Philadelphia Inquirer – May 15, 2012
Speaking of the Philadelphia School District recently, Mayor Nutter said, “If we don’t take significant action now, the system will collapse.” That “significant action” could include widespread school closings, many more charter schools, and increased local control of the remaining district schools.
If this is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures, we should at least get some perspective on where we’ve been — and how we got here — before we plow ahead.
Consider the Philadelphia School District of a century ago. The city’s population then, and the number of students in its public schools, were about the same as they are today. The birthrate was higher, though, which suggests that many school-age children were not enrolled in school. Those who were had to contend with underfunded, understaffed programs and crowded, poorly maintained facilities. Sound familiar?
On top of that, teachers’ salaries were the lowest among the country’s large cities. Philadelphia was a one-party (Republican) town then, too, and teaching positions were patronage jobs acquired on the basis of connections with ward bosses (a not-so-good version of “local control”). Academic qualifications mattered little. Once hired, teachers were required to kick back a percentage of their meager pay to the party machine. And they often had to purchase textbooks for students with their own money.
Capacity was so limited that a third of the student body — more than 50,000 pupils — could attend school only half-time. Another couple of thousand were on waiting lists, unable to attend at all.
There were, in short, no “good old days” for the Philadelphia School District. In the early 20th century, the city was an industrial powerhouse, with plenty of financial and intellectual capital. Still, it lacked the will to invest in high-quality education for all its children.
Not much has changed. The schools today face cuts in programs and personnel, decrepit facilities, safety problems, and corruption scandals. Teachers still use their own money to purchase supplementary materials for the classroom. Thousands of students are chronically late or absent, and therefore de facto part-timers.
In the 21st century, Philadelphia’s low attendance and high dropout rates have led some to blame the students and their parents for not valuing education sufficiently. But if the district’s families bear some responsibility for its problems, it’s no more than they did a hundred years ago. In those days, parents often kept their children out of school so they could work in the city’s factories and shops, or stay at home and take care of their younger siblings.
In 1912, unlike today, the district’s population was more than 90 percent white — largely Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, and German. But the populations served by the district over the decades have always lacked the economic and political clout to force the city to provide better schools. In 2012, Lower Merion, just beyond the city limits, spends almost twice as much per student as Philadelphia does.
Of course, there were and are bright spots in the city’s schools. Today, they include some high-performing elementary schools, old gems such as Central High, and individual teachers whose passion and dedication are inspiring.
The latest overhaul plan is worth a try. Charters at least offer some curricular variety, and decentralization of the remaining district schools might encourage more local input and participation. The system won’t collapse, but these changes won’t solve its fundamental problems either. America’s big city districts will all continue to struggle. They are too diverse, too unwieldy, too inefficient and too few of the people who pay the highest property taxes send their own kids to city public schools.
As a parent in Philadelphia, and a life-long citizen I can honestly say that this is the most scared I have been for our future. Each generation seems to get further and further away from being parents that actually care for their children. Social media has created to many opportunities to seperate ourselves from basic face-to-face realities. Catholic schools are closing left-an-right, the SDP is in shambles, and charters seem to be spinning their wheels to the tune of the district.
When will it end…where is the bright shining future that we were promised in the 60’s and 70’s….where are the flying cars and silver lamiae jumpsuits….where have you gone Joe DaMaggio??????
I am scared.
Actually when Philly schools were the pride of the nation, they had the structure that the SRC is proposing. They were a loose collection of individual nonprofits with their own individual curriculum and mandate, which is why Philly schools are named after their founders or philosophical forbears.
The community raised the money. The nonprofits were in charge of how they spent it, and openly accountable for it. There was not this centrist monopoly that demanded that everyone teach to the bottom.
There are several fascinating historical accounts of this fact. Going back to what works is cause for optimism.
As a teacher at an elite private school, the author may not understand the consequences of the plan he endorses.
Worth a try? You teach at a suburban private school and probably have little to ask for. come into the real world of urban education. It is nothing for me personally to spend $750.00 to 1000.00 out of my pocket for pens & pencils, paper and ink cartridges so my seniors can do their required senior projects. Do you have textbooks for your classes, well I have 10 year old history books, and after all this time don’t even have one complete set. Try charters, ok. watch your taxes go to waste even more. They DO NOT OUT PERFORM PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Just another”CORPORATE IDEA” we know corporations are in business to make MONEY!
I am still trying to figure out how a for profit charter school will do a better job than the non profit public schools. The non profit part says we will take the pot of money and spend it all on education. The for profit says we have to produce a profit which will go to who? the students? Why are administrators at charters routinely paid more than administrators in public schools? I don’t have a ‘business brain’ but I kinda think the logic is faulty.
It is incorrect that Lower Merion spends “twice per capita” on what Philly spends. The budget now is
$2,771 million” or $2.771 bilion in regular-speak. The enrollment K-12 is 146,090.
What is $2.771 billion divided by 146,090 students? It’s $18,967.76 spent per student.
So in other words, with a budget even after drastic cuts to $2.7 billion, the PSD still spends $19,000 per student in Philly.
That is from http://www.phila.k12.pa.us/about/
under “enrollment” and “budget.” Lower Merion spends about the same. They just spend it better.
The problem is that there are so many ways to work the numbers. The Philadelphia district gives $10,000 plus to the charters for each pupil they enroll, which is half of what LM spends. The district spends more per student according to its total budget and total enrollment numbers but much less of it has a direct impact on the classroom experience of the students.
And that is the rub isn’t it. Philly public schools budget are closed, opaque, and no one still even knows where the huge Obama stimulus dollars went, or the Rendell bonus funding for his term as governor. It’s not clear. No nonprofit charter is going to possibly be that unaccountable, yet all you hear on these comments are the union educators decrying charters, tests, cuts, the GOP, etc. That is their only tack. It’s unreasonable.
It’s unreasonable because PA is a red state. There will be tests. There will be charters. There may even be vouchers. There will be cuts if the economy does not recover. It’s not reality to continue as before.
It’s a big ask to demand more of the taxpayer as the Philly Democrats have done. It’s unreasonable given the current state of the management and transparency of the budget.
We are paying enough to have good schools. That we don’t have that now is not the Philly taxpayers’ fault, the state taxpayers’ fault, or the GOP’s fault.
No amount of money continually wasted into the school district of Philadelphia will change the “homelife” or “parenting” skills of the natives. These kids are doomed from birth because they are conceived not in love, but like wild animals.
There is ZERO hope for these children unless the state is prepared to take these kids from their “parents” at birth and return them to those “parents”, fully educated, at age 18.
Stop throwing good money after bad. No amount of money will work.
Okay… Good thing you’re not in charge of the school reform commission.
Dear Grant:
When I see the headline, “A Great Struggle to Keep the City Schools Alive” and talk of the schools dying or ending or being closed and changing as we know it…I think to myself…Yes, there is a God and, yes, there is divine intervention.
Don’t get me wrong:
City students deserve a lot. City kids deserve a decent education.
The city schools are corrupt and have hurt many people; not just me.
The city schools are not based on Quaker/Friends’ values of fairness and respect for the individual.
The city schools are either run by or run as if the Teamsters were in control.
So when I hear that the end may be coming for the administrators and bigwigs who run the city schools…I think, whatever goes around, comes around…
I am hoping for the Corbett administration to start throwing these bums out and putting some of them in jail…
I am not for vouchers; I am for public education run by honest people…
What do you say?
That’s quite a list.
I think you’re right that there is corruption in both city government and the district. In the end the students are always the ones who suffer most, though it’s no fun for the teachers either.
Hard to imagine that the district will improve much, but it will probably keep limping along.
Your history of the Philadelphia schools has a huge gap. I grew up in Philadelphia during the Great Depression. I attended public schools in a neighborhood where the unemployment rate was at least 50% when the rest of the country had unemployment of 24%. ALL the schools I attended were desegregated because we had no choice. Some of my classmates were so poor that they only attended school 2 or 3 times a week because the shoes had to be shared with siblings. I attended Girls High School at 17th and Spring Garden Streets. From there I went to college at the University of Chicago on scholarship. I graduated in 1947.
My four children attended the Philadelphia public schools from the 1950s to the 1970s. The girls went to Girls High and the boys to Central High. All four finished college at major universities (all state schools, none of them in Pennsylvania). Three of the four went on to get advanced degrees and have been working in their chosen fields for many years.
I taught science in junior high school in Philadelphia for a few years after I had two children in college. I taught in the junior high where the first teacher ever in the public schools was killed by a student. The funeral was attended by almost all of the students who could get there, especially the students who had had the teacher for class.
Later I attended graduate school in science teaching and earned 2 graduate degrees. I was a supervisor of teachers in science and math and they were a dedicated group, both in the city and in the surrounding suburbs. I can’t speak for the teachers today but I am guessing that the science and math teachers are still as dedicated as before.
I don’t like what has happened to the schools in Philadelphia but I also don’t like your selective history of the city’s schools. I am on the Alumnae Board of Girls High (aka) the Philadelphia High School for Girls and what I see in that school looks similar to the school I and my daughters went to. You also don’t mention Masterman, another of the city’s fine schools.
I don’t see charters as the answer to anything much except for segregation. They have the right to “throw out” any student they want to for any reason. The other schools are then saddled with students who are essential “dropouts” when actually they have been “throwouts”. And at taxpayer expense. They are paid per student but not required to retain them.
I agree with you.
I know a number of people of my generation and yours who received good educations in the Philadelphia schools, though of them went to Girls High or Central.
Your point about the 30’s is an excellent one. That was a time in which some communities were able to do a great deal with the little they had. Ironically, it may in some ways have been the high point in the 20th century history of the city’s school. Unfortunately, after the war, as whites who could afford it began to leave the city in droves, the impact on the public schools was severe. What’s your take on this?
I would have happily mentioned Girls High and Masterman, but they count every word, so it’s a constant struggle to get as many examples in there as I’d like.
Thanks for writing your column in the Inquirer.. While I disagree with your conclusions, your column mentioned several facts that the Inquirer likes to routinely ignore. I believe it is useful to look at the educational system from the perspective of the last 100 years. Indeed it would be useful to look at all questions from that perspective. I believe that the conclusion you draw from this perspective is that Philadelphia schools are no quite as horrendous as they were 100 years ago. I have no big disagreement with that statement. My problem with your analysis is that it doesn’t give a realistic explanation of where do we go from here?
Another point I found to be useful in your column was when you mentioned that per-student funding for education in Philadelphia is about half of what it is on the other side of City Line Avenue. I have sent several letters to the Inquirer mentioning this fact and have raised it at community meetings. The response has been that many people would like to believe that this reality doesn’t exist. In fact, the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education outlawed segregated school systems. Yet inequality of funding goes along with segregated schools today in 2012.
Your argument is that: “The latest overhaul plan deserves a try.” This statement appears to contradict your analysis of the past 100 years of education in Philadelphia. Clearly, the past 100 years have not produced a quality educational system in any inner city in the United States. The charter schools merely offer a somewhat better education for some, while condemning the overwhelming majority of Philadelphia public school students to a horrendous education.
One aspect of the educational system that few people talk about is the jobs that will be available for graduates. According to the labor department, the most needed future jobs will be waiters, waitresses, security guards, housekeepers, and nurses aids. Understanding these facts, is it any wonder that the educational system has enormous problems.
We have one problem which is similar to the problems of our ancestors who lived four-thousand years ago. The masses of people in this country work to enrich a tiny minority of society. Until we deal with this problem, it is useless to talk about educational reform. The resources have been available to end poverty for at least 100 years. Yet because we live in a capitalist system the standard of living for working people has been deteriorating for the last 40 years.
You might feel that it is unrealistic to advocate for a new kind of government that would champion human needs before profits. However, as the system continues to move towards complete economic collapse, this is exactly the kind of answer increasing numbers of working people would like to hear.
Good article in the Inquirer…..couple of items not mentioned. (I was a teacher in the Philadelphia Schools and retired with just about 40 years)
You did not mention the farce of Busing! We, as teachers, foresaw the problems looming in this nonsense. Whole communities were destroyed..look at Olney…wonderful families, great shopping etc. Now all gone. On Thanksgiving Day, the whole community came to the football game in the morning before the Thanksgiving Feast..after busing, there were NO fans in the stands because most of the students were not from the area of the High School-this was repeated all over the city. The schools are now far more segregated than before. As a Band/Orch Director at one of the good high schools, we saw the end of Shows, Concerts, plays, games etc. because the students were shuttled out of the schools immediately after school and could not come back for any program or game.
Where did you ever hear of a high school student having to PAY to go to school. You do in Philadelphia! The HS students must purchase tokens to ride the city buses..in my home room, students would be absent for periods of time because the parents simply could NOT afford the cost of the tokens. Can you imagine a high school student in the suburbs having to PAY to go to school..does not exist.
Now, instead of upgrading our public education system, we have CHARTER SCHOOLS! Give me a break. No more busing..since that did not work, we now are faced with this new scheme.
You mentioned Central HS as one of the best….you did not mention Masterman, where I finished up my teaching…….just named the Best High School in PA by US News and World Report.