Who–and What–Does the New Philadelphia School Board Represent?

Philadelphia Mayor Kenney enters the press conference with 
School Superintendent Hite  to announce the new Philadelphia School Board.

from The Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools

By Deb Grill, Karel Kilimnik and Lisa Haver
April 4, 2018

APPS biographies of the nine members of the new Philadelphia School Board.

Unlike the other 500, Philadelphia is the only school district in Pennsylvania whose voters cannot elect a school board. We've had town halls, online surveys, and pronouncements from city politicians, but it all comes down to this:  The government officials who will decide the future of the city's public schools, and who will control a $3 billion budget, have been chosen by one person, Mayor Kenney.  His decision has been based, in part, on the opinions of the thirteen people selected by him to be on the Nominating Panel. It has also been based on the wishes of the influential individuals, organizations and corporations who have lobbied him to represent their interests on the board. Two built-in lobbyists on the Nominating Panel, Stephanie Naidoff and Bonnie Camarda, are members of the board of the Philadelphia School Partnership, which funnels millions every year from private investors into schools of their choice for the programs of their choice, mostly charters.

All of the deliberations of the Panel were held in secret.None of the district's stakeholders, or the city's taxpayers, were able to express their opinions about any of the candidates, whether pro or con, or to raise concerns about possible conflicts of interest. APPS did everything we could, short of legal action, to open up this process. We sent letters to the Mayor and to the Panel, refuting the Mayor’s false assertion that the Panel could deliberate in Executive Session because it was discussing “personnel matters”, pointing out that the Panel was neither hiring nor appointing any personnel. We had several community groups sign a letter asking the mayor to obey the Sunshine Act.

Click here to read the entire post. 

 

Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools - Part V

By Ken Derstine
June 3, 2016

After Crossing the Rubicon

Having crossed the Rubicon in its turnover of Wister public school to a charter company despite its not being, by its own criteria, a “failing school”, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (SRC) is embarked on an agenda to greatly expand the privatization of Philadelphia public schools.

At its May 26^th Action Meeting, the SRC formally turned over Wister to Mastery Charters concluding the process begun at its January 21^, 2016 Action Meeting when Wister was returned to turnaround status despite evidence it was not “a failing school”. At the same time, at the May 19^th and May 26^th Action Meetings, the SRC sought ways to get around the recommendations of its Charter Office that two ASPIRA and two Universal charters not be renewed despite consistent violations of their charter agreements and low academic performance at the schools.

The ASPIRA and Universal Nonrenewal Recommendation

For over a year, the Charter Office had been telling ASPIRA it was in violation of its charter. In a January 22, 2015 letter to ASPIRA, the Charter Office listed 17 conditions that ASPIRA, Inc. must meet for charter renewal, including overhaul of its board of trustees, its business practices and its oversight of its Stetson charter school. On August 23, 2013 reporter Daniel Denvir had reported ASPIRA owed millions to its four charters, but no one was checking its books. As previously, in December, 2014, ASPIRA rebuffed the attempt by the Charter Office to oversee its operations.

The vote for non-renewal of the two ASPIRA and two Universal charters was finally scheduled for the April 28, 2016. Shortly before, the head of the Charter Office expressed confidence that the vote on the non-renewals was proof that oversight of Renaissance charters was working.

However, at the April 28^th meeting, the SRC voted to table the non-renewals for the four charters. The reason given by Commissioner Bill Green was that the SRC had to wait for a report of the City Controllers office that was investigating the charters. 

In his scathing 23-page report issued May 18, 2016, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported City Controller Alan Butkovitz stating,

Click here to read the rest of this post.

 

Riding the 'Turnaround' Merry-Go-Round in the Continuing Assault on Philadelphia Public Schools - Part III

by Ken Derstine @ Defend Public Education!
April 14, 2016

On April 7, 2016, at a Hillary Clinton campaign rally in Philadelphia, Bill Clinton got into an argument with demonstrators from Black Lives Matter over his legacy. He later said he “almost want[s] to apologize” for his remarks in defending his “welfare reform” and Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1994. It is these policies that led to a drastic increase in homelessness and explosion of the prison population in the U.S. in the 1990’s and after.

No matter how contrite Bill Clinton may be for the purposes of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, however, nothing he said at the rally was true. The fundamental premise of Bill Clinton’s neoliberal policies was that the working class needed “welfare reform” even as the industrial base of the U.S. economy was eroding because of globalization. This right-wing position was based on free market myth that the workers as individuals are responsible for their deteriorating conditions. At the same time, his deregulation of the corporate and financial sectors led to historically unprecedented accumulation of wealth by the top 1% of the American population and the near collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008. This was only averted by the $700 billion bailout of banks and various financial institutions with taxpayer money. No such relief has ever been contemplated for the workers and the unemployed.

The neoliberal agenda for privatization that became corporate education reform began as part of Clinton’s neoliberal reforms. The Clintons’ relationships with billionaires Eli Broad, the Walton Foundation (Walmart) and the Gates Foundation were to play a fundamental role in its development. The 'no excuses' philosophy would become a fundamental premise of charter schools in the subsequent administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The 'No Excuses' Education Philosophy 

The 'no excuses' philosophy of school management was first implemented in 1994 in the original KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools in Houston. Created by Mike Feinberg and David Levin (who is also a co-founder of Relay Graduate School of Education), the philosophy basically says that students from low-income families should be taught to overcome the problems brought on by poverty through a rigid pedagogy that accepts no excuses for failure. Any consideration of social factors in student achievement is considered “low expectations”.

  

In his recently released book, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through “No Excuses” Teaching, Jim Horn, Professor of Educational Leadership at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says of the 'no excuses' model:

The “no excuses” school model that KIPP charter schools popularized owes significantly to an assumption made two decades ago by paternalistic school reformers (Finn, 1997), who argued that schools and teachers could “reduce inequality in educational achievement if disadvantaged students were held to the same high standards as everybody else” (Cohen, 1996, p. 101).  This belief remains widespread today, and it has contributed to at least four bad outcomes for children, teachers, and public schools:  1) it leads us away from altering the corrosive socioeconomic realities that affect children’s lives outside school, while pushing our attention toward fixing children and their teachers’ belief systems, 2) it requires educators and children to subscribe to an ideology that demands toxic levels of anxiety and stress to attain some modicum of success, even temporarily, 3) it has led to widespread failure to live up to expectations that prove more fanciful than real, which creates self-loathing or self-blame for failing to achieve what students and teachers, alike, are told is achievable, 4) it has contributed to a totalizing compliance regimen for students and teachers that is more penal than pedagogical.

The heart of Horn’s book comes from twenty-five interviews with former KIPP teachers about their experience at KIPP. He summarizes what these teachers say in the interviews in his book (page 141, 142):

  

Click here to read the entire article.

Also see:

Riding the ‘turnaround’ merry-go-round in the continuing assault on Philadelphia public schools ­– Part I
The Battle for Wister; The SRC’s Projected Five-year Plan

Riding the ‘turnaround’ merry-go-round in the continuing assault on Philadelphia public schools ­– Part II
Mastery Charter Schools; The Unequal Funding of Public vs. Charter Schools

Guest Post: Who Is Behind the Philadelphia School Partnership?

by Deborah Grill
Research from a retired Philadelphia public school librarian who is part of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public School

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.

Guest Post: An Analysis of How Philadelphia School Partnership Has Implemented Its Mission

by Coleman Poses
A retired social science researcher for the City of Philadelphia and a researcher and activist with the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.

Philadelphia School Partnership can trace its origin back to 2010, as a nonprofit organization with a mission to “create and expand great schools in Philadelphia.” To accomplish this mission, it had planned to collect and distribute 100 million dollars to successful Archdiocesan, charter, and district schools for their incubation, startup, expansion, and turnaround endeavors.

This mission coincided with the launching of the new District-Charter Collaboration Compacts, which would, according to the marketing, commit its signatories to usher in a new era of cooperation between school districts and charter schools across the country. In theory, there would be less competition for resources, and a universal enrollment would end the practice of schools luring students away from other schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued the grant to fund these compacts.

As of this writing, 21 districts have signed such agreements. Philadelphia’s agreement, called the Great Schools Compact (GSC), however, was unique in that it included Archdiocesan Catholic schools. The Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP) was charged with guiding the GSC as well as acting as its fiscal agent.

This article focuses on the activities that the PSP has undertaken.

Click here to read the full article.

The Philadelphia Story, or The Revolution that Tom Corbett Made

Our Schools Are Not For Sale from Media Mobilizing Project TV on Vimeo.

More on Broad Foundation and Education Genocide in Philadelphia

From Ken Derstine in Philadelphia:

November 29, 2013

By Ken Derstine

November 29, 2013

By Ken Derstine

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” – Mark Twain

Further research into the Broad Foundation’s role in corporate education reform in Philadelphia

It is hard to believe that only a little over two years have passed since Arlene Ackerman was bought out of her contract on August 22^nd, 2011. The changes in the Philadelphia School District have been so overwhelming and rapid that it seems the events happened a much longer time ago.

In the past I have written about the role The Broad Foundation is playing in corporate education reform in Philadelphia, in particular in my February 24, 2013 article, which was published at the time by Substance News in Chicago and is now on my blog, “Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education?.  http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/ In particular see the section The Broad Superintendents Academy. Also see my June 3, 2013 article “ The 2013-14 “Doomsday Budget of the School District of Philadelphia: How Did It Come to This”” http://tinyurl.com/kh2d9nw

In the light of the passage of time and recent developments, I have done a reexamination of the influence of the Broad Foundation in corporate education reform in Philadelphia. My February 24th article went into some of this but did not include the detail I give below, plus at the end of this article I detail a new development.

In the February 24^th article I detail that Arlene Ackerman joined the board of the Broad Foundation on March 19, 2009 while she was Superintendent in Philadelphia. http://tinyurl.com/89sfrzv Prior to this on March 15, 2007 she was appointed the first Superintendent in Residence of the Broad Superintendents Academy. This article, Dr. Arlene Ackerman Intersects the Worlds of Teachers College and the Broad Institute, details her role at the Broad Superintendents Academy. It says,

Enter Arlene Ackerman, the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Outstanding Educational Practice, Organization and Leadership at Teachers College (TC), Columbia University, who has just been appointed the first Broad Superintendent in Residence. Based in L.A., the position—a first for the Broad Foundation—will give Dr. Ackerman a highly visible role in directing, mentoring and serving as executive coach in one of the nation’s largest urban school systems. She will be in charge of advising an initial cohort of 14 aspiring superintendents, each of whom will be given a faculty mentor, and guiding them in areas related to governance, infrastructure, leadership. She will continue her work at Columbia and use both positions to reinforce common goals.

http://tinyurl.com/my5mbh6

Ackerman was appointed Superintendent in Philadelphia on February 19, 2008. She had previously been Superintendent of San Francisco schools where she resigned on September 6, 2005 when the School Board voted unanimously to invoke the “compatibility clause” in her contract, and bought out her contract for $375,000. http://tinyurl.com/m23j75q

She is listed on the Broad Foundation Board of Directors in their 2009-2010 Annual Report (http://tinyurl.com/6w5sps2

 Page 25).

She is not listed on board in the 2011-2012 Annual Report. (Sidenote: Ed Rendell is listed on The Broad Prize Selection Jury in this report. Page 55 http://tinyurl.com/9wqv9um ) However, I want to make it clear, and the reason I did this latest research, there is evidence that Ackerman was deeply involved with The Broad Foundation during her whole time in Philadelphia whether or not she was on the board of the Broad Foundation in 2011-2012.

When she got into the dispute with Mayor Nutter and Dwight Evans over which charter management company would be given management of Martin Luther King High School, Mayor Nutter had Joan Markman, his Chief Integrity Officer, do an investigation whose findings were published in the 26 page document Fact Finding Report to Mayor Michael A. Nutter Concerning Charter Operator Selection Process At Martin Luther King High School, September 21, 2011.

http://thenotebook.org/sites/default/files/MLK%20Report.pdf

(If you have never read this, it is very interesting and important reading. If you have, two years later these events seem even more significant and it’s worth a reread.)

On two occasions, this report states that trainees from the Broad Superintendent Academy were present during the interviews with Ackerman about the dispute.

Page 8

Evans then attempted to convince Ackerman to reject the vote of the SAC (the parent organization at MLK) in communications in the days before the March 16, 2011, SRC meeting at which the SRC was scheduled to vote. In at least one telephone call from Evans, she refused to do so. Her refusal was witnessed not only by members of her staff, but at least one visiting fellow of the Broad Superintendent Academy who was shadowing Ackerman during the week of March 14, 2011, and who was present in Ackerman’s office as she argued with Evans in a telephone conversation the day before the SRC vote.

Page 13 (This takes place in the evening, after the March 16th, SRC meeting which approved Mosaica for the management of Martin Luther King High School, which angered Dwight Evans.)

The meeting (between Evans and Porter of Mosaica) appears to have lasted for 20-30 minutes. Porter (John Porter, President of Mosaica Turnaround Partners whom Ackerman was backing for management of Martin Luther King High School) - who said he was “in shock” and whom Nunery described to us as “shaking” — left the building and got into a taxi. Nunery went upstairs to Ackerman’s office, where Ackerman was debriefing a second Broad Superintendent Academy fellow who was shadowing her for the week. Witnesses who were present at that time, including the Broad Academy fellow, recalled Nunery entering visibly shaken and saying he had just attended a meeting that was like a scene from “The Godfather”.

After Porter was pressured by Evans to withdraw Mosaica from management of MLK at this March 16th meeting, Porter met with Ackerman that evening. There were later differing explanations (see the report) from Archie and Ackerman about what caused Porter to withdraw Mosaica from management of MLK the next day even though it had just been approved by the SRC the day before. Once again, however, this dispute shows the deep involvement with The Broad Foundation that Ackerman brought to Philadelphia.

Page 18

Both Ackerman and Porter told us that after Porter left in a taxi and Ackerman learned from Nunery about the Evans meeting, she contacted Porter. Nunery, Ackerman, and Porter described Ackerman as distressed to learn that Evans tried to pressure Porter and Mosaica away from MLK. Ackerman had known Porter from when she was an instructor and he was a fellow in the Broad Academy program several years before. She and Porter then met at the Marriot Hotel restaurant to discuss what had transpired at the meeting with Evans. The two discussed the difficulties Mosaica might face operating MLK in the face of Evan’s hostility…

In this research I have focused on the report written for the Mayor about the dispute over MLK. These events took place on March 16th, 2011. Nutter is not mentioned in the report, but SRC Chairman Robert Archie, who was appointed by Nutter, was very involved and the report makes it clear that Archie intervened to support Evans against Porter and Ackerman. 

Nutter apparently made a decision in late June that Ackerman must go when Ackerman got into a public dispute with him over full day kindergarten announcing she was moving funds to finance full day kindergarten from federal Title I programs even as Nutter was lobbying Harrisburg for funding. She was given an infamous $905,000 buy-out of her contract on August 22, 2011.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/school_files/Arlene-Ackerman-is-out-as-Philly-superintendent.html

Note: The report to Mayor Nutter about the March 16^th dispute over MLK was released September 21^st, a month after Ackerman had resigned.

Since the Boston Consulting Group was brought into the District shortly after Ackerman left, the District has been subjected to one of the world’s top corporate raider firms. (See “Who’s Killing Philly public schools?” http://tinyurl.com/o23eamd ) and “Who’s (still) killing Philly public schools?” http://tinyurl.com/k994xhp by Daniel Denvir.

Ackerman may have left, but she left behind many representatives from The Broad Foundation in administrative positions, including her successor William Hite, Broad Superintendent Class of 2005 http://tinyurl.com/l74njlh, who was appointed to carry out the BCG plans on June 29, 2012.

Recently, William Hite appointed David Hardy as Chief Academics Support Officer in the School District. His background from the Philadelphia Daily News, November 8, 2013 http://articles.philly.com/2013-11-08/news/43827137_1_hardy-brooklyn-universal-companies

Hardy previously worked for the New Jersey Department of Education as head of a regional education office that aimed to turn around underperforming schools in Burlington and Camden counties.

Before being hired for that position in August 2012, Hardy had been principal of the Achievement First  http://tinyurl.com/mgs3a8t East New York Charter School in Brooklyn since its September 2009 founding.

Previously, he worked as a principal-in-residence at another Achievement First school in Brooklyn. Hardy was also a Teach for America volunteer in 2003 for Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida.

That Hardy started his career with Teach for America is significant. I do not know of documentation about the number of TFA teachers in Philadelphia, but TFA has been deeply involved in Philadelphia since 2008. In an article on my blog, “Starved Schools Taken Off of Life Support” http://tinyurl.com/kkk8yxf, I wrote this about H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, co-owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News and his support of TFA:

In 2009, H.F. Lenfest’s Lenfest Foundation announced a $10 million matching grant to expand Teach for America in Philadelphia over ten years. TFA said it was “the largest grant offer a regional Teach for America program has ever received”. http://tinyurl.com/pg8wr8w

For information about the origins of NJ’s Regional Achievement Centers, of which Camden is one of seven and which Harding headed until he was brought to the Philadelphia School District by Hite in mid-November, 2013, see this article from the Jersey Jazzman blog:

Eli Broad Buys News Jersey’s Schools (June 5, 2012)

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/06/eli-broad-buys-new-jerseys-schools.html

Note: NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf is a graduate of the Broad Superintendent Academy Class of 2004. He was previously president and chief operating officer of Edison Schools.

http://www.broadcenter.org/academy/network/profile/christopher-cerf

For a graphic view of how Cerf has employed the Broad Foundation’s business methods of “creative destruction” whose basic tenet is to starve the public schools as the method of making charter schools appealing to parents, see this documentary from Princeton Community Television about the destructive impact that Cerf and the Christie administration have had in Trenton, New Jersey.

https://vimeo.com/79505696

Getting back to David Harding, look at this July 30, 2013 article by Jersey Jazzman:

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/07/njdoe-commissioner-chris-cerf-knows-how.html

Hardy is not mentioned in the article, but look at the comments to the article! He has quite a reputation in NYC and New Jersey! (Check out the comment with the NY Daily News link to “10-year-old autistic boy, Brandon Strong, punished for behavior caused by his condition” http://tinyurl.com/l7z4dmv that shows Hardy is clueless about the needs of Special Education students which is also mentioned in the comments to the Jersey Jazzman article.)

Finally, Ackerman went to Santa Fe, New Mexico after leaving Philadelphia where she became a national spokeswoman for school vouchers and charter schools until her passing in February 2013. http://tinyurl.com/k8q4wh9

She brought with her to Santa Fe Joel Boyd who had overseen the Promise Academies Ackerman had set up in Philadelphia in 2008 as part of her Imagine 2014 plan.

http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/article-6887-starting-over.html (Read the comments.)

To see how his appointment as Santa Fe School Superintendent was viewed in Santa Fe, see this August 24, 2012 article by a Santa Fe parent on the Parents Across America website.

 http://tinyurl.com/lnl6jce

If any links are defective, this article can be found at:

http://tinyurl.com/kkh5s2o