Eyes on the November 19th SRC

9-17-15 SRC

By Karel Kilimnik

November 14, 2015

Welcome to the Fourth Edition of APPS’ “Eyes on the SRC”. Every month, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission votes, with almost no public deliberation, on pages of resolutions that will affect the academic and financial future of the district. Our purpose here is to shine a light on a few resolutions that need to be explained in more detail. We ask questions here which should be asked of the SRC members themselves. That is one reason why we need every voice to speak out against the chaos and turmoil created by this present administration and by the School Reform Commission.

School started in September with a dire lack of substitutes, and the situation has not improved. Teachers in every school are losing valuable prep time to covering classes. Dr. Hite admits that Source4Teachers is doing poorly, yet he makes no effort to terminate their contract. He and the SRC, which voted to outsource substitutes, need to be called out on this at every opportunity.

The next SRC meeting is Thursday November 19th at 5:30. To register to speak you must call 215 400 4180 by 4:30 on Wednesday November 18th. It’s best to say that you’re a teacher, parent, or community member because only “one member of an organization can register to speak” (from the District website).

Want some help with your testimony? Contact us at philaapps@gmail.com

Click here to read the November 19 Resolutions of Note

Who is Behind the Philadelphia School Partnership?

PSP

by Deborah Grill
November 9, 2015

The move to privatize public education has many players. Some attempt to move in giant steps. In Los Angeles, Eli Broad has raised $490 million in a bid to place half of Los Angeles public school students into charter schools. In New Orleans, city and state politicians took advantage of the chaos and destruction after Hurricane Katrina to fire public school teachers and convert all public schools into privately run charter schools. In Newark, Superintendent Cami Anderson, appointed by Governor Chris Christie, stripped the elected school board of most of its power and implemented “One Newark”.   This plan instituted a lottery eliminating the right of parents to enroll their child in a neighborhood school, closed many public schools, and increased the number of charter schools. Recently, New Jersey politicians have targeted Camden as the next city to close all public schools and replace them with an all-charter district.

Other school choice players, including those in Philadelphia, choose to go about it more subtly. While individual politicians and organizations have been involved in the push to open charters, the inception of the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP) in 2010 (originally the Philadelphia School Project) has provided the organization and money to speed up the privatization of the city’s public school system.   The Partnership has been able to do this through its management of the Philadelphia Great Schools Compact, formulated and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. PSP’s influence has grown through its lobbying efforts and through the grants it has bestowed on schools of PSP’s board’s choosing through its own Great Schools Fund. PSP facilitates and staffs the Compact Committee meetings as well as serving as it fiscal agent. The meetings of both PSP’s Board and the Great Schools Compact Committee are closed to the public.

As the District begins another round of school closings and converting neighborhood schools to “Renaissance” Charters, a closer examination of PSP’s history and board members is needed to understand how this private organization has become so influential in just five years. This article is part of a series on the make-up and influence of The Philadelphia School Partnership.

Click here to read the entire article.

Ears on the October 15th SRC

src 2

By Diane Payne

At the meeting of the School Reform Commission on October 15th the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools asked several questions. This post details answers (or lack thereof) to our questions and also comments on the remarks of Superintendent Hite and Commissioner Green at the end of the meeting.

Two of the unanswered questions:

Karel Kilimnik: Where can we find the salaries of all the recently hired administrative personnel?  No answer

Diane Payne: My question today on resolution A2….what evidence did you use to select Mastery Charter School teachers as coaches for our staff rather than using the expertise and knowledge of your own district teachers?  No answer

 

Click here for the full Ears on the October 15th SRC post.

APPS members have called on Governor Wolf to remove Commissioner Farah Jimenez from the SRC for cause 

SRC

On October 8, 2015, APPS sent a letter to Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Wolf asking him to remove Farah Jimenez from one of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission’s gubernatorial spots on the SRC.

After observing a number of irregularities by SRC member Jimenez, APPS sent a letter asking her to explain. We asked her to explain why she voted to approve a $300,00.00 contract with Mastery Schools for teacher training passed in August. We asked why she abstained from a vote to transfer management of Frederick Douglass elementary from Young Scholars to Mastery, and then admitted at a later SRC meeting that she took part in discussions on the transaction at SRC executive sessions. We asked her to explain her decision, and the SRC’s, not to disclose the fact that she oversees the district’s Charter Office or that she facilitated the application and approval process for 39 charter applicants last winter. These are all important questions due to the fact that her husband is on staff at a law firm that does extensive business with Mastery and KIPP schools.

Ms. Jimenez’s response was to have her lawyer send a letter, obviously intended to intimidate, accusing us of “defamation” and “malice” toward his client. We were shocked to see a public official, after being asked to respond to concerns regarding her actions as a public official, take steps to silence members of the public. If she does not resign, the Governor has more than enough reason to remove her.

 APPS letter to Governor Wolf

On October 15, 2015 the Daily News reported on the APPS letter to Governor Wolf.

Advocacy group to Gov. Wolf: Get rid of SRC member

A local group of education advocates has sent Gov. Wolf a letter asking for the removal of Farah Jimenez from the School Reform Commission because of her husband’s association with charter schools.

On October 16, 2015, Daily News columnist Christine Flowers wrote a column attacking APPS because of the letter and defending SRC Commissioner Jimenez.

SRC’s Jimenez the one who really cares | Philadelphia Daily News – October 16, 2015

This is APPS response to the Flowers’ column.

We wish to respond to Christine Flower’s column (“SRC’s Jimenez the one who really cares”, Friday, October 16) comparing members of the Alliance of Philadelphia Public Schools (APPS) to the Taliban because we asked SRC Commissioner Farah Jimenez to explain actions she has taken as a member of the SRC.

The column makes a number of false statements. APPS is not “run by union leaders”. We are an independent grass-roots organization of teachers, community members and parents who believe that a public school system should serve the interests of the community, not private investors. We receive no outside funding. We do speak out at SRC meetings on those issues, and have done so long before Ms. Jimenez’s appointment last year. We are puzzled by Ms. Flowers’ position that this constitutes “harassment”. Members of the SRC have a responsibility to explain their actions to the public they have been appointed to serve. Public officials are accountable to the public, not the other way around.

APPS made no “personal attacks” on Ms. Jimenez, nor did we engage in any “name-calling”. The questions we raised in our letters to Commissioner Jimenez and to Governor Wolf were based on public comments made and actions taken by her at SRC meetings. As reported in the Daily News, we questioned her decision to vote to approve a $300,000 contract with Mastery Schools in spite of the fact that Mastery is represented by the legal firm at which Ms. Jimenez’s husband is employed. We asked why she abstained on a vote to transfer management of Frederick Douglass Elementary to Mastery Schools, then stated publicly that she took part in discussions in Executive Session on that matter. We asked why neither she nor the SRC disclosed that she had taken on oversight of the district’s charter office or that she facilitated the charter application process earlier this year in which both Mastery and KIPP, who is also represented by Ms. Jimenez’s husband’s law firm, had submitted applications. Contrary to Ms. Flowers’ assertions, we made no allegations. We asked Ms. Jimenez to explain why these actions do not constitute a conflict of interest. We have yet to receive a reply.

Ms. Flowers fails to point out that Ms. Jimenez’s response to APPS’s letter was to have her lawyer send a letter, clearly meant to intimidate us into silence, which accuses us of maliciously seeking to defame his client without citing any example of that. Ms. Flowers, an attorney herself and a journalist, knows that members of the pubic must be protected from frivolous allegations of defamation by public officials if we are to maintain a free society. Nor does Ms. Flowers cite the impartial legal opinion of Rob Caruso, Executive Director of the State Ethics Commission, as quoted in the Daily News: “If the public official is sitting in on discussions, weighing in on a matter, that’s an attempt to influence.”

She states that APPS sued the city and demands to know where the settlement money went. The fact is that that the suit was filed by individual members of APPS whose First Amendment rights were violated, a fact that was admitted to by Ms. Jimenez herself at an SRC meeting. Although they were under no obligation to disclose it, those members actually testified that the money had been distributed to schools and student programs at an SRC meeting when Ms. Jimenez was present.

Ms. Flowers’ loyalty to her friend is admirable. It is not, however, an excuse to attack members of the public for expressing their opinions and demanding that public officials to be answerable to those they are entrusted to serve.

Want to do something?

Call Governor Wolf at 717-787-5825 and request that Farah Jimenez be removed from the School Reform Commission.