DN Editorial: Cursives! Foiled again
If Council doesn't get serious about school funding, that's all she wrote
WE KNEW we were being naïve when we imagined that City Council would come back from the last week's campaigning and roll up its sleeves to address the hard issues of school funding in Philadelphia. Any one of the issues would have been fine: how to come up with the $105 million the district requested of the city, how to fill the $85 million deficit, the erosion of essentials like school nurses and books, or maybe the discouraging disparity - 33 percent, according to a recent study - between funding for rich districts vs. poor ones like ours.
Oh, were we naïve. Yesterday, City Council devoted a large part of the school-budget hearing on what it thinks is the problem facing the schools: the decline of cursive writing as part of mandatory curriculum in Philadelphia public schools.
Likely responding to a Daily News report last week that highlighted the trend in public-school districts around the country, Council members are apparently so verklempt that the actual problems facing the district were put aside for a lengthy discussion on handwriting.
What's most disturbing is not how idiotic this discussion is, given the serious problems of public education in this city - a discussion that Council has repeatedly shown little appetitie for grappling with - but how indifferent they were to the fact that this would end up as the "are you kidding me?" headline out of the hearings.
Two recent polls indicate that the public thinks that fixing the schools is the No. 1 priority. Last week, voters rejected the pro-charter-and-voucher Anthony Hardy Williams and gave Jim Kenney a victory (thanks in part to support from the teacher's union). Yet, the Council members who bothered to show up yesterday grilled district leaders not only on the crisis of the cursive, but on a variety of non-issues, such as how the district plans for a world where the School Reform Commission would be dissolved (a non-binding resolution on dissolving the SRC passed last Tuesday, but no one can actually dissolve it but the governor.)
Meanwhile, about that money . . . The district is counting on $159 million from the state, and $105 million from the city, based on a proposal from Mayor Nutter to hike the property tax by 9.34 percent. This will cover the deficit and help implement Superintendent William Hite's plan for improving the schools. That's "improving" the schools, not just opening the doors and hoping for the best. Except, the state is playing coy, waiting to see what Council will do, and Council is playing coy, waiting to see what the state will do.
Once again, school funding becomes a game of chicken. Once again, Council rejects a proposal with no alternative to offer. Once again, budget talks become a virtual ambulance ride going nowhere, since the school-budget deadline is the end of this week.
It is frustrating that we find ourselves back in funding-crisis mode year after year with little changing but the dollar amounts. But that will remain as long as patchwork fixes such as cigarette taxes fail to resolve the issue in a more permanent way. The hearings continue today, with public testimony. But it seems that for the schoolchildren of the city, the handwriting is on the wall.