When you go about a typical day, how often do you interact with children who are not related to you? How many times has your neighbor dropped off their kids for an hour while they ran to the store? How many times have you gone to a restaurant that has a dedicated children’s corner?
For some of us, the answer to these questions may be “all the time” but for more and more of us, the answer is…”rarely”. And it may not be for the reasons you’re thinking. We might blame technology, hyper-vigilant parenting, or the lingering social fractures of the pandemic for this isolation, but another contributor is much simpler, and much harder to fix: There are fewer households with children. Period. In the 1950s, over half of all US families had children. Today in Portland, only 24% of households do. We are rapidly becoming a city of adults, increasingly disconnected from the generation who will succeed us. We don’t see them and, in many ways, we have lost our collective responsibility towards them.
We live in a region struggling with an education crisis and a worsening economic environment, and support for public education is under immense pressure. Many people are disengaged from the issue simply because Portland is no longer a place that has a lot of children or families. In fact, Oregon has one of the lowest birth rates in the country. Those who are born here are also increasingly more diverse and different from the adults in the region. For example, in the 2020 census, while 20% of Washington County residents identified as Hispanic/Latine, the K-12 population in the county is between 35-40% Latine.
When so many of us are not directly involved with children, it’s hard to care about their future and their education—even though our future depends on them. Future leaders, public servants, tradespeople, scientists, service people, and medical professionals are students in our classrooms today. However, due to our aging population, the housing and childcare affordability crises, the high cost of living, and immigration enforcement, families with children can struggle. We have privatized parenting: treating the upbringing of children as a niche, personal hobby rather than a collective civic duty. We desperately need to return to the village model. And we already have the infrastructure to do it.
Public education is the last public space where we can build connections to our collective future and it is one of the last places where people across socio-economic backgrounds have regular interactions. It is the very essence of educational equity: the concept that every child receives what they need to develop their full academic and social potential. Children' s backgrounds should not be a predictor of their success. We need to rally around public education because it is also one of the last ways, through taxes, investments, and our time, that we can invest in children who are not our own.
Public education is not just a line item on our property tax bills; it is the last truly public space where we still build a shared future. When we disengage from our schools because we don’t have skin in the game, we forfeit that future. We must recommit to the success of the next generation - regardless of whose children they may be - because as James Baldwin famously reminded us, “These are all our children; we will all profit by or pay for what they become.” Let’s take care of them even if they are not our own.
Written for ninety-nine girlfriends by,
Barbara Hilyer, M.Ed., past Governing Board Member
Tong Zhang, Ph.D, current Governing Board Chair