Mother Jones tells the sad story of Oregon Public Schools

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/05/04_407.html">Class Dismissed

Bob Allnut greets me at the door of his geometry class at Hillsboro High School, outside Portland, Oregon. "The key move is the sideways step," he explains, demonstrating how he shimmies between the tightly packed chairs.

"I don't get this!" blurts a student from somewhere in the knot of desks. "I'm working my way over there," Allnutt, a 25-year teaching veteran, calls back as he darts frantically around the class.

There are 38 students in the room, broken up into small groups, and the din of conversation makes it nearly impossible for Allnutt to be heard beyond the first few rows. On the far side of the classroom, a girl sits with her back to the teacher, chatting with friends. A group of four kids crowds around David Henning, 16, one of the few students who seem to understand the assignment. "We help each other out as best we can," says Henning, an earnest-looking sophomore wearing an Old Navy baseball cap. "A lot of the help is from the students around you." The teacher, he adds matter-of-factly, can't possibly get to everyone.

It's a typical classroom scene in Oregon -- and in a growing number of other states where a confluence of budget cuts, federal underfunding, and a nationally orchestrated anti-tax crusade has left public schools facing the worst funding crisis in decades. "The good students are going to survive," says Charlie Cleveland, a social studies teacher at Hillsboro High. "And the students at the other end are going to get special help -- we have programs mandated by law for them. It's the big group in the middle that are just jammed together.

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