Too many of our children come to school struggling with the effects of trauma. When they get to school, it should be a place of safety, joy, exploration, and human interactions steeped in love and concern. But, the practices of the SD add to the trauma of already vulnerable children by defining safety as metal detectors and police officers, joy is swapped for drill and kill, exploration is swapped for data and tests and human interactions are swapped for large class sizes, computers and algorithms.
The practice of the SRC is to vote in blocks and unanimously approve most resolutions on each month’s agenda. There is rarely discussion or deliberation about how this money is being spent. Members of the public come before you, speak for 3 passionate minutes and powerlessly watch your lockstep votes. There is never any more information provided about why, how, or what justification exists for these expenditures. Expenditures that add to the trauma of our children by spending scarce dollars for untried, untested experiments on our already vulnerable children (including the decades of Charter School expansion which has failed to show any meaningful results). For that reason, I submitted questions to you on February 7th requesting you explain and justify your decisions around 9 of the resolutions totaling $115,031,000 dollars. Data drives a stake in the heart of every school in our district. It is how we narrowly and callously define our students and schools. Yet you provide the public with no data, justification, or discussion on massive amounts of tax payer dollars that you spend every month.
19.5 million on blended learning and cloud management. You choose programs with no independent or peer reviewed research to support their effectiveness. You are poised again to spend millions on blended learning which is only a cute term to make palpable placing kids in front of screens that use algorithms and data mining because they don’t deserve human educators.
15 million for CLI. This is a literacy band aid. It would be great as an addendum to well stocked school libraries staffed with certified school librarians who work as librarians and not prep teachers. But, instead you throw 15 million at a band aid. Research does support school libraries – how many could be restarted with this money?
This is the link to the article Diane had distributed to the SRC.
The Failed Engineering Model of Personalized [sic] Learning | Curmudgucation – February 14, 2018
Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools 