Walking the Walk is a six part series that will analyze the ways in which Mayor Nutter can implement his plan for public education. With the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers opening contract negotiations with the School District of Philadelphia, now is the time for the mayor to make good on his campaign promises and truly “put children first”. He can do so by working with Sandra Dungee-Glenn and the School Reform Commission to build a contract that will give teachers the resources needed to provide our city’s children with a first rate education.
“As Mayor, I will call for a reduction in contracts with outside contractors unless there is a compelling educational purpose for renewing the contract.”
--Michael Nutter, Putting Children First
Cassandra W. Jones, the Philadelphia School District's interim chief academic officer, recently recommended overhauling 70 of the district’s lowest-performing schools by bringing in outside management. Although EMOs (educational management organizations) such as Edison Schools, Foundations Inc., Victory Schools, Universal Companies, Temple University and University of Pennsylvania have produced mixed results, the district is still considering investing millions of dollars in them.
This is yet another situation where Mayor Nutter can implement his plan for public education and truly “put children first”. He can make good on his campaign promise to “call for a reduction in contracts with outside contractors unless there is a compelling educational purpose for renewing the contract.” Is there “a compelling educational purpose” for contracting out more of our public schools?
According to a story run last year in The Bulletin, the answer would be no: “The RAND Corporation, a national research organization, and Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based non profit organization working in educational research and reform, released a study assessing student achievement here. It concluded in a single italicized sentence, In sum, with four years of data, we find little evidence in terms of academic outcomes that would support the additional resources for the private managers. To put it more simply, the EMOs receive an additional $18 million per year, approximately $768 more per pupil, to run their schools with no measurable difference in test results.”
You would think the conclusions drawn by RAND and Research for Action would be enough for the SRC to pull the plug on EMOs once and for all. Yet, with outside contractors producing no significant academic gains, the district continues to award them lucrative contracts. The question in my mind is WHY? Is the SRC so isolated in their corporate world that they can’t—to use a cliché—see the forest through the trees? Are they too stubborn? Gullible? Naive?
In my opinion, the school district continues to consider EMOs because they do not have a grasp of what is truly wrong with education in the city of Philadelphia. They still fail to see that a student’s HOME ENVIRONMENT means more than the length of the school day, the rigor of the curriculum, the training of the staff. And how have EMOs improved the HOME ENVIRONMENT of their students? How have they stabilized neighborhoods and brought safety into the community? How have they helped non-English speaking parents speak English to help with their child’s homework? How have they solved addiction problems? Employment problems? Anger management problems? How have they stopped the “no-snitch” mentality? How have they made education a priority in every home in Philadelphia?
The answer is, they haven’t! As research shows, these outside contractors can do a lot of shuffling and restructuring of staff, curriculum, and resources (at exorbitant prices), but when the smoke clears, our children aren’t any better off then before; in fact, they are worse off, because we’ve taken money out of the system and wasted it on unwise educational experiments.
It’s insulting to me as a teacher that the school district feels it must bring in outside management to properly educate our children when the problem lies so far outside the classroom. The district needs to take all the money they are spending on EMOs and reinvest it in programs to help struggling parents and neighborhoods gain some stability. They need to take this money and invest it in a LARGER TEACHING STAFF to lower class sizes, and use it to update technology and classroom materials. To give our children a skill and a life purpose.
As Mayor Nutter announced in his education plan outside Samuel Powel School last fall, “We know that contracting out to the education management organizations—the EMOs—are not producing results . . . that are any better then many of our regular public schools. So instead of allowing consultants to profit, we should return some of the consultant money to the classroom.”
Amen. Now let’s hope Mayor Nutter will use his political influence to persuade the school district to stop doing business with outside contractors.
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