Forbidding transfers altogether would suck hard for many kids & parents.

a few select schools are allowed to hoard the lion's share of system funding and resources...The gap gets wider and wider...

I'm actually not intimately familiar with Pdx school system, as all my children
have been grown-ups for awhile now.

Still I feel the transfer issue is much more complicated than just being about race.

Personal experience:

When I was in school I had a transfer from the closest school to one about a mile away, because the latter had an all-day gifted class and the former only had morning enrichment (aka 45 minutes of extra computer lab.) My younger sister had one because you could automatically get a transfer for a sibling, which was nice because she was able to attend a full-day Spanish immersion class, something the local school didn't offer either. There were only two schools in our district at the time with full-day gifted classes, and neither of them were in particularly wealthy or overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, for what it's worth (the classes were always very diverse, if anybody's wondering.)

Neither of these schools were wealthy or well funded or in particularly desirable neighborhoods. The school we attended might have been slightly less diverse than the neighborhood school but both would have been much more diverse than schools in most other towns and most schools in our district.

Our neighborhood school didn't miss out on much for us not being there- their resources were shifted toward english learners and struggling students, not gifted kids and their hyperactive siblings. My sister did attend that school for one year when I went to junior high and she lost her transfer, and it was a freakin' disaster. We basically had to lie about daycare she wasn't actually attending to get her back into a school that met her needs.

So if our local schools had implemented a policy like they're proposing for Portland schools, it would have really been damaging me as a child, and it wouldn't have improved my neighborhood school at all. Not a fan.

and safest school they are able to arrange, regardless of race. To act otherwise, is deficient parenting.

The article also provides scant information to intelligently discuss the appropriateness or fairness of the transfers.