Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
.................
It's actually not possible for Medford or Eugene to be like Palo Alto CA or Newton MA etc. The parental involvement, education level of parents and household wealth are magnitudes different and cannot be wishfully hoped upon. Places like Palo Alto are full of Stanford degree holders. That's not a policy or strategy to improve Oregon education.
Medford schools are AWFUL. Eugene schools are pretty good.
TRUE STORY....A friend lived and worked in Medford. He thought, his kids were doing ok in school with A's and B's in most of their classes.
He got a new job in Montana. When he moved to Montana the school district there tested the kids....and set them back a year!!! He was told that they could catch up if they applied themselves and that this happens all the time when kids move into Montana.
I am not a fan of Federal involvement in education, but at least one nation-wide test to let parents know how their kids and school district measure up to the rest of the country.
Unless you are arguing that Asians are somehow genetically superior then you are making my point for me. It's about EXPECTATIONS within the community and PERFORMANCE of the school system. Plano has both. Oregon for the most part has neither.
I have no doubt that the population of say...metro Salem could perform similarly to Plano as they both have roughly equivalent size populations. If there were equal expectations within the community and equal performance within the schools. There is neither.
If you move to most of Oregon outside the few affluent suburban areas like Lake Oswego, Beaverton and Wilsonville, you will encounter communities full of low expectations and school systems that are mediocre in many ways. Oregon is not nearly as special as it thinks it is. The rot is deep and it goes back decades. This is a story about Eugene and my alma matter from a few years ago. Eugene should be a bright spot with a major university and highly educated population. It is not: https://www.registerguard.com/articl...NEWS/301299999
Try to imagine a community like Plano putting up with schools like that.
I even thought in the affluent towns too that its still lazier on average than other states good schools even if better than a lot of the surrounding towns. I find an IDGAF mentality in those ich places also. what about Sherwood? I see Sherwood as an upper middle class trailer park, u feel it in the air. Same with a lot of Portland though tbh. This place is a dump compared to what people from here make it look like. It now reminds me of what going through a hellhole like Hartford CT was like. Congrats Portland, u got that bad now.
I even told someone who wanted to move to Portland, if u do move here.. I wont meet u. but if u dont leave ur city and I move to it, I would like to meet. I put it to the person like that because I said, I dont have a social life in this area, I cant stand most of the people that much and if I did meet u, i would just be negative about it to you. then i said one last time, I want to move where u want to leave, I might be one of the few, but I do.. if u stay put, I will meet u when I get to town. If u come here, I wont. U sold out to the friends who told u this was a great place when it isnt.
Medford schools are AWFUL. Eugene schools are pretty good.
TRUE STORY....A friend lived and worked in Medford. He thought, his kids were doing ok in school with A's and B's in most of their classes.
He got a new job in Montana. When he moved to Montana the school district there tested the kids....and set them back a year!!! He was told that they could catch up if they applied themselves and that this happens all the time when kids move into Montana.
I am not a fan of Federal involvement in education, but at least one nation-wide test to let parents know how their kids and school district measure up to the rest of the country.
ALSO this mediocre expectation kind of place is how it treats the Portland Trail Blazers as well. Just making the playoffs is good to them. What losers. I come from title town, so i see that as a disgrace.
There are really two Oregons. There are the upscale suburban areas around Portland and in a few pockets elsewhere like Corvallis, South Eugene, maybe Bend and West Salem where there is the same upper-middle class drive to achieve like anyplace else. And then there is a whole giant swath of the rest of the state where there is just not a lot of drive, especially with respect to education. I saw it growing up in North Eugene. Most of my classmates who were really successful left the state and never looked back.
A perfect story that sums up the state of much of rural Oregon is this New York Times series by Nick Kristof "Who Killed the Knapp Family from earlier this year:
Kristof goes back to his home town of Yamhill OR and looks up all the kids on the school bus he used to ride to school and discovers that over 25% of them are dead or in prison. The whole article is about rural despair and vanishing opportunities. What makes the article especially jarring is the knowledge that Yamhill is not deepest darkest Appalachia. It isn't even a remote town like Roseburg. Yamhill is within easy commuting distance of the Beaverton-Hillsboro corridor which for the past several decades has been the largest single job engine in the Pacific Northwest outside of the Seattle area. The place has been dripping with jobs for the past several decades. In tech, health care, and for that matter, construction. Here in Camas I have neighbors who commute to tech jobs out in Beaverton and Hillsboro. That is a LOT longer and more difficult commute than it would be from Yamhill.
Apparently the folks in Kristof's story would rather sit around and do nothing but cook meth if they can't get the timber jobs that their fathers and grandfathers used to have. God forbid they have to drive 1/2 hour to find a good paying job. That is the mentality in large swaths of Oregon. Dissing of education is just a part of it.
I love Oregon. I grew up in Oregon and my family goes back 5 generations. I have extended family scattered all over the state. But I fear for the future because it is falling behind in so many ways. Take away the Portland metro and most of the rest of the state looks about like Arkansas. It used to not be that way.
Texasdiver, thanks for sharing this story. I read both articles because I wanted to better understand this local societal problem. It's eye opening, gut wrenching and heart breaking to see such dysfunction so pervasive, so close to home. Something is very wrong when children with such great potential end up going down the same destructive paths almost as if there were no other options for them. I mean, come on. This is America, right? Land of the free and home of the brave! Yet, somehow, the America they have come to know does not work. To hear each of their stories and eventual demise, really drives home the fact there is something seriously wrong on a larger societal scale.
This quote I found especially significant: "If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility."
This reminds me, in part, of the US response to Covid or lack thereof - too little, too late. Instead of focusing on re-educating misplaced blue collar workers and offering early drug intervention programs, we're more focused on the war on drugs and building bigger prisons. The later ends up costing tax payers and society so much more, not to mention the devastation such an approach leaves in its wake. Now, we're spending billions on the back end of Covid vs. something more proactive earlier on like Asian countries did.
Not being born in the PNW, its honestly hard to grasp why lack of logging jobs really matters all that much. I mean, seriously, there are so many other industries out there that are thriving. But I guess its like living next to an old steel mill town or coal mine. That's a part of the history of the place and what families were born into. So, when its gone, they're completely devastated even though from an outsider's perspective, the answer seems so obvious = learn something new.
The strangest part to me was that even the ones who were top of their class reaching beyond their peers, etc... still struggled to survive ultimately. They even had successful careers like Andrea and Amber Knapp. Amber was a tech wiz. So, theoretically, she had learned something new and was very good at it! But that, in and of itself, was still not enough, apparently. Then the last one, Keylan, eventually OD'd after getting out of prison.
There seemed to be more to this cycle, almost like a black hole of depression, substance abuse and self-destruction. Thus, it's a more complex societal problem than anyone can find an easy fix for. Though I do tend to agree with the author's points about addressing these problems from a larger scale. It's hard to believe this same pattern is repeating itself all across the state even today...
Derek
Last edited by MtnSurfer; 09-25-2020 at 04:54 PM..
Texasdiver, thanks for sharing this story. I read both articles because I wanted to better understand this local societal problem. It's eye opening, gut wrenching and heart breaking to see such dysfunction so pervasive, so close to home. Something is very wrong when children with such great potential end up going down the same destructive paths almost as if there were no other options for them. I mean, come on. This is America, right? Land of the free and home of the brave! Yet, somehow, the America they have come to know does not work. To hear each of their stories and eventual demise, really drives home the fact there is something seriously wrong on a larger societal scale.
This quote I found especially significant: "If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility."
This reminds me, in part, of the US response to Covid or lack thereof - too little, too late. Instead of focusing on re-educating misplaced blue collar workers and offering early drug intervention programs, we're more focused on the war on drugs and building bigger prisons. The later ends up costing tax payers and society so much more, not to mention the devastation such an approach leaves in its wake. Now, we're spending billions on the back end of Covid vs. something more proactive earlier on like Asian countries did.
Not being born in the PNW, its honestly hard to grasp why lack of logging jobs really matters all that much. I mean, seriously, there are so many other industries out there that are thriving. But I guess its like living next to an old steel mill town or coal mine. That's a part of the history of the place and what families were born into. So, when its gone, they're completely devastated even though from an outsider's perspective, the answer seems so obvious = learn something new.
The strangest part to me was that even the ones who were top of their class reaching beyond their peers, etc... still struggled to survive ultimately. They even had successful careers like Andrea and Amber Knapp. Amber was a tech wiz. So, theoretically, she had learned something new and was very good at it! But that, in and of itself, was still not enough, apparently. Then the last one, Keylan, eventually OD'd after getting out of prison.
There seemed to be more to this cycle, almost like a black hole of depression, substance abuse and self-destruction. Thus, it's a more complex societal problem than anyone can find an easy fix for. Though I do tend to agree with the author's points about addressing these problems from a larger scale. It's hard to believe this same pattern is repeating itself all across the state even today...
Derek
Timber is to Oregon as coal is to West Virginia or Kentucky.
It's MUCH MUCH more than the actual jobs. It's an entire culture and rural way of life that people are loath to let go of. There are dozens of towns in Oregon that frankly serve no economic purpose without the timber industry just like there are dozens and dozens of towns in West Virginia that serve no economic purpose without coal mining. People know that.
There was a time when industries came and went and so did the people too. The mountain west is littered with hundreds of ghost towns from the days of mining and railroads. But people today don't want to move on like their ancestors did. They don't even want to stay put and commute to jobs in larger cities. I don't know what you do.
Watch the 1971 Ken Kesey movie "Sometimes a Great Notion" starring Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, and Lee Remick, which portrays a Gyppo Logging family in coastal Oregon for a bit of a picture of what timber culture used to like in Oregon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someti...t_Notion_(film)
Apparently the folks in Kristof's story would rather sit around and do nothing but cook meth if they can't get the timber jobs that their fathers and grandfathers used to have. God forbid they have to drive 1/2 hour to find a good paying job. That is the mentality in large swaths of Oregon. Dissing of education is just a part of it.
I love Oregon. I grew up in Oregon and my family goes back 5 generations. I have extended family scattered all over the state. But I fear for the future because it is falling behind in so many ways. Take away the Portland metro and most of the rest of the state looks about like Arkansas. It used to not be that way.
It's mind-boggling. My home town is Sweet Home, and the dynamic Kristof chronicles is very much alive and well there. A good friend of mine wrote her Masters thesis on the similarities between Sweet Home and backwoods Appalachia. Same with Florence and Oakridge, and don't get me started on Albany; I went to high school there and fled the minute I graduated. Education has somehow become the enemy to so many of them. Florence is full of angry hometown hotshots who are convinced that the lack of timber jobs has wrecked their lives; meanwhile, the trades are literally begging for warm bodies, and those jobs pay better than timber ever did. LCC is practically giving away education in the trades, but I guess it's too much trouble for them.
Timber is to Oregon as coal is to West Virginia or Kentucky.
It's MUCH MUCH more than the actual jobs. It's an entire culture and rural way of life that people are loath to let go of. There are dozens of towns in Oregon that frankly serve no economic purpose without the timber industry just like there are dozens and dozens of towns in West Virginia that serve no economic purpose without coal mining. People know that.
There was a time when industries came and went and so did the people too. The mountain west is littered with hundreds of ghost towns from the days of mining and railroads. But people today don't want to move on like their ancestors did. They don't even want to stay put and commute to jobs in larger cities. I don't know what you do.
Watch the 1971 Ken Kesey movie "Sometimes a Great Notion" starring Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, and Lee Remick, which portrays a Gyppo Logging family in coastal Oregon for a bit of a picture of what timber culture used to like in Oregon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someti...t_Notion_(film)
I know exactly what you mean about ghost towns. Yes, it does seem strange that instead of leaving for jobs somewhere else, they would instead choose to stay and lament about days gone by. But then you have one of the great pardox's of Oregon. That is, its amazing beauty in the midst of human tragedy as the story reveals. So, I guess I understand in part why some would want to stay. It's like an old factory machine that just get's stuck in a broken state. The dysfunction becomes generational and spreads throughout the fabric of the society and culture.
On one of my first trips to the Oregon coast many years ago, I met a local surfer coming in out of the water in Port Orford. Stunned by the beauty of the place, I struck up a conversation and asked him what 'people do for a living around here?' His almost instantaneous response was 'sell weed! Though the DEA is cracking down on them more now.' This was before legalization. I thought, ok, well, I guess they're doing what they think they have to do to survive. The drug culture is very alive and well in NorCal in the Emerald Triangle for similar reasons. I'm not sure the pot business is enough to sustain an entire town anymore beyond selling trinkets and other tourist items. But its certainly a big part as are other drugs like the article talked about regarding meth labs, unfortunately.
Derek
Last edited by MtnSurfer; 09-25-2020 at 06:27 PM..
I know exactly what you mean about ghost towns. Yes, it does seem strange that instead of leaving for jobs somewhere else, they would instead choose to stay and lament about days gone by.
To be fair to them, "jobs elsewhere" weren't exactly growing on trees, and they didn't have many transferable skills. It was roughest on the established families who'd been in timber all their lives and had maybe 10 years until retirement. They had homes they probably couldn't sell at a profit or rent out at any cost at that time. A lot of them did relocate temporarily to SE Alaska.
But the bitterness became generational. People who've never held a job in timber are angry because the industry barely exists anymore.
People have varying opinions about this. You could point to many factors, but the one I am familiar with is there is a strong drug "underculture" present in Oregon. Drugs aren't really looked down on by a significant portion of the population, including high schoolers. This manifests itself in many ways. It's one reason I left.
I’ve often felt the same.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
