Public officials in Pennsylvania are trying to starve public education until it dies. They have a constitutional obligation under the state and possibly the federal constitution to provide equal treatment to all. The students hurt most by state budget cuts are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Someone should sue to compel the state to provide education to all students.
Schools have been stripped of essential personnel. And that’s not all. They can’t even provide a sound basic education.
Read this comment by a teacher in Philadelphia:
“I’m a teacher in Philadelphia and I spent my Saturday this weekend finding out throughout the day which of my friends and co-workers had been laid off. Weingarten is absolutely spot on when she says that the students of Philadelphia are not the concern of Hite, the SRC, or the state. Most of my co-workers laId off were history teachers – an untested subject in PA. What is happening in Philadelphia is a complete travesty and a failure of democracy, and not just because I might lose my job or because the union might lose some dues. If I return to the classroom in the fall, the “education” I will be able to give my students will not look anything like what I was taught education should be. And that’s a travesty.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It would be highly unfortunate if the goal of the heads of education were to want to rewrite history itself so that democracy disappeared. What better way to do that than to “erase” history and social studies from the public schools?
Hmmm… a cruel Catch-22. So all this testing at least provides job security for the teacher who teach in tested subjects… Sick.
And what of the electives and foreign languages? NYS stopped administering Spanish Regents Exams last year, I wonder if that means that Foreign Language teachers are the next to go in the grand scheme to economize.
When an organism dies, it died by increments. So, it should be no surprise that most every subject and function that are not state-mandated have been eliminated. Hite continues to have an impossible task, to abide by the laws of both economics and the state of Pennsylvania. Even as cynical ex-journalist, I find hit hard to dismiss his comments on anything other than sincere.
Odds on, dysfunctional Philadelphia taxes will starve city schools without state assistance — an unlikely source given the poisonous political history. Also problematic, surrender of $133 million in salaries, incentives and benefits by PFT union members.
To date, charter schools have cherry-picked more promising students. Time for the community to insist that charters admit — and, at risk of harsh charge-backs, retain — a more representative cross-section of Philadelphia’s challenging pupils. With the loss of all support services at public schools, indeed, there is little other option. Only this would constitute a true test of the charter alternative, as the burdens of student support are added to the for-profit model.
Hell
They want children to sit in a desk 10 hours a day and practice for a test so they can say”……”Look at our scores”
Bullsh*********TTTTTTT!!!!
Fat Potatoes …but they will know how to multiply the bad luck they have had getting No Education!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Couldn’t agree with you more, neanderthal100.
I found this exceptional article about the forces driving America’s education spring.
PLEASE READ THIS! it is so truthful and it well researched.
http://www.nationofchange.org/forces-driving-america-s-education-spring-1369577132
Title IX, though usually applied in cases of gender equity is an obvious tool for educational equality as well, especially when tied to charters and vouchers. Separate with public financing is not equal any more than the school to prison pipeline.
Just pulled the full Philadelphia Budget and gave it the quick look and there is no financial crisis of this magnatude unless created. There is not a loss in revenue from the year before. The revenue is about $11,800/student. In Pennsylvania there is only 36% state funding almost all the rest is local. Philadelphia people why haven’t you done what I just did in 10 minutes? The keys to the kingdom are in the budget. They are lying to you. I downloaded it and you can also. It is all in the beginning of the budget as to the revenue and that revenue for two years back.
You know perfectly well, Diane, that the Federal constitution both prohibits control of education nationally, and that the equal protection clause does not apply to education. You wish it would. But it doesn’t, and a suit wouldn’t even be accepted by the Supreme Court (most likely). The state constitutions are another matter.
Pennsylvania’s Tragic Betrayal of its Public Schools
By Joseph Batory, Former Superintendent of Schools, Upper Darby Schoo District, Drexel Hill, PA
With regard to the inadequate funding of Philadelphia Public Schools, the city’s politicians have been and continue to lacking in political courage and moral fiber. Far too many of them are much too self-serving and most of them do not even understand what the fiscal insanity that continues to cripple the schools and the children of their city.
Likewise, the recent array of superintendents has each been far too meek and without the commitment to confront the system’s financial deficiencies.
But the worst villain of all has been the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In the early 1990’s, Pennsylvania government consciously destroyed its Equalized Subsidy for Basic Education (ESBE) formula. That method of State funding once used to bridge the wide gaps between poorer and more affluent school districts. The ESBE formula each year had utilized factors of community wealth and pupil population to drive out annual subsidies to school systems that were both objective and fair. Unfortunately, the growing costs of this ESBE formula to the state budget caused its ultimate demise as cowardly politicians prioritized re-election agendas instead of the common good.
Since the removal of the ESBE formula by the Pennsylvania legislature, billions of dollars have been denied to school districts across the Commonwealth.
When the ESBE formula was dropped, many impoverished school systems received only a fraction of what the ESBE formula would have generated. Without a funding formula, this has gone on year after year. This has created havoc at the local level.
State politicians have also violated the Pennsylvania Constitution which mandates that the Commonwealth “maintain and support a thorough and efficient system of public education” and they’ve been in denial for many years like they had no part in this incompetency.
Over the years, there have been numerous and diverse education coalitions across Pennsylvania that rose up against the betrayal of schools and children by a bipartisan political establishment without conscience.
Tragically, unlike many other states nationally, Pennsylvania courts—whether as a matter of political control or apathy— have consistently dismissed challenges to the Commonwealth’s obvious inadequate funding of schools. Almost all states pay a larger percentage of overall public education costs than Pennsylvania. The Commonwealth’s approximate rank is 45 out of 50 in the nation on this measure. On average, other states contribute 47% of total education funding, but in 2006 (sadly…the most recent statistics available), Pennsylvania contributed only 36% (National Center for Education Statistics) as its share of public education funding statewide. To counter this reality, Harrisburg’s political “spin doctors” work overtime to obfuscate the issues, assassinate dissenters and confuse the public.
The last Philadelphia superintendent who tried to fight for the rights of the city’s children was David Hornbeck. He publicly decried the State’s lack of any adequate financial commitment to its public schools. For daring to do this, he was politically executed and run out of office. Small wonder that his superintendent successors just ran with whatever funds the political establishment granted them rather than advocating the educational needs of school children.
As a superintendent of schools during the 1990’s in nearby Upper Darby, I also fought with State politicians of both parties daring to suggest publicly that they were ignoring their Constitutional responsibility and hurting the neediest schools and children via insufficient school funding. Most of these politicians denied any funding inadequacies regularly telling constituents that school districts like Philadelphia and my District in Upper Darby had plenty of money.
Ironically, on November 15, 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer, published a page one independent report from the GoodSchoolsPa organization validating the terrible betrayal of Pennsylvania’s public schools and the children they serve for a long period of years by its state politicians.
Here are some of the findings of that study : Pennsylvania was currently underfunding public education by $4.8 billion. And Pennsylvania ranked 45th among the 50 states in the percentage of school funding that comes from the State. This analysis noted that to correct the situation by equalizing what is spent for each student in Pennsylvania and allowing the state’s poorer public schools to just “catch up” to the statewide adequate cost per pupil, many school districts in Pennsylvania were entitled to money. In that context, Philadelphia’s public schools were owed $1 billion from the state and Upper Darby (my old school district) was entitled to $54 million.
Hard to believe things could get any worse. But now we have the tyrannical reign of Governor Tom Corbett. The Harrisburg political buzzword of “fiscal responsibility” is an absurd concept in the context of the education our young people. Money has always mattered in business and industry and government whenever America has been serious about anything! Saving a dollar now on underfunding schools in Pennsylvania will very likely result in spending exponentially more dollars in the future when a more undereducated population is contributing less to the economy and/or filling up the prisons. Governor Corbett’s theoretically conservative policy can be more accurately described as fiscal irresponsibility.
The Commonwealth’s political betrayal of public schools is a national disgrace. It is a legacy of infamy!
These stories about Philadelphia make me heartsick. I began my career in Philadelphia 43 years ago when the schools seemed to be on the rebound. This post recalls when the decline started: http://waynegersen.com/2013/06/10/philadelphia-schools-last-one-out-turn-out-the-lights/
It is not only that most of the affected parties are African-American and Hispanics. It is the deliberate disregard for continuing education. If a teacher has maternity leave or goes on sabbatical, or simply resigns, no one is sent from downtown as a long term sub.The children affected are sent a different per-diem sub, usually one who cannot be understood by the children, or the oldest people in PA. Then let’s give them a Keystone test on that discipline. HELLO! ….AND YOU WONDER why they are not doing well.
One of the teachers in our school mentioned that her child goes to a Charter School and the custodian was teaching the children math…. until parents started complaining to the administration about the validity of their learning and his degree. In my discipline, Spanish, I often receive children from charter schools who were given As and Bs for showing up and they are expected to work in the public school. Parents have to stand up for what they ‘re getting and raise some good old fashioned Cain.