APPS Media Articles – Page 12 – Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools

The Unelected, Unaccountable SRC Tells the People of Philadelphia: “Just Trust Us”

The hallmark of the School Reform Commission , since its inception, has been its contempt for the stakeholders of the district. For years, the SRC held public meetings on weekday afternoons, a time when most of the public was unable to attend. They abolished their Planning Meetings, when actual deliberation took place, and went to one meeting a month. At the same time, much of the real decision-making shifted to private venues including the boards of the Philadelphia School Partnership, the William Penn Foundation, and the Great Schools Compact Committee. That Committee was formed for the purpose of enacting the mandates of the Gates Compact, enacted by the SRC without any public vote or discussion.

This year, with no announcement or explanation, the SRC stopped holding its monthly Strategic Policy and Planning Meetings.

The rules, such as they are, for listing speakers for each meeting, have always been nebulous and secretive. No matter when you called, or what your topic was, there was no way to know where you would appear on the list until you arrived. Many times our members, who called well in advance, would end up at the bottom of the list. Questions to SRC were routinely ignored; the only answer being: we do it how we do it and you have nothing to say about it. The most egregious example of this abuse of power was APPS member Lisa Haver placed at the bottom of the list–# 65—at last month’s meeting, even though she had called weeks before to register.

At the December 2015 meeting, Chairwoman Marjorie Neff announced that rules for speakers would be changed. The SRC wanted to give priority to those who had not spoken before. The new rules, posted on the district website, stated that speakers would be grouped by topic and that topics would be listed “in the order in which they were registered.” Those who had not spoken at the previous meeting would be given priority “within each topic area.” But when our members asked where there topic was on the list when they registered to speak, the SRC staff refused to divulge that information. In other words, you’ll just have to trust us. Even worse, some members found that their names were not on the list at all.

After a series of fruitless emails, phone calls, and in-person visits with SRC staff, APPS co-founder Lisa Haver sent the following letter to Chairwoman Neff on Wednesday, January 13, 2016:

Click here to read the the letter to SRC Chairwoman Neff.

Hite Administration Escalates War on Public Schools in 2015

Observations from APPS member Karel Kilimnik
about how privatization is being advanced in the School District of Philadelphia as 2015 ends.

December 24, 2015

Three Neighborhood Schools to Be Turned Over to Charter Operators

In early October Superintendent William Hite announced that three neighborhood schools would be turned into Renaissance Charter. Those schools are Cooke in Logan, Wister in East Germantown, and Huey in West Philadelphia. The school communities were given no say in this. They were told their only choice would be which charter provider would be chosen. Hite learned last year that when parents have a real choice, they will reject being charterized. Teachers, parents and students fought to keep Steele Elementary in Nicetown and Munoz-Marin in North Philadelphia public; the parent vote was overwhelmingly against going charter. This time, he decided to impose this on parents through what turned out to be a very murky process. Teachers were shut out of the process altogether. The district set up an Evaluation Committee at each school and chose five parents to participate. That committee would make its recommendation to the district and the SRC on the future of the school.

What the Hite administration actually did was set up meetings run by District staff to “inform” parents. Parents and teachers at all of the three schools were purposely misled as to the location and time of these meetings. For some reason, none of the meetings was held at the schools themselves. At Cooke, the parents had to become detectives to find the meeting. At Wister, community members showed up at the announced location only to find that the meeting was being held somewhere else. People piled into cars and raced over. Yes, seats were empty at the actual district location simply because they were deceived about the correct place. Are parents supposed to trust the people who deliberately lied to them about the location of a meeting to make an honest decision about the future of their children’s school?

The too-small room overflowed with participants. The District staff was there to sell this plan to parents. To do so they enlisted a parent from Cleveland Mastery charter school. Wister parents were respectful and listened to her story and when she finished questioned district staff for specifics. They had no answers. People saw through their manipulations and sales pitch. District staff seemed taken aback by the opposition to their “wonderful plan.”

See the article Lies, Lies, Lies: Wister School is Another Chapter in Privatization and Locking Out Parent, Teacher, and Community Voice

APPS member Coleman Poses presented testimony at the November School Reform Commission showing how inaccurate the District data was for Wister. An SRC staff member admitted to Coleman that they used the wrong school’s data for Wister. Despite being told about this mistaken data the District continues to sail ahead with turning Wister over to Mastery.

Mastery Marketing In Full Force at Wister

Click here to read the rest of this article.

SRC strategy a setup for failure

Lisa Haver with the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, reacts after the School Reform Commission voted to cancel the contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. October 6, 2014. ( MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer )

Lisa Haver is a co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools

This Op Ed was published by the Philadelphia Daily News on December 21, 2015

Hite’s Action Plan 3.0 has established “specialized networks, each requiring distinct expertise, management, oversight, and resourcing.”
At George Washington High School, an already volatile situation escalated when a teacher was viciously attacked by students earlier this month. In schools across the district, many students have yet to be assigned a full-time teacher. The School Reform Commission approved a $34 million contract to outsource substitutes, and although the year began with an 11 percent fill rate and has yet to exceed 30 percent, the SRC has refused to cancel that contract. A recent Philadelphia Public School Notebook article told the story of one Northeast High student who carries a seven-subject roster but, as of last month, has only three full-time teachers. Students have been assigned report card grades for classes in which they have learned very little, if anything. Not surprisingly, disciplinary problems have increased significantly.

Teachers covering classes lose their daily preparation period and must use their own personal time to prepare lessons, mark papers, call parents and consult with staff. The bare-bones budget — once a crisis, now the new normal — has forced them to take on many roles including nurse, counselor and custodian. Yet the SRC continues to threaten them with the loss of their contract and with it all workplace protections.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Rushed reforms fail our schools

This column by APPS co-founder Lisa Haver was published by the Philadelphia Daily News on Wednesday, October 21, 2015.

The school formerly known as Roosevelt Middle School in East Germantown landed at the bottom of the list of Philadelphia schools’ Pennsylvania System of School Assessment reading-proficiency scores this year. Math-proficiency scores are 0.3 percent. It pains me to say that, because I taught there for four years in the ’90s. It wasn’t a bad school then. We had a good principal who respected teachers, many of whom had been there almost 20 years. There was a full-time librarian, a full-time nurse and two full-time counselors. A committee of teachers developed a series of innovative project-based curricula.

Roosevelt has made it through serial budget cuts and district neglect. But the most recent, perhaps fatal, wound was inflicted by the School Reform Commission’s decision two years ago to convert it to a K-8. When community members protested that three schools in the same area – Germantown High School, Fulton Elementary and Roosevelt – were on the list of 24 neighborhood schools to be closed in 2013, the SRC came up with a last-minute scheme to add six lower grades in a matter of months. The district provided little support during the transition.

It appears, though, that disruption and failure are not a deterrent to repeating mistakes in the School District of Philadelphia. Superintendent William Hite unveiled a plan earlier this month to reform 15 district schools at an estimated cost of $15 million to $20 million. Some will be part of the Hite-created Transformation Program, in which curricular and personnel changes, including forcing out the entire faculty, can be imposed with no public hearings or vote by the SRC. Others will be placed into the Renaissance Network, which is the administration’s way of giving up on a school it has done little to improve and kicking it to the curb for a private company to pick up. Some will have several grades added at once, as Roosevelt did, changing its mission and climate overnight. Contrary to promises made by Hite at public meetings, two schools will be closed permanently. Enrollment and class size in nearby schools will almost certainly increase.

The hurried approval process will give parents little chance to have any say in the future of their children’s schools. Teachers and staff have been shut out of the process altogether, even though many will be forced out of schools whose communities they have been part of for years. But since the decisions about which schools will be overhauled, and how, have already been made at the top, what purpose do these meetings serve other than window-dressing – until the inevitable rubber-stamping by the SRC?

Hite cites reading and math proficiency scores, which hover around 30 percent, as justification for placing three more schools into the Renaissance program. But the latest PSSA scores show that none of the 21 current elementary or middle Renaissance schools achieved a math score over 20 percent; only eight topped 30 percent in reading. Three have come up for nonrenewal proceedings in the past year alone. The School Performance Rating of Audenried High School, placed in the Renaissance program in 2011, was among the lowest in the state.

If Hite’s plan represented real reforms, maybe it would be worth the $20 million price tag. But the facts show they are not. Overnight expansion has been a disaster for Roosevelt and other schools. Transformation schools, so far, show little more than cosmetic changes. Data on Renaissance schools clearly show that the whole program should be scrapped. Hite is a lifelong educator, and he knows what real reform entails: smaller class size; one-on-one reading interventions; a library in every school; full support staff including classroom aides for students with special needs, English language learners and kindergarten. They have always been worth investing in.

Lisa Haver is a retired Philadelphia teacher and co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

Email: philaapps@gmail.com

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: