Tag: Outsourcing

Has the Board Made the District Better in Its First Five Years?

Preview: June 29, 2023 Board of Education Meeting

by Lisa Haver

uly 2023 marks five years since the reinstatement of the Board of Education after years of state control. Four of the nine original members still sit on the board.  What has the board accomplished in that time? Have they made education better for the city’s children? There are fewer school librarians than in 2018. Class size remains too high.  Standardized testing still determines where resources go and how students, teachers and schools are judged. Substandard charter schools continue to drain money, much of it for exorbitant CEO salaries. And when members of the public come to be heard on these and other issues, they find that the board’s speaker suppression policies bar them from speaking and give them a scant two minutes–if they are lucky enough to make the list. Recently, the board has actually barred members of the public from even entering the auditorium. What does the board tout as its biggest accomplishment? Goals and Guardrails, their new data system that labels schools “on-track” or “off-track”, and which they spend up to two hours analyzing every month.    

At this meeting, the board will vote on 104 official items and spend approximately $207, 084, 246. (Five items each cost $10 million or more, including Item 58 at $69 million.) Twenty-five of the items appear to be no-bid. Despite the number of items and the total costs, the board will still allow only 30 general speakers. 

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

Board of Education Action Meeting:  May 25, 2023

 by Lisa Haver and Lynda Rubin

The board’s speaker suppression policies are now doing double duty: not just to keep members of the community from speaking but to keep them out of the room altogether. A guard at the door to the auditorium told Lynda Rubin she could go in because she was on the speaker list but barred Lisa Haver because she wasn’t.  Haver had tried to sign up but was told by the board that she would not be one of the 30 chosen speakers. She told the guard he could arrest her but that she was going in. Last month some APPS members were detained downstairs because they were not on the list.  

We wrote to the board after the April incident, pointing out that they had only set up 82 chairs in an auditorium that seats 240 people. Thus, the same people who were denied the right to speak now no longer have the right to be present. Did the board not want APPS to witness its voting to spend over $500 million in taxpayer money on 78 official items?  Or voting on a charter application that would cost the district hundreds of millions over the next five years?   A governmental body not accountable to the public can become tyrannical and dictatorial. We need an elected school board.

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Board Bars Public from Attending and Testifying, Then Hires Communications Consultants

Board of Education Action and Budget Meetings:   April 20, 2023

by Lisa Haver and Deborah Grill

With every meeting, the Board of Education finds new ways to enforce its mission of speaker suppression. Several APPS members who tried to sign up to speak at the action meeting found the window closed after just two hours.  APPS member Ilene Poses was not only barred from speaking but was barred from entering the auditorium when she arrived. Security told her that there was no more room in the auditorium. When she called those of us who had made it in, we counted over ten empty seats. Ilene was finally admitted along with several other people.    

The board pushes the public away both literally and figuratively. The staff tables in the front of the room set up an ever-expanding barrier between the board and the public. In an auditorium with an official capacity of 240, the board had only set up 82 seats. Lisa Haver asked the board to explain that when she testified; she got no answer.

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Funding for Classrooms, Not Consultants

 Eyes on the Board of Education:  December 15, 2022

by Lisa Haver

Irony, apparently, is not the Board of Education’s strong suit.  After imposing a number of speaker suppression policies, with no notice or explanation to the public, the Board now proposes hiring a firm for $70,000 to expand the district’s “capacity to engage families, students, staff and the overall Philadelphia community in authentic two-way engagement efforts.”  Are the Board’s action meetings not authentic enough?  The Board clearly wants to hear from a very limited number of families, students, staff and community members, and only for two minutes at a time.  The Board eliminated three of their four public committees, including the Parent and Community Engagement Committee, venues that were supposed to provide opportunities for more dialogue about issues of concern. The one remaining committee, the Policy Committee,  now meets only twice a year.  The Board’s Policy page does not even mention that there are meetings.  Governance by invitation is not a substitute for true public engagement. 

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