District's lowest-performing seats

By Eileen M. DiFranco

Contrary to popular opinion, the lowest-performing "seats" in the School District of Philadelphia are not located at Pastorius or Alcorn or any of the city's many recently shuttered schools. The lowest-performing seats - the ones that have driven the School District into despair and disrepair - are the padded swivel chairs at 440 N. Broad St. that are occupied by the School Reform Commission.

The members of the SRC sat comfortably in those seats two years ago while Superintendent Arlene Ackerman implemented her poorly attended summer-school program - even though they knew they would be faced with the mother of all budget crises the following year. They sat by while Renaissance schools and Promise Academies created a separate and unequal school system. And they remained seated while Gov. Corbett imposed budget cuts that would dismantle public education as we know it.

Rather than standing up in protest, the SRC cut school nurses, librarians, social workers, and mental-health specialists. Rather than help the struggling schools, the SRC declared them "failed" and almost gleefully converted them into charter schools, only 17 percent of which have been proven to outperform traditional public schools.

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While others worked with children under daunting conditions in pared-down schools, the SRC hobnobbed with the likes of the Boston Consulting Group and the William Penn Foundation in a well-appointed board room, planning to curtail public education in Philadelphia even further. Apparently, there was little talk in these meetings about finding additional funding or improving "failing" schools. The talk was about shutting them down and diverting scarce resources to charter schools.

None of these people are elected by the people who use the public schools. But while parents and others have been horrified by the SRC's high-handed, undemocratic destruction of public schools, SRC member Wendell Pritchett said at a hastily convened meeting last month that he was "excited" to support charter school expansion with additional funds - even though the rest of Philadelphia's schoolchildren will have no counselors next year.

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With the school year only a month away, children, parents, and teachers wonder what sort of school system the unelected members of the School Reform Commission have bequeathed to them. What caliber of leadership lays off secretaries, counselors, and aides? What type of men and women even entertain such a budget?

The SRC has done an abysmal job, and its "doomsday" budget is a new nadir. It's time to vacate these low-performing seats.