Philly School Reform, from City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (n+1 and FSG, 2015)

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PHILLY SCHOOL REFORM

JESSE MONTGOMERY

On a spring afternoon in 2013, hundreds of parents, students, teachers, and activists stood at the headquarters of the Philadelphia School District to protest the worst school bud get in Philadelphia history. The press had already taken to calling it a “doomsday bud-get,” a seriocomic term that obscured as much as it expressed. The proposed bud get would leave schools with only the barest signs of education: a principal and a core group of teachers. Counselors, sports, secretaries, librarians, and music and art teachers, as well as all support safety staff, would be eliminated. Dressed in red (the color of the teachers’ union, but also, of course, of a defi cit bud get), waving signs, and holding banners, the protesters massed on the stairs of the squat concrete building. They spilled out into Broad Street, in clear view of city hall, chanting, “Save our schools!” Near the front of the rush, a student pep band performed under the direction of its teacher, who faced layoff.

Inside the building, in the auditorium of the School District Education Center, the public school district’s state- imposed gov-erning body, Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission, was pre-paring to vote on the controversial bud get. The auditorium, too, overfl owed with protesters, many of them prepared to deliver com-ment on the proposal before the vote. Four of the fi ve members of the commission were joined by Superintendent William Hite be-hind a long row of tables topped by microphones, name placards,

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392 JESSE MONTGOMERY

and bottled water. The fi fth commissioner, Joseph Dworetzky, par-ticipated via teleconference. As the doors were closed and the last people jostled for room, the district leaders talked quietly among themselves and even smiled.

But as the meeting came to order, they took on the grave, ner-vous expressions they would wear for the duration of the eve ning. The bulk of time had been set aside for public testimony on the proposed bud get, during which the commission could fi eld questions and respond to concerns. One by one, parents, teachers, and students delivered indignant, anguished, oftentimes tearful speeches. Many spoke about crucial programs that would be cut from the schools, the importance of counselors and cafeteria work-ers, and the already vulnerable populations that would be hit hard-est by the cuts. Others attacked the commission directly, calling the bud get, and the pro cess of its creation, hurried, callous, and racist.

The commissioners listened to all of this quietly, their faces drawn. It seemed clear that the issue had been resolved in their minds and that the public comment period could do little to change the hard decisions they felt had to be made. Pedro Ramos, the chair of the commission, was a lawyer who had served as presi-dent of the Philadelphia School Board and as city solicitor and had been chief of staff to the president of UPenn. He had grown up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. But he had been appointed by the Republican governor, Tom Corbett, to be his man on the commission and was now dutifully executing orders from Harrisburg.

After two hours of comment from the public, Ramos proposed a vote. The bud get passed, 4–1. The immediate question was whether what remained after the thousands of cuts could really be considered “schools.” Before casting the sole dissenting vote, Dworetzky stated that “wherever the line falls between a school and not a school, what’s being proposed here is very close to the line.” But the question was treated as academic. His four fellow commissioners cited their legal obligation to approve a bud get and


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PHILLY SCHOOL REFORM 393

voted yes. One week later, it was announced that layoff notices were being sent to 3,783 district employees.

Public schools in Pennsylvania have been a site of confl ict for de-cades. Until the 1970s, teachers in the commonwealth held no col-lective bargaining rights. Once teachers acquired them, after many years of intense or ga niz ing around issues of low pay and poor working conditions, teachers’ strikes proliferated. Between 1970 and 1988, one of every fi ve public school strikes in the country took place in Pennsylvania. Their frequency helped make them unpop-u lar; a broad sense that teachers were protecting their own rights against the needs of students took hold among parents and the broader community. In the early 1990s, the state stepped in and managed to roll back many of the rights previously achieved by the unions. These struggles were especially pitched in Philadelphia, a city whose public school system suffered exceptional levels of pov-erty and economic stratifi cation resulting from white fl ight. Years of confl ict had created a racially charged antagonism between Har-risburg and the city, and the remote state government took the fi rst opportunity to turn the city into a kind of laboratory for school “reform.”

The current struggles faced by the city’s schools began in the late 1990s, when a state senate overseen by the Republican gover-nor, Tom Ridge, changed the state school- funding formula, unteth-ering it from poverty levels and choking off much- needed funds for Philadelphia schools. In 1998, the district superintendent, David Hornbeck, in a fi t of indignant activism, threatened to shut down Philadelphia’s public schools unless the district received the ad-ditional funding from the state he deemed necessary for opera-tions. Hornbeck’s move was audacious, and the members of the Republican- led Pennsylvania General Assembly did not like it. They responded by passing Act 46, which gave the secretary of ed-ucation power to declare any school district in the state “under dis-tress” should it sink to below specifi ed standards of conduct. Once


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a district was named distressed, an administrative machine would take over. The local (usually elected) board of education would be dissolved and placed under the control of a fi ve- person school re-form commission, staffed with members appointed by the gover-nor and unaccountable to the public. In a preview of future attacks on public- sector unions, Act 46 would also limit collective bargain-ing between teachers and the commission, strip teachers of their right to strike, and allow the state to impose a contract if they did (all of this despite the fact that Hornbeck, not the teachers’ union, had threatened the shutdown).

In the fall of 2001, citing abysmal test scores, staffi ng shortages, and a multimillion- dollar bud get defi cit, Governor Mark Sch-weiker (a Republican who had taken over after his pre de ces sor, Tom Ridge, was appointed to the newly created Department of Homeland Security) revived Act 46 and initiated the state takeover of what was at that point the fi fth- largest school district in America. Schweiker initially sought to turn control of all district schools over to Edison Inc., a for- profi t school management group, effectively privatizing the entire school district. After months of student protests, negotiations with the city, and lawsuits fi led by a host of organizations, including the Philadelphia Student Union and the NAACP, a compromise was reached. In the end, Edison Inc. was awarded only twenty schools (a failure that sent its Wall Street stock plummeting), and Mayor John Street managed to wrest two ap-pointees to the reform commission from the state. What began with Hornbeck’s attempt to demand equitable funding three years prior had led to the largest state takeover of public education this country has ever seen.

In the years since— which coincided with another systematic intrusion into the lives of schoolchildren, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act— the per for mance of the school district has been discouraging. While test scores saw small gains each year, they remained far below the state average; high school graduation rates hovered around 60 percent. In keeping with national trends, the school district also encouraged systematic deprofessionaliza-


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tion and championed “choice” in its public schools. Charter school growth exploded, skilled teachers were replaced with temporary workers from Teach for America, scripted curricula were made mandatory in many schools, and the number of precarious workers in the district more generally seemed to grow.

I wound up working in the school district almost by accident during the fall of 2010. I had graduated from college in the Mid-west and spent the summer reading on a bench in front of the stu-dent union while my bank account dwindled and everyone I’d known for the last four years trickled out of town and toward the coasts. When this arrangement became untenable, I made an arbi-trary move to Philadelphia with a few friends. With the Great Re-cession proceeding unabated and no connections in the city, I answered an ad on Craigslist for an AmeriCorps position tutoring En glish in the public schools. I was hired within days.

EducationWorks, the nonprofi t that was my direct employer and the largest AmeriCorps program in Pennsylvania, assigned me to work at Frankford, a public high school located in the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood of the same name. My job was to act as a classroom tutor for ninth- grade En glish classes serving high- risk students (those testing two to four years behind in reading). The pay was bad—we were given a stipend of $1,150 a month, which worked out to about $7.20 an hour before taxes— but I was excited to work with kids and motivated by the opportunity to do meaning-ful work.

When I arrived in October 2010, Frankford had been classifi ed by the terms of No Child Left Behind as a “per sis tently dangerous school” every year since 2006— a designation based on a sustained ratio of more than fi ve “dangerous incidents” per 250 students. There are currently six such schools in the state, all of them in the city of Philadelphia. Frankford enrolled close to 2,000 students— nearly 90 percent of them black and Latino— but on a given day only 75 percent attended school, and an even smaller number actu-ally made it to class, electing instead to wander the halls or disap-pear after signing in. Standardized test scores fell well below the


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district’s already low average. Over 85 percent of the student body was considered eco nom ically disadvantaged. One hundred percent were eligible for free lunch.

Issues of “school climate,” as the euphemism has it, tended to dominate the attention of the administration. This was made ap-parent to me on the fi rst day, when my already short orientation ended abruptly after my new supervisor, an assistant principal, bolted from her offi ce mid- sentence in order to chase down a truant student. From the beginning, I maintained a low profi le, because of the fl exible nature of my position and the general hum of chaos that permeated the building. I retained this weird, liminal status throughout my tenure at Frankford. I wasn’t a teacher; I wasn’t even an employee of the school district. As an AmeriCorps member, I was on the books but somewhere in the margins: academic support staff without much accountability or real supervision (let alone real pay) best used to plug holes left by bud get cuts and understaffi ng. My job was at once highly ambiguous and paradigmatic: fl exible, unprofessional, supported by an unpredictable source of funding, its existence was a testament to what the system needed and what it could afford. The district employed thousands of us.

I was ostensibly a tutor, and in a few of the classes I was attached to— typically better- run classes with more engaged students— I did a lot of tutoring: one- on- one work with kids who were struggling, small group homework help, essay workshops, and the like. But in other classes (or in the halls), I played different roles, mostly out of necessity. I would sit and attend to a particularly distractible stu-dent, for example, or play backup disciplinarian if a teacher needed support. Once or twice I broke up a fi ght; often I was a chaperone or a shrink. Some of this work seemed tangential to what I was sup-posed to be doing. As the months passed, I came to realize that the extra tasks were my job, that I was there simply to be a body, to sustain a vague sense of order or calm, and that this was, to varying degrees, the job of every single adult employed in one of these schools. From veteran teachers to school safety offi cers, everyone’s fi rst priority was to create an environment where one could teach.


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At this small task we often failed. The school was dysfunctional. There was a lot of bullying, and fi ghts happened frequently. Many students I knew felt unsafe; several transferred after getting jumped or robbed. Still more had grown inured to it all. For them, things popping off were a respite from the intense boredom that consti-tuted the school day. Part of this was the result of poor leadership: I remember the principal, bemoaning the disorder in his halls, com-paring students who roamed between classrooms to cockroaches. “Turn on the lights, catch them in the act,” he told us, “and BOOM! they’re gone.” But it was hard not to suspect that the problem was systematic, district- wide. Still, it was good work. I learned a lot about working with students, thanks chiefl y to mentoring by excellent, experienced teachers who were very good at a very diffi cult job, and I felt like an important, positive part of some of the classes I worked with. But the overall lack of support was exhausting, and many days I left Frankford dispirited and at a loss.

By the end of the 2010–11 school year, rumors began to circulate that the district would lay off 16 percent of its workforce, including 12 percent of its teachers, as a result of the governor’s bud get. Few of the teachers I worked with were sure that they would have a job in the fall, let alone jobs at Frankford, and the students all knew it, too. There were walkouts at Audenried, a district school slated to be turned into a charter as part of a turnaround initia-tive. Two of the three students I had worked with every day, sweet, thoughtful guys who never missed our after- school pro-gram, had been jumped on or near school grounds by their class-mates. One of them wouldn’t return in the fall, and the other simply disappeared— transferred, probably, but I’ll never know for sure. The kids who beat and robbed him kept attending school, despite being suspended; evidently, there was something about school they liked.

I was saved the trouble of quitting when the federal stimulus money funding our program ran out. Were the program to continue in the fall, already strapped schools would have to pay my wage, and there was talk that I might be put to work in the cafeterias when


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I wasn’t tutoring. I bowed out, somewhat defl ated and not a little relieved. It was strange to leave an environment where you felt, all at the same time, terribly needed but entirely powerless.

There are three fundamental tenets of the modern school re-form movement: some schools are beyond saving; the teachers are largely to blame; and children can essentially be saved from the very communities they come out of through the intervention of various highly motivated wealthy individuals and their surrogates in the multiarmed school bureaucracy.

The American public school system as a whole is, even on the terms of the school reformers, a decently performing system, if no-where near the levels of northern Eu ro pean countries such as Fin-land, with their highly paid, deeply professionalized— and densely unionized— teaching staff. In fact, when you adjust for child pov-erty, American public schools perform about on par with any other system. But at least since the late 1970s, when Americans began to feel their competitive advantage in all things, including smarts, slipping in the face of rising East Asian nations, the idea of the American school system as “broken” has taken hold— thanks to the ideological campaign of school “reform.”

Beginning in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education published its famous re-port A Nation at Risk, conservative voices became increasingly dominant in discussions of school reform. The report was intended to be a clarion call to American politicians, enjoining them to save a public school system that was supposedly adrift, unable to pro-duce students equipped to compete in the global economy. Many of the report’s recommendations are familiar to us today: that the schools focus on standardized testing; that the school day be made longer and that more homework be given; that schoolchildren be held to higher standards of academic per for mance; and that teacher salaries be made “professionally competitive, market- sensitive, and performance- based.”

The report was intended to ensure the federal government re-mained deeply involved in setting goals for schools as well as deal-


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ing out sanctions and demerits. But the punitive thrust of the rules helped open new and lucrative inroads for the private sector, as districts across the country failed to meet benchmarks and sought fi xes and scapegoats. The school reform movement is an alliance of business- savvy technocrats and self- styled education crusaders in-tent on disrupting what they see as an ossifi ed system. It paints itself as nimble and entrepreneurial: committed to testing and meritoc-racy, with teaching staff fl itting in and out, and governance of the school given over to a charter board, often composed of the well- heeled— not unlike the board of directors for a publicly traded company.

By most mea sures, charter schools perform, as a whole, on par with or even worse than traditional public schools. Yet they exert a tremendous attraction for many parents in urban districts, who have seen the costs borne by underfunded schools. So, too, do the believers who staff the movement— with its many para- organizations, such as Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst and Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America— see the wide- ranging program of school reform as ulti-mately progressive. Their world is one in which continual innova-tion in pedagogical methods anticipates disruption in the global economy. It is a world in which progress, assured by constant as-sessment and adherence to metrics (the ideals of the most admired quarters of American capitalism, such as Silicon Valley), will even-tually triumph over a de cadent, outdated, bureaucratic structure that tenures weak teachers at the expense of the students, who will soon be competing for jobs with each other and, what’s more, competing in a fl at world with the Chinese, Indians, and South Koreans. This message doesn’t only resonate with the power elite; refi ned over generations, it has come to carry real weight with many city dwellers, whose consent or vocal approval the movement, and its allies among elected offi cials, at least partly depend on.

The routes to the actual “reforms” are sometimes circuitous and dependent on local circumstances and personalities, but in the end they tend to look pretty much alike; in other words, they look


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40 0 JESSE MONTGOMERY

like business strategies. The latest round of cuts in Philadelphia came after the commission ordered a report on the schools under its charge from the infamous Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a fi rm publicly famous for its studies of consumer shopping hab-its, Trading Up and Down Around the World. The BCG promised to “right- size” the district and “return [it] to structural balance.” Hired for a fi ve- week engagement for a presumably enormous sum— partly bankrolled by the charter- school- friendly William Penn Foundation— BCG developed a blueprint for the future of public education in Philadelphia that would dismantle and reconstruct the entire system in the name of effi ciency. Asked to focus on de-veloping a “portfolio model” for managing the schools and identi-fying areas where costs could be cut, BCG came up with a plan that called for the closure of forty schools by 2013 and sixty- four by 2017. It also recommended “modernizing” operations by replacing transportation, cafeteria, maintenance, and custodial workers with subcontracted, nonunionized labor; signifi cantly reducing the dis-trict’s central offi ce staff (also unionized); and splitting the central-ized school district into a series of de facto mini- districts so that they could be awarded competitively to charter management orga-nizations, nonprofi ts, and groups of educators. According to BCG, the district should focus “on expanding high performing schools,” excising those that lagged, “and attracting high- quality leadership and operators, rather than directly managing schools.”

A year after the BCG report, the commission announced its plan to destroy the beleaguered district in order to save it. Around the same time, the district opened contract negotiations with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers with what Diane Ravitch called “the most insulting, most demeaning contract ever offered in any school district to my knowledge.” It called for pay cuts of 13 percent for those who earn more than $55,000 and 5 percent cuts for those making $25,000 or less. The contract would eliminate stepped raises and freeze salaries until 2017, extend the school day by an hour, eliminate se niority, require teachers be available for conferences with parents and students outside the normal workday


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(unpaid), allow for unlimited eve ning meetings (also unpaid), and eliminate the district’s responsibility to provide librarians (for schools with a thousand students or more), counselors for each school, employee lounges, water fountains, parking facilities, desks for teachers, and “a suffi cient number of instructional materials and textbooks.” Superintendent Hite said that such protections do not belong in a professional contract.

You would be hard- pressed to fi nd a set of terms more represen-tative of the strategy and aims of school reformers today. The cuts in wages, the end of se niority, and the thoroughgoing elimination of ser vices deemed “inessential” by wealthy non- educators are the hallmarks of today’s reform agenda. Their aim is to further distress the system, which in turn pushes out teachers who won’t stand for the conditions and makes alternatives like charter schools increas-ingly attractive in comparison. Similar agendas are being pushed through in districts across the country as politicians call for merit- based pay and data- centric evaluation in all things. But even in an environment where these types of reforms are the status quo, school closures on the scale seen in Philadelphia are alarming.

Ultimately, the commission voted to close twenty- four of the city’s schools and merge or relocate fi ve others. The argument be-hind the closings was that the schools were underutilized, expen-sive to maintain, and academically underperforming. Their closure was framed as a sacrifi ce for the sake of the district. But it is over-whelmingly young people of color, and those who work in their schools, who bear the brunt of these closings and witness the worst effects of the bud get cuts: of the fourteen thousand students af-fected by the decision, 81 percent of students in now- closed schools were black, and 93 percent came from low- income house holds. For de cades now, the district and the state of Pennsylvania have de-cided, again and again, that austerity mea sures that disproportion-ally affect poor students of color are the only means for balancing bud gets.

The rationale cited by the commission when it voted to accept the unacceptable bud get was that the school system had run out of


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money— the suggestion being that it had been profl igate with the money that it had. But a poor school district will always run out of money; that is what happens when schools are paid for by local property taxes. In every state in the Union, therefore, the state gov-ernment subsidizes the school districts with greater need. But these systems are highly variable from state to state, running the gamut from progressive to regressive, and Pennsylvania’s over the last two de cades has gone from bad to one of the worst. Poor areas here get signifi cantly less overall funding per student than do richer ones, and the percentage of aid provided by the state is estimated to be the second lowest in the country. This is a problem for districts across the state, but Philadelphia has one of the worst poverty rates of any large American city. Its tax base is weak, and its school sys-tem heavily dependent on state and federal aid. As a result, big cuts to state education spending have devastating effects.

I started writing about school reform in the district during the spring of 2012 after the district announced its insolvency and ini-tial plans to follow the BCG’s recommendation and dismantle the district, but after a few months of following the increasingly grim and convoluted story, I felt exhausted and put it down. When I returned to it almost a year later, as the school closures were being fi nalized and contract negotiations began, I was struck by what little progress had been made. Again, hundreds of district employees were being threatened with layoffs. Again, the schools might not open at all.

In the three years I have been following the apparently perpet-ual collapse of the Philadelphia School District, the cyclical nature of the crisis has become undeniable. At the time of this writing, the city is attempting to pass a tax on cigarettes in order to fi ll most— but not all—of its bud get gap. Superintendent Hite has indicated his intention to open the schools fully staffed and run them as such until the money runs out. And in Harrisburg, Governor Corbett is attempting to use the crisis to extract concessions from Philadel-phia in order to improve his abysmal approval ratings ahead of November elections.

Most of the problems the district faces today are the same prob-


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lems it has faced since the state takeover, and the annual nature of the funding fi ghts and mass layoffs makes it diffi cult to tell if prog-ress is being made. Re sis tance to the closures and outside control has been growing. Since spring 2011, when the governor proposed massive cuts to basic education spending, a co ali tion of parents, teachers, and students fi ghting the closings and the defunding has had some effect. Various high- profi le actions— such as a two- week hunger strike in May 2013— drew national attention to the Phila-delphia school crisis and forced a recalcitrant governor and a chas-tened legislature to scare up money for the city, while the School Reform Commission retracted some of its layoffs. But Governor Corbett and the senate have time and again found ways to maintain control of the district.

As in many cities, the weak link in Philadelphia is the teachers’ union— the one force that could lend clarity and power to a strug-gling co ali tion. Teachers’ unions, the chief target of school reform movements, are also in the best position to make the strong case against school reform and for full funding. But for de cades, teachers’ unions in cities everywhere have settled into defensive postures, occasionally going on major strikes to preserve wages and benefi ts— tactics that the school reformers have, time and again, succeeded in painting as selfi sh and harmful. The reformers are wrong, but the goal for teachers must be to neutralize the reformers’ mes-sage, not simply to feel they are in the right. Teachers’ unions have every right to fi ght for fi rst- rate working conditions and to negoti-ate fair contracts, but po liti cally they have often failed to make these fi ghts seem like struggles on behalf of an entire community or a public. The salient exception has been the strike of the Chicago Teachers Union in the summer of 2012, a direct result of a reform movement within the union. Its strike, over issues strictly confi ned to the classroom and to the environment that students faced, not only galvanized a public to take its side but also made a sizable dent in the po liti cal power and infl uence of the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Chicago has inspired union movements every-where, including Philadelphia, where the union’s Caucus of


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Working Educators could very well become the leading voice for responsible reform. As of this writing, a reform slate has taken over the union in Los Angeles, while contract fi ghts in Portland, Oregon, and St. Paul, Minnesota, have successfully brought community lead-ers and rank- and- fi le union members together. These movements are the most promising counter to school reform yet.

In Philadelphia, real school reform— one that provides fair and reliable funding, restores local control of the district, and reaffi rms the state’s responsibility to provide for the health and safety of all its children— cannot come quickly enough. The district now averages one nurse per thousand students and places no counselors at schools with fewer than six hundred students. During the 2013–2014 school year, two young students died in schools without nurses on duty. Counselors who remained in the schools report declines in the number of their students attending college. There is still no money for books, supplies, or librarians.

Without more money from the state that is regular, reliable, and born of a commitment to the equitable funding of poor districts, the public schools in Philadelphia are going to get much worse; if school funding isn’t restored soon, stripped of safety offi cers and counselors and support staff, they will get exponentially worse and quickly. And what then? Perhaps the further degradation of public schools feeds a panicked enthusiasm for even more charters or voucher programs. Perhaps total deprofessionalization. Certainly more of it. Perhaps these reformers get so good at starving these public schools that your own city decides to hire them. Perhaps they are already there.


Philly School Reform, from City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (n+1 and FSG, 2015)

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Transcript of Philly School Reform, from City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis (n+1 and FSG, 2015)