This year’s “worst case scenario” budget for public schools in Philadelphia has passed, meaning about 3,800 employees will be laid off unless compensating state funding or alternative cuts are negotiated by the end of the summer. This will have an enormously negative impact on student safety, special education, and basic services.
I don’t really have much commentary. These kinds of cuts have been threatened for a few years, and this is the first time there hasn’t been an alternative budget whose cuts are slightly less draconian. It wouldn’t be fair to blame all of it on the School Reform Commission, the extra-district entity that essentially wrestled control from the official School District over the last decade (which isn’t even around in “name only” at this point) — there is federal and state government responsibility.
But it would also be a mistake not to use this occasion to reflect on the pernicious role that the SRC has ended up playing in Philadelphia since the early 00’s by systematically dismantling the infrastructure and collective institutions that provided probably the only resistance to these kinds of cuts that was possible.
I’m encouraged to see that some charter schools are starting to unionize, but the fact is that most charter schools operate under transparently anti-union rules, and without some kind of collective bargaining arrangement, it’s hard to see what other groups of stakeholders are really going to fight for schools.
The general problem, as I understand it, is that parents tend to be isolated from collective engagement around school policy — they like their own children’s schools but not schools that aren’t “theirs.” Usually, unions and districts are the entities that can amass enough political capital to have a seat at the table when it comes time to make decisions about the general welfare of all schools in the district. But in Philadelphia, that sort of collective support has been splintered through the portfolio model, which has created a kind of educational archipelago — a cluster of islands whose best interests don’t quite intersect.
That doesn’t mean that the portfolio model couldn’t work, and it would also be wrong to say that no good schools (that do not charge students) emerged from the portfolio implementation in Philly. I work at several of them. But at the same time I look no further than higher education to see how this can play out — big investments in public education return to increasingly rarefied private opportunities while the genuinely public institutions (in higher ed, these tend to be community colleges in particular) get squeezed to the breaking point even as private institutions spend more on their students (and charge higher fees). Faculty, a driving force for collective change, are denied administrative power, transformed into a largely temporary workforce without job security or bargaining rights, and eventually the remaining faculty with any job security become protective to the point of self-defeating paranoia.
In higher ed, this looks a lot like the systematic “closing” of a chapter in American education of public access to higher education. The people in a position to fight against such a closing are precisely the entrenched faculty who fought tooth and nail to get their job security in the first place — administrators can be replaced; adjuncts can be fired. It’s dispiriting for this to happen in the realm of higher education, but it’s downright criminal for it to happen to K-12.