The soft corruption of public consent

Portland’s school bond boondoggle

In the placid precincts and gentrified neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon, a peculiar ritual once again played out with the predictability of Pacific Northwest rain. The city’s voters, ever-reliable in their progressive orthodoxy, dutifully approved yet another massive school bond measure—nearly $1.83 billion this time—despite plummeting enrollment and a school system hemorrhaging both students and credibility.

This latest act in Portland’s long-running fiscal theater represents nothing less than what we might call the soft corruption of public consent, a process whereby the governing class manipulates democratic procedures to extract wealth from taxpayers while delivering increasingly dismal results.

As early returns from the May 20th special election rolled in, Portland Public Schools (PPS) officials wasted no time declaring victory for Measure 26-259, which looks like it will pass with approximately 58% of the vote. The massive bond measure represents the largest school bond in Oregon history, yet another monument to the district’s insatiable appetite for tax dollars despite its demonstrable failure to reverse academic decline or stem the exodus of families from its schools.

Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong, in a statement that captures the administrative doublespeak passing for leadership in today’s government schools, declared: “We are incredibly grateful to the Portland community for once again standing with our students and saying yes to the future of public education.”

Left unsaid is that the Portland community is shrinking, or at least the part that attends the government-run schools is getting smaller each year.

The district proudly touts that most of these funds will go toward rebuilding and modernizing three high schools: Cleveland, Ida B. Wells (fka Wilson), and Jefferson. Yet this massive capital expenditure comes at precisely the moment when PPS acknowledges a sustained enrollment decline that is projected to continue for the next eight to nine years. Portland’s government school administrators are building grand palaces for a student population that continues to dwindle year after year. A curious strategy, to say the least.

Jefferson High School, which once maintained the highest enrollment of any high school in the state, and has produced a Heisman Trophy winner, Hall of Famers in baseball and pro football, and a current NBA head coach, now has an enrollment of 525. Each student’s share of the once venerable institution’s remodel?

Approximately $875,000 per child.

Now, is this truly the best use of taxpayer money?

The soft corruption becomes even more apparent when one considers that with this bond campaign, PPS simultaneously unveiled a preliminary $2.04 billion budget proposal that eliminates 242 staff positions amid a $40 million deficit. As Superintendent Armstrong herself admitted, “We are in our third consecutive year of a structural deficit. Our expenses to run schools continue to exceed the revenue that we receive, and the gap is only widening.”

What Armstrong failed to mention is the obvious contradiction: If your enrollment is dropping and your budget is already unsustainable, why demand nearly $2 billion more from taxpayers for capital improvements?

The answer reveals the essence of this type of soft corruption: Because they can get away with it.

The district’s own projections show enrollment declining at 1.5% for the next school year, with similar declines expected to continue for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, Portland’s population grew ever-so-slightly in 2024, increasing by 0.2% to 635,749 residents.

While families don’t appear to be leaving Portland any longer, they are leaving Portland’s government schools.

Where the soft corruption truly manifests is in who pays and who benefits from this arrangement. Portland’s property owners already shoulder a median effective property tax rate of 1.08%, significantly higher than the national average, with a median annual tax bill of $5,381.

Thanks to various ballot measures over the last few decades which succeeded in cramming already established neighborhoods with the burden of financing government’s pet projects that they may not approve of, the weight of the property taxes is not at all equal—and certainly not equitable—when applied to the different parts of town.

How does this work? Property owners essentially rent back their real estate from the government—one that has no legitimate claim to private property—to fund its latest educational extravagance. The more value its assessors claim a property holds, the more dollars the City of Portland can and will extort from the property owner.

Lost in all of this “tax the rich” twaddle is that a not insignificant portion of the victims of Portland’s property tax swindle are retirees on fixed incomes or middle-class families struggling with Oregon’s already high cost of living.

Meanwhile, the percentage of renters in Portland increases, rising from 46.6% in 2013 to 46.9% in 2018, with certain neighborhoods seeing much larger gains in this category. These folks, while certainly noticing some impact through occasional, though moderate, step-ups in rent, don’t experience the crushing weight of ever-escalating property tax bills on their desks.

Nevertheless, they get to broadcast their virtue signal by voting for “investment in schools” without directly bearing any of the financial burden.

This insidious dynamic creates a perverse political incentive structure—a growing class of voters with limited skin in the game now imposes massive tax burdens on property owners. Meanwhile, the educational bureaucracy expands regardless of results or accountability.

It is taxation with the veneer of representation, a distortion of democracy that benefits administrators and their union allies while families flee the very system they’re forced to fund.

This system of soft corruption finds its perfect enabler in Oregon’s mail-in voting system, in place since 2000. While touted as enhancing “democratic participation,” its primary achievement was to entrench a power structure for a progressive establishment—one that manipulates election timing and messaging to achieve desired outcomes.

The tactics have proved quite successful for Oregon’s leftists, liberals, and progressives. For it is said that the purpose of a system is what it does.

Special elections like the May 20th vote typically see turnouts hovering between 20–30% of eligible voters, according to Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read. However, yesterday’s election saw turnout of just under 19%. These low-turnout affairs are dominated by highly motivated interest groups, specifically teacher unions, public employee unions, and progressive activists who mindlessly and reliably support any measure with “schools” in the title.

The soft corruption extends to the highest levels of state government. Governor Tina Kotek, a paragon of progressive politics, exemplifies the hypocrisy inherent in the system. While recently showing her newfound concern about campaign finance reform when discovering her ideological opponents receive large donations, Kotek demonstrated little interest in such reforms during her nine years as Oregon’s House Speaker.

Kotek is the perfect figurehead for a state whereby trying to “fit in” with the progressive cultural milieu means more than results, and where progressive rhetoric masks the extensive regulatory capture by public sector unions and bloat from the managerial class.

The consequences of this soft corruption extend far beyond wasted tax dollars. Portland’s children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds who cannot escape to private alternatives, remain trapped in a system more focused on empire-building than education. While administrators promise that gleaming new buildings will somehow reverse academic decline, the district slashes teaching positions and student services.

With that in mind, let us dispense, once and for all, with the sentimental fiction that government schools exist “for the children.” This is the great lie at the heart of the modern education-industrial complex. It is a lie repeated so often it has become an article of faith among the Portland political class.

In truth, the government school system is, first and foremost, a jobs program for adults. The numbers of administrators, consultants, unionized teachers, and a vast retinue of “support staff” swell with each new bond measure, even as enrollment shrinks.

The numbers do not lie. With every passing year, Portland Public Schools employ fewer teachers and educate fewer students, yet the number of administrators, equity officers, and compliance specialists grows like morning glory in an untended garden. The billions of dollars in bonds are not “investments” in the futures for children. These are lifelines for a bureaucracy whose primary mission is self-preservation.

Consider the grim arithmetic of the expected passage of this recent bond.

With turnout under 20%, and the measure passing with 58% of the vote, only around 10% of eligible voters endorsed this raid on the public treasury.

This is not democracy, rather it is a parody of the institution. It has become a system in which the organized and motivated few—public employee unions, the district’s contractors, and the progressive faithful—impose their will on the indifferent or disenfranchised many.

The true tragedy is that many Portlanders are unable or unwilling to recognize the contradiction. They dutifully vote for bond measures sold as “investments in children’s futures” while the system produces declining results year after year.

This is the essence of soft corruption. It maintains a façade of legitimacy and public purpose while primarily serving the interests of those who control the levers of power.

Portland’s government schools represent a microcosm of the broader progressive governance model, one that includes endless demands for more resources coupled with declining performance and zero accountability. School board members and superintendents come and go, each promising reform while the bureaucratic machinery grinds on, consuming ever more tax dollars and producing fewer graduates prepared for either higher education or meaningful employment.

Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority.” In Portland, we have arrived at something even more insidious: the tyranny of the manipulated minority. In the cases of both Portland and the State of Oregon, this natural devolution of democracy is empowered by the apathy of the masses and the machinery of mail-in ballots.

When only one in five citizens bothers to vote, and half of those vote “yes” on a measure they scarcely understand, the result is not the will of the people, but the triumph of the special interests.

To borrow the old parable: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. In Portland, the wolves are the government unions and their political patrons, and the sheep are the property owners—fleeced, nay eaten, year after year, to fund a system that no longer serves their family, neighborhood, or city.

This is not the “consent of the governed.” It is the soft corruption of public consent, engineered by those who have mastered the art of extracting resources from a distracted populace. The government schools are not failing because they lack money. They fail because their true mission is not education, but employment.

Every bond measure, every new administrative position, every equity initiative, and so forth is another brick in the edifice of a system built to serve itself.

Until Portland voters—particularly those who uncritically support any measure labeled as “for the children”—recognize their complicity in this soft corruption, the cycle will continue.

Children will be used as props in emotional campaigns for more funding. Property owners will see their tax burdens grow. And the educational bureaucracy will expand regardless of the outcome.

The soft corruption of public consent may lack the drama of outright bribery or embezzlement, but its effects are far more pernicious. It hollows out democratic institutions from within, replacing genuine public service with a self-perpetuating system benefitting insiders while failing those it purports to serve. Portland’s latest school bond boondoggle stands as yet another monument to this corruption—one that will cost taxpayers dearly for decades to come.

If the Portland school system were truly for the students, one would expect to see resources flowing into classrooms, test scores rising, and families flocking to enroll their children.

Instead, we see the opposite: declining enrollment, stagnant or falling academic performance, and a growing exodus to private and alternative schools.

The only constant is the relentless growth of the bureaucracy and the ever-rising burden on taxpayers.

Make no mistake, the passage of Measure 26-259 is not a victory for children or families. But it is a victory for the adults whose livelihoods depend on the perpetuation of the system.

The system? It consists partly of contractors profiting from the construction projects, unions who will obtain ever-more-generous contracts, and politicians claiming credit for “investing in education” while quietly ensuring that nothing ever changes. These are the selfsame people who have declared victory.

While there may (or may not) be a shiny, new high school to attend in a decade, the average PPS student is on the losing side of this bargain.

Until Portlanders recognize that their government schools are not, and have never really been, primarily about educating children, nothing will change. The cycle of decline, disinvestment, and bureaucratic expansion will continue, funded by the soft corruption of public consent and the tyranny of a manipulated majority.

The challenge, then, is not merely to defeat the next bond measure, but to expose the true nature of the system. Citizens must band together and pull back the curtain, revealing the wolves in sheep’s clothing who have been feasting on the public purse.

Only then can Portland begin the hard work of building an education system that serves children and families, rather than the adults who have captured it.

In Portland, the sheep must finally learn to say no.