now filibuster
reform, Merkley last week was
named to the powerful Senate
Appropriations Committee—
the first Oregonian to serve on
the panel (in either chamber)
since Mark Hatfield in the mid-
See EDUCATORS on page 3
INDEX
News ...........2,3,8,9,12
Opinion ..................4,5
A & E ......................6,7
Bids/Classifieds ........11
1990s.
Merkley also recently ironed
out a serious snafu with the U.S.
Department of Housing and
Urban Development over cuts
to Oregon housing authorities’
federal grants for five regions
across the state.
The Skanner News spoke with
Merkley last week about his
controversial new proposed leg-
islation that would prevent fed-
eral agents from spying on
Americans without a warrant –
as well as his top priorities for
2013.
The Skanner News: Senator
you’ve done so much this year
that it’s hard to drill down into
any single thing. But we were
hoping to talk with you today
about the Protect America’s Pri-
vacy Act. That’s such a huge
issue. Talk about how you came
to it and why you’re sponsoring
this bill.
Sen. Jeff Merkley: This is
related to the FISA legislation
that we anticipate will come on
the floor shortly. Essentially
there is a lot of concern about
interpretations of stature and
those interpretations are being
kept secret by the Administra-
tion – as in previous administra-
tions. So Americans really don’t
know how essentially a secret
court has created secret law
regarding the government’s
ability to spy on them. And I
find that unacceptable. So my
amendment would essentially
instruct the administration to
end this practice of secret law,
let Americans know what the
court rulings are on interpreta-
tions of statute. We can read the
See MERKLEY on page 3
Obama: Gun Consensus By January
By Josh Levs and Holly Yan
CNN
The nation will have a set of
recommendations to address widespread
gun violence within weeks, President
Obama announced Wednesday.
Vice President Joe Obama will lead an
inter-agency group to come up with “con-
crete proposals no later than January — pro-
posals that I then intend to push without
delay,” the president said.
Speaking five days after a gunman killed
27 people, including 20 children, at a Con-
necticut elementary school, Obama said that
“if there is even one thing that we can do” to
prevent such tragedies, “we have a deep
obligation, all of us, to try.”
“This is not some Washington commis-
sion. This is not something where folks are
going to be studying the issue for six
months and publishing a report that gets
read and then pushed aside. This is a team
that has a very specific task to pull together
real reforms right now.”
No single law or set of laws can prevent
gun violence, the president said.
But the complexity of the issue “can no
longer be an excuse for doing nothing,” he
said.
The “complex” issue demands action on
gun laws and work in making “access to
mental health care at least as easy as access
to a gun,” he said.
See GUN VIOLENCE on page 3