The Board’s Goals and Guardrails ™ represent a failure of leadership by the people entrusted with the future of our children. Board members with no knowledge of, or perhaps a denial of, the past 20 years of corporate disruption of public education think the best way to look like you are doing something is to create more data. The Board has demoted itself from leaders to just another cog in the 440 bureaucratic wheel. It was embarrassing to hear Board members perform their round-robin reading of the G and G, especially when the Council President asked more than once when they would finish.
Here is one example of the meaningless word salad in the G and G:
In addition to having ending points and ending dates for the interim guardrails, the Board has adopted interim guardrail ending points for each year leading up to the ending date.
A pig doesn’t gain weight standing on the scale. Applying random ratings to color-coded boxes is not a substitute for actually doing something. How disappointing that every member of the Board has drunk this Kool-Aid.
Where in the G and G™ are what children actually need: school librarians, reading specialists, smaller class size, more counselors, classroom assistants and counselors, fewer standardized tests?
Shame on the Board for, in the sneakiest way possible, without a public vote or deliberation, capping the number of public speakers and cutting time from 3 minutes to 2. This after eliminating 3 of the 4 committees where they promised more dialogue with parents and community members. We need an elected school board.
It is not believable that Goals and Guardrails ™ are one way to hold Dr. Hite accountable, as I heard Board members tell KYW radio this morning. In fact, Board members who have said it is their job to get out of the way of the administration, who recessed the July 2020 meeting after 7 hours of public testimony rather than openly vote against Dr. Hite’s reopening plan, who failed to hold him accountable for the debacle at Ben Franklin HS, have shown us many times they have no intention of holding Dr. Hite accountable.
Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools 