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

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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:

Relay Graduate School of Education: A Policy Brief

Relay GSE

This year the Philadelphia School District used training videos on classroom management from The Relay Graduate School of Education as part of its New Teacher orientation.  The principals of Blaine and Kelley Elementary School (recent turnaround schools) are enrolled in Relay’s principal training program.

Relay Graduate School of Education is a teacher/principal training program based in New York and founded by people who had little experience or training in education.  The school has opened a Philadelphia/Camden branch and has a partnership with Mastery Charter in the Philadelphia region.  Since it appears to be extending its reach inside the Philadelphia School District we felt the need to explore Relay’s history and influence.

Kate Peterson, a graduate student at Arcadia University, has looked into Relay’s founders and programs.  Her findings are posted below.   We want to thank Kate for her thorough research and for allowing us to post it.

Relay Graduate School of Education Policy Brief

by Kate Peterson
January 2, 2016

Relay Graduate School of Education is a stand-alone school based in New York City. It began as Teacher U in 2007, when Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP Public Charter Schools, and Norman Atkins, co-founder of Uncommon Schools, decided to develop a program that would supply their charter schools and others with high-quality teachers, which they deemed as scarce. They partnered with the founder of Achievement First, Dacia Toll, to create their program. Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program (Relay Graduate School of Education, 2015h; Barbic, 2013).

Click here to read the entire article.

APPS Member Coleman Poses tells the SRC they are using incorrect information for the Wister ‘turnaround’

Coleman Poses

This testimony was given at the December 17th SRC meeting.

Dear members of the SRC:

Last month I testified about the questionable data that the school district had presented during several meetings with the families, staff, and the neighbors of the John Wister School in Germantown.

I showed one slide, which was entitled “Why a change is needed for Wister,” which, supposedly detailed a precipitous decrease in student enrollment over 2 years from about 275 to about 170.

Coleman Slide #1

I showed another slide, based upon my own research, that showed that the student population at Wister fell from 452 to 383, but that the decrease was due to the school’s losing a sixth grade, and that four out of the six remaining grades actually increased in population.

coleman slide #2

About a week later, to my surprise, I received a phone call from Dave Zega, in Superintendent Hite’s office – informing me that my data were in fact correct. The information that I had displayed in my first exhibit were actually data about another school.   He went on to say that my slide had actually been supplanted by the correct slide in subsequent Powerpoints.

I informed Mr. Zega that I had attended several meeting in both October and November, and that the new data were never presented at these meetings. I then asked Mr. Zega if he wouldn’t mind sending the new information to the Wister principal and families. He informed me that he would need to consult his colleagues. As of today, neither the staff, nor the families to whom I have spoken, have been informed of this new information.

I do not wish to speculate upon why the school district has not disseminated the correct information to the public. I just thought that the SRC, as the final arbiter of this turnover, would be interested in knowing the truth. Thank you.

Hite Administration Escalates War on Public Schools in 2015

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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.