What the hell is going on with Philly schools?

Submitted by JohnHill on

Friends and neighbors,

To help us all understand what the hell is playing out right now in Philly schools, I wanted to start compiling a list of resources and articles about the Philadelphia School District's present situation and how it came about.  If you've got more to add (and  there WILL be a lot more being written about this subject in the days/weeks to come), please post them in the comments for others to read.

For those that haven't heard, on Tuesday, the mostly state-appointed School Reform Commission announced that because of a projected $218 million deficit, it was basically dismantling the Philadelphia School District.  The "plan" they announced involves closing 40 schools in 2013, and closing 6 additional schools each year until 2017.  Whatever is left will be divided up into "achievement networks" of around 25 schools. Managment over these networks of schools will be open to competition from public and private entities (including non-profits and for-profit corporations).

All this takes place about a decade after a Harrisburg-engineered takeover of the Philadelphia School District.  In 2001, the Philadelphia School District faced a $216 million deficit and growing public concerns that it was not effectively educating young people in this city.  At that time, the Republican controlled state government used this financial and internal crisis as a pretext for a radical experiment in school privatization.  The state invoked a recently passed law allowing for Harrisburg to seize control over the Philadelphia School District and appoint a School Reform Commision with broad authority to turn over the management of schools to corporations and non-profits.  Collective bargaining rights for teachers were curtailed as teacher strikes were made illegal.  At the time of the takeover, it appeared that the for-profit corporation Edison Schools would takeover the entire Philadelphia School District.  This didn't happen because people fought it and won.  Instead, the SRC pushed partial privatization through a "blended" model involving regular neighborhood schools, charters, and other school models administered by public and private entities.  

Now the same state-created SRC that was tasked with "saving" the district from ruin by bringing in outside managers and selling off schools to private captial has driven the district into a wall.  They've drafted a new agenda for radical privatization and austerity.  Corporations and politically connected non-profits stand to make a lot of money while students, families, and all city residents stand to suffer.

Let's read up quicks folks because things are about to get real here in Philly.  If we don't understand what's going on and raise a whole of lot of hell very quickly, we're going to lose more than we can possibly imagine.

(It's not letting me post multiple links in the main text, so check the comments for article links.)

26 Comments

CURRENT CRISIS:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>CURRENT CRISIS:</p> <p><br /> &quot;Philadelphia School District announces its dissolution&quot; - Daniel Denvir, City Paper&#39;s Naked City blog:<br /> http://www.citypaper.net/blogs/nakedcity/Philadelphia-School-District-announces-its-dissolution-.html</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #3:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>Joint statement by the Philly Student Union and Youth United for Change about district&#39;s plan<br /> http://home.phillystudentunion.org/PSU-Blog/philadelphia-student-union-youth-united-for-change-respond-to-districts-plan.html</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #4:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;You&#39;re not speaking to me, Mr. Knudsen&quot; - Helen Gym, open letter by longtime Philly education activist, published in Philadelphia Public School Notebook blogs<br /> http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/124747/youre-not-speaking-me-mr-knudsen</p>

THE HISTORY OF THE SRC AND THE STATE TAKEOVER OF THE PSD #2:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>Random academic article laying out a detailed picture of the legislative basis for the state takeover, its effects on collective bargaining and how it laid the groundwork for a complete privatization of the philly school district:</p> <p>http://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jbl/articles/volume5/issue3/LaRoche5U.Pa.J.Lab.&amp;Emp.L.611%282003%29.pdf</p>

History of the SRC

Submitted by phila.ken on

<p>Understanding the history of the state takeover is very valuable and important. Abolition of the SRC must be one of our demands because it is obvious it has been the method for this attack on public education. Some areas for investigation:</p> <p>1. The specifics of the state takeover should be studied. About 40 schools were to be turned over to Edison Schools. This was eventually scaled back to 8. These schools only lasted a few years. (I&#39;m not sure if Edison Schools even exists anymore.) Uncovering this history would be important to expose the bogus nature of the current priviatization and how it will unfold.</p> <p>2. The tenure of Arlene Ackerman must be investigated. It can be proved that she was on the board of the Broad Foundation while she was Superintendent of Schools. Who knew this and aided and abetted her wrecking operation? (Did Mayor Nutter know who she was working for?) She created the exact same controversies while Superintendent of San Francisco public schools as she did in Philadelphia. When they did a search for a Superintendent why was her tenure in San Francisco seen as a good thing?</p> <p>The Broad Foundation is one of the leading promoters of the priviitizing of public schools. They train prospective Superintendents (Arlene Ackerman was the first head of their Superintendents Academy before becoming Superintendent of Philadelphia Schools) to prepare public school systems for privitization. They use a method called &quot;churn&quot; which means whatever problems exist in a school district they make worse. This method explains much about Ackerman&#39;s administration.</p> <p>The $638 million deficit that the School District had this year was for two reasons. Governor Corbett cut funding for Philadelphia this year by $300 million. The other half of the defecit is from Ackerman. She threw money around like there was no tomorrow to start her Promise Academies and Renaissance Schools. Given the Broad Foundations methods it is highly likely that creating this defecit was deliberate as the way to advance their privitization agenda.</p> <p>For more information about the Broad Foundation, see the Parents Across America article &quot;How to tell if you School District is infected by the Broad virus&quot; at:</p> <p>http://parentsacrossamerica.org/2011/04/how-to-tell-if-your-school-district-is-infected-by-the-broad-virus/</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #5:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Philly schools need more money&quot; - Miriam Hill, from Raising Philadelphia blog, associated with the Philly Inquirer</p> <p>http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/raising_philadelphia/148961405.html</p> <p>A short piece, mostly worth noting because it offers the 2009-2010 figures of the disparity between Philly School funding per student vs. neighboring Lower Merion Township (which has the highest amount of spending in the state.)&nbsp;</p> <p>In Philly, the district spends $13,272 a year per child.</p> <p>Across the street, Lower Merion spends $26,570 a year per child.</p> <p>What she doesn&#39;t mention is the painfully obvious reality that the economic NEEDS of a given school district aren&#39;t just about numbers of students. &nbsp; I don&#39;t have statistics handy (although I&#39;m sure they&#39;re out there) but having worked in Philly schools for about seven years now, it&#39;s my experience that poverty, exposure to violence, exposure to the criminal justice system, limited access to decent mental health services, environmental conditions, parents working low-wage jobs, etc can have massive effects on students in schools.&nbsp; If you are in a community that&#39;s more economically vulnerable, or in a community where kids are more afraid of being shot or attacked, you need extra resources to support the kids that are understandably hurt by these conditions.&nbsp; Not even just to educate them, but just to help them get to a place where they are consistently able to exercise self-control or handle conflict/anxiety in ways that don&#39;t get them booted out of school or warehoused in disciplinary situations until they drop out.</p> <p>No doubt, there are still kids that struggle in LM, but in Philly it&#39;s clear the realities of poverty and violence are on another level.</p> <p>I wonder what the figures look like now.</p>

BACKGROUND ON PRIVATIZATION #1

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;How billionaire donors harm public education&quot; - Valerie Strauss, Washington Post blog</p> <p>http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/how-billionaire-donors-are-har.html</p> <p>Following phila.ken&#39;s &quot;History of the SRC&quot; post, here&#39;s a pretty good article about how philanthropists, foundations, and non-profits pour huge sums of money into efforts to &quot;help&quot; public schools by pushing a privatization agenda, while public school teachers struggle for funds to get basic class supplies.&nbsp; Mentions the Broad Foundation cited above.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

BACKGROUND ON PRIVATIZATION #2

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire&quot; - Marginal Notes Collective, 2009</p> <p>http://defenestrator.org/sites/default/files/out_of_the_frying_pan.pdf</p> <p>In November 2008, <strong>Mayor Nutter attempted to use the economic crisis as a pretext to close 20% of the city&#39;s public libraries.&nbsp; </strong>He also proposed <strong>turning over some of the libraries to public-private partnerships where public services serving city residents would be run by unaccountable foundations/non-profits.&nbsp;</strong> <u><strong>This didn&#39;t happen because people in this city fought it and won.&nbsp; </strong></u></p> <p>This article was written in the wake of this struggle and explains how so-called &quot;public private partnerships&quot; function as another form of privatization that weakens public services, takes away their accountability to the public, and lines the pockets of powerful at the expense of community residents.&nbsp; The articles puts these plans in the context of the larger tide of neoliberalism that puts the needs of capital over the needs of people.</p> <p>There&#39;s a million parallels between what happened then with the libraries and what&#39;s happening now with Philly schools.</p> <p>Note: This was originally printed as a newspaper-style pamphlet.&nbsp; The page order in the pdf is a bit funny.</p> <p>Full disclosure: This was written by friends of mine and I might have had something to do with the picture of Nutter cooking city residents in a big frying pan.</p>

BACKGROUND ON PRIVATIZATION #3

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;The Big Enchilada,&quot; - Jonathan Kozol, Harper&#39;s Magazine, reprinted on Bill Totten&#39;s weblog</p> <p>http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/08/big-enchilada.html</p> <p>Details the recent push towards privatizing schools and turning over school management to for-profit corporations.</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #6

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Public education as a human right&quot; - Nijmie Dzurinko, Public School Notebook blog post</p> <p>http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/124760/public-education-human-right</p> <p>Nijmie is the former director of the Philly Student Union and a founder of the Media Mobilizing Project.&nbsp; Her post is a call for a positive vision of treating education as a human right and spelling out what that means.</p>
Jpiette's picture

Study: Dropout Rates for Blacks Higher in Charters

Submitted by Jpiette on

<p>Especially relevant here in Philly in light of the city&#39;s recent decision to dissolve the school board.</p> <p>http://urbanyouthjustice.visibli.com/share/hNKsDL</p> <p>Study: Dropout Rates for Blacks Higher in Charters - News - The Austin Chronicle<br /> urbanyouthjustice.visibli.com<br /> A new UT study shows black high school students in Texas are three times more likely to drop out from a charter system</p> <p>http://urbanyouthjustice.visibli.com/share/hNKsDL</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Schoolhouse Democracy

Submitted by thebishop on

<p>This plan is an absolute tragedy. &nbsp;But is there an opportunity here to push for workplace democracy in the schools? &nbsp;Suppose there were &#39;charter&#39; schools which are owned and operated by the teachers themselves. &nbsp;We know there is incredible corruption in the real-estate side of charter schools. &nbsp;Often would-be charter schools get to takeover existing schools or unused real-estate far below its market value. &nbsp;Can we leverage this fact to start worker-owned schools with limited startup costs? &nbsp;</p> <p>If Philadelphia&#39;s best teachers refuse to work in for-profit charters and instead work together to run schools in the interests of the workers, students and community perhaps the for-profit charters would fail.</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #7:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Churches criticize transformation plan&quot; - Dale Mezzacappa, Philly Public School Notebook blog</p> <p>http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/124770/churches-speak-out-district-transformation</p> <p>Last night there was a last minute meeting of several hundred people speaking out against the transformation plan.&nbsp; Speakers from church and parent organizations among others.&nbsp; I&#39;m told several members of Occupy Philly were present as well.&nbsp; <strong>A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE FIGURING OUT HOW TO MOBILIZE AROUND THIS PROPOSED PLAN.</strong></p>

CURRENT CRISIS #8:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;City schools need reform, not revolution&quot; [sic] - Christopher Paslay, Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed</p> <p>http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20120430_City_schools_need_reform__not_revolution.html</p> <p>Criticism against the new plan and against the pattern of changing leadership constantly creating new grandiose plans to fix Philly schools.&nbsp; Briefly cites former schools chief David Hornbeck&#39;s plan school &quot;clusters&quot; during the 90s--a plan which was abandoned because it unintentionally created more bureaucracies within the system.</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #9:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Philly schools gear up for huge venture&quot; - Kristen A Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer</p> <p>http://articles.philly.com/2012-04-29/news/31475058_1_schools-gear-school-reform-commission-school-year</p> <p>This article lays out more from Tom Knudsen spin about the SRC plan to close massive amounts of schools, break up the district and turn it over to outside managers.&nbsp; Knudsen basically denies that the plan is to privatize the distrct and states that for-profit corporations will not takeover the management of the pieces of the old school district.</p> <p>Here&#39;s some important quotes:</p> <blockquote> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ...unlike the district&#39;s privatization push of the early 2000s, when officials gave more than 40 schools to private providers - they ultimately ended that initiative, saying it was a flawed model - only nonprofits will be involved in running schools, Knudsen said.</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &quot;We don&#39;t want any for-profit groups in here,&quot; he said. &quot;The outsiders would be people like The New Teacher Project, or universities such as Temple, Drexel, or Penn.&quot;</p> <p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Knudsen said organizations like New Visions for Public Schools, a New York-based company that manages schools there, would be good partners.</p> </blockquote> <p>More:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Decentralization </em>is the byword of the plan, which is subject to public comment and SRC approval before adoption. The district&#39;s central office, already half the size it was last year, will shrink further, to only about 200 staff members.</p> <p>The current top-down structure will go away, with the new achievement networks taking on the responsibility for schools.</p> </blockquote> <p>If we want to stop this plan from going forward, it&#39;s going to be very important to look at this SRC hype to make sure our message doesn&#39;t get tangled up in their glowing rhetoric about decentralization and excluding for-profits.&nbsp; First and foremost, as Helen Gym articulated very powerfully,<strong> this isn&#39;t a plan that is designed to better serve the educational needs of kids in Philly</strong>... schools aren&#39;t being closed because we don&#39;t need them, they&#39;re being closed because our political leadership refuses to fund them.&nbsp;</p> <p>More specifically, it&#39;s important to note that non-profits are still private entities that are unaccountable to the public.&nbsp; There are good non-profits out there who are accountable to the communities they work in, but there are also non-profits that work as hard for their bottomline and for the interests of private capital as any for-profit corporations.&nbsp; (I say this as someone with a great deal of experience working in non-profits.)&nbsp; The district&#39;s current &quot;blended&quot; model (which turned over massive amounts of public resources to private non-profits) has already produced numerous examples of corruption, greed, and mismangement of resources.&nbsp; &quot;Non-profit&quot; often has a warm and fuzzy ring to it, but really it&#39;s just a tax status.&nbsp; Giving something that belongs to all of us away to a private interest is still privatization!</p> <p>Also, this talk of &quot;decentralization&quot; may sound nice on the surface... but Knudsen&#39;s not talking about putting local communities in charge of their schools.&nbsp; (If that&#39;s what he wanted, his plan would be to get rid of the SRC and give us back a damn school board!)&nbsp; When they say decentralization, I think &quot;free market,&quot; because that&#39;s basically what this sounds like.&nbsp; Organizations compete with each other to see who can meet performance targets set by folks from outside the community.&nbsp; If any locals want something different for their school (if students or teachers were to say &quot;let&#39;s stop focussing on the tests and reduce class sizes!&quot; for example), that manager would have to whip those folks into shape unless they wanted to risk losing their contract to somebody else.&nbsp; This isn&#39;t about putting regular people in the driver&#39;s seat... it&#39;s about letting the market decide the kind of education kids in Philly need.</p>

STATEMENT FROM OCCUPY PHILLY LABOR WG

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>The Knudsen Plan &ndash; The End of the Promise of Public Education</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&ldquo;Grow up and deal with it.&rdquo;&nbsp;&nbsp; Mayor Michael Nutter&rsquo;s response to critics of the School Transformation Plan.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The fate of public education in Philadelphia just got darker.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Bare bones school budgets will continue for the foreseeable future.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Forty schools will close in the next year while charters will continue rapid growth.&nbsp;&nbsp; More than 2,500 blue collar, union jobs will be outsourced to the lowest bidder.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The School District central administration will be further down sized with supervision of schools farmed out to private contractors.&nbsp;&nbsp; Our school system has been turned over to high priced consultants and turnaround specialists as if it was a bankrupt airline.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The SRC paints a rosy picture of a future with high performing schools pushing out low performers.&nbsp;&nbsp; But when we strip away the rhetoric what we have is the systematic transformation of education into a business and the abandonment of any commitment to provide a quality education for all children.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Last year&rsquo;s school budget resulted in draconian cuts to Philadelphia&rsquo;s already under resourced schools.&nbsp; The Knudsen plan says get used to it. Forget about smaller class size,&nbsp; art and music, school libraries, full time nurses and adequate security.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; These things, which upper middle class familes take for granted, are not going to be available for most familes who send their children to neighborhood public schools.&nbsp; Rather than fight for a budget that provides these things, the SRC accepts long term austerity as the best we can get.&nbsp;&nbsp; The working class families of Philadelphia, the majority of whom are people of color, are being told to accept permanent second class status.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The political establishment from Harrisburg to City Hall acts like this is a necessary step when, in fact, it is part of a political agenda that will benefit the 1%.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The super rich and the big corporations want to increase their wealth by slashing public services like education and shifting the tax burden onto working people.&nbsp;&nbsp; They also want to privatize education to create new markets for private capital.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Wrong headed priorities and a tax system designed to benefit the rich are the reasons we don&rsquo;t have the resources to provide quality education for all.&nbsp;&nbsp; We pay for a military empire that is larger than the combined armies and navies of all the other countries in the world.&nbsp;&nbsp; We are spending $600 million in Pennsylvania on prison construction.&nbsp;&nbsp; We allow 70% of the corporations in this state to pay no taxes.&nbsp; We foreclose on homes while bailing out banks.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Knudsen plan asks blue collar school workers to give up wages and benefits or see their job outsourced and their unions busted.&nbsp;&nbsp; Its asks for concessions from teachers, nurses and secretaries.&nbsp;&nbsp; It asks nothing from the banks like Wells Fargo who made hundreds of millions from the District from interest swaps and from the corporations like Comcast who get big tax rebates.&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This is not what democracy looks like.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Corporate guns for hire&nbsp; from Boston, a Gas Company CEO and an unelected SRC wrote the plan .&nbsp;&nbsp; Educators, students, parents, and the broader community have no voice.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We the people need to be heard.&nbsp;&nbsp; We need to organize a broad coalition of all those who have a stake in this struggle to stop this plan a begin to work together to fashion a real alternative.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Occupy Philly Labor Working Group labor@occupyphillyga.net</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #10:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Grow Up and Deal With It&quot; - Frank Murphy, from City School Stories blog</p> <p>http://cityschoolstories.com/2012/04/26/%E2%80%9Cgrow-up-and-deal-with-it%E2%80%9D/</p> <p>Frank Murphy is a former PSD principal.&nbsp; He describes the roots of the current crisis in terms of chronic underfunding, mismanagement by former PSD CEO Arlene Ackerman (who was originally championed by Nutter), and cuts by Corbett at the worst possible economic moment.&nbsp; Politicians who are complicit in failing to provide adequate resources to the district are now putting forward a radical plan that says the problem has nothing to do with funding.</p> <p>Also worth noting... Citing Ackerman&#39;s involvement with the pro-privatization Broad Foundation, Murphy mentions he believes her job was basically to destablize the district and make today&#39;s events possible:</p> <blockquote> <p>Arlene Ackerman spent this district into a giant hole (a $625 million deficit).&nbsp; I believe most of her actions were part of a &ldquo;Broad&rdquo; plan to create &ldquo;constant upheaval&rdquo; in order to counter any possible resistance to privatization.</p> </blockquote>

BACKGROUND ON THE CRISIS #1

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Experts: Yes, Philly schools are underfunded &hellip; by $1 billion&quot; - Dale Mezzacappa, Philadelphia Public School Notebook blog post</p> <p>http://www.thenotebook.org/winter-2007/07369/experts-yes-philly-schools-are-underfunded-%E2%80%A6-1-billion</p> <p>This 2007 article announces the results of a PA Department of Education study that <strong>in order to meet the needs of their students, Philly Schools needed $1 billion more per year than they recieved at the time!!!</strong>&nbsp; That&#39;s $5,000 per student.&nbsp; Note that this is how underfunded Philly schools were BEFORE the 2008 financial collapse AND Corbett&#39;s cuts to public education.</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #11:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Should a Starving Child Live Within his Means? What about a Starving School District?&quot; - Dan U-A, Young Philly Politics blog</p> <p>http://youngphillypolitics.com/should_starving_child_live_within_his_means_what_about_starving_school_district</p> <p>Dan U-A attacks the myth that the present crisis was caused by misspending sufficient funds.&nbsp; Talks about the roots of the crisis in chronic underfunding of Philly schools and explains how this plan does not deal with the district&#39;s real problems.&nbsp; He descries the plan as &quot;shock doctine-esque.&quot;&nbsp; More on that later...</p>

BACKGROUND ON PRIVATIZATION #4:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;The Shock Doctrine&quot; (video) - Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron</p> <p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSF0e6oO_tw</p> <p>In 2007, Canadian author Naomi Klein released a book called <em>The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism</em>.&nbsp; The video above lays out her basic argument about how disaster capitalism uses moments of extreme crisis to push through unpopular policies of privatization, austerity, and economic restructuring.</p> <p>The situations she talks about are typically massive social disruptions like Pinochet&#39;s brutal rule in Chile or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.&nbsp; While Philly&#39;s not on that level (right?!!), there are some useful paralels about how powerful interests manufacture crises for the purpose of forcing massive changes on behalf of capital.&nbsp;</p> <p>Folks in state and city gov&#39;t have been complicit in starving the district for funds and creating an atmosphere of longterm chaos in the school system.&nbsp; Now that we&#39;re seeing the logical outcomes of these policies, the same officials are seizing on the crisis to push through more severe changes... using the urgency of the moment to shut down any public scrutiny of what they&#39;re up to (see Nutter&#39;s totally classy &quot;grow up and deal with it&quot; remark for example).</p>

BACKGROUND ON THE CRISIS #2

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;A &#39;Broad&#39; View&quot; - Frank Murphy, City School Stories, 4/26/11</p> <p>http://cityschoolstories.com/2011/04/26/notes-from-the-field-34/</p> <p>Another blog post from former Philly principal Frank Murphy... this one from last year.&nbsp; He writes more about the Broad Foundation, the foundation founded by billionaire Eli Broad.</p> <p>Quote:</p> <blockquote> <p>Broad believes that public schools should be run as though they are businesses.&nbsp; He advocates for the continual reorganizations of schools, staff firings, and experimentation in order to create chaos or churn.&nbsp; The Broad view sees this as a productive strategy in that it weakens the ability of communities to resist change.&nbsp; In order to advance his educational agenda he has created the Broad Foundations.</p> </blockquote> <p>As mentioned in some of the articles above, Arlene Ackerman is heavily connected to the Broad Foundation.&nbsp; She previously worked for them training school superintendants from around the country.&nbsp; Given that the chaos in the district is being used to push forward reforms that are very much in line with the objectives of billionaire Eli Broad, is this crisis actually a Broad success story?</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #12

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Kundsen: &#39;A Unique Moment&#39;&quot; - Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen&#39;s speech to the SRC meeting last night, as posted on the Philadelphia Public School Notebook website</p> <p>http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/124778/knudsen-unique-moment</p> <p>I came late to the meeting after the SRC made their presentation.&nbsp; During the public reaction portion of the meeting, everything I heard was negative.&nbsp; While Knudsen and SRC members talked about how important public engagement is, from where I was sitting it seemed pretty clear that almost nobody outside of the SRC is really calling for more privatization and the dismemberment of the district.&nbsp;</p> <p>At the end of the meeting, things got loud with community activists forcing the meeting to stay in session past the allowed public comment period.&nbsp; There was some yelling and a whole lot of passion from those in attendance.</p> <p>Things are definitely getting started!</p>

CURRENT CRISIS #13:

Submitted by JohnHill on

<p>&quot;Council not ready to sign off on AVI, additional schools funding&quot; - Catherine Lucey, Philly Clout blog, Philadelphia Daily News</p> <p>http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/cityhall/Council-not-ready-to-sign-off-on-AVI-additional-schools-funding.html</p> <p>Something I haven&#39;t posted much about is the effort to push the so-called &quot;Actual Value Initiative&quot; through City Council in order to provide funds for the district.&nbsp; Even though there has been no agreement from City Council, the SRC&#39;s budget includes $94 million in anticipated revenue from AVI.&nbsp; I&#39;m not clear who are the winners and losers with AVI (if someone could post more about it, I&#39;d appreciate it), but it&#39;s at the very least more evidence of the house of cards that the SRC&#39;s building with their five-year plan.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>