As Rahm Emanuel once memorably said, when he was President Obama’s chief of staff, never let a crisis go to waste. Naomi Klein surely agreed in her book “Shock Doctrine,” which showed how crises, both natural and man-made, are used to achieve other goal unrelated to the crisis. Hurricane Katrina made it possible to wipe out public education and the teachers union in New Orleans. The budget cuts and imposed austerity will soon make it possible to crush the teachers union and privatize Philadelphia’s schools.
A teacher in Philadelphia writes, challenging an earlier post that called Los Angeles ground zero for corporate reform:
“Sorry to contradict, but Los Angeles is only at the forefront of the push-back (and a fine thing that is too.) The next big front in corporate “reform” will be in Philadelphia in a little over a month.
“The contract for the PFT is up and we are facing demands from the state-controlled School Reform Commission and their hand-picked Superintendent William Hite, a graduate of the Broad Academy. I and my fellow teachers are facing a demand that we give up $133 million in salary and health benefit concessions, which is bad enough. But we’re also looking at proposals to eliminate seniority, institute performance pay, eliminate contractual caps on class size, and virtually every other fond wish of the “reformers”.
“State and city leaders have engineered a budget crisis and passed only sham fixes, all to set up the PFT to be broken no matter how we react. If we give in to the concessions, we will have lost almost everything the PFT has gained for the schools and teachers since 1968. If not, we will either have a contract imposed on us or we will be forced to strike, but that in itself is illegal according to the law that allowed the state takeover of the district in 2001. The no-strike clause is unique to Philadelphia within the state, so we may be able to successfully challenge it in court, but any way this plays out the SRC and their political masters seem to think that it will give them a free hand to go full bore with every kind of corporate reform. If they succeed, they will have remade the 8th largest school district in the nation into a goldmine of corporatized “education”.
“Unfortunately, they are probably right.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on luvsiesous and commented:
Using Rahm Emanuel’s tactics, I think he got the idea from Saul Alinsky, Philadelphia is reforming their school system.
Is this too little too late?
Or, can they save the schools from decline and bankruptcy?
Wayne
Reposted on two LinkedIn Groups. If the corporate reform wins, then they will be in the same boat as teachers within a year. The public psyche will not live with this upheaval for more than six months. The sad part is that the students will most likely not do any better, and teachers who have dedicated their lives, will be lost in the midst of a good ol’ fashioned money grab.
Oh I wish you were right. But they will drink from the cup because they don’t see a choice. This trend will continue until parents track the roots of all the deform their children are forced to participate in. If course it’s not good for the kids. If they cared about the kids they would have gotten teachers and admin involved. But it’s about profit. So they got their corporate buddies involved and now they are all rich. Sigh
You are correct the pushback here not just in the school district is alive. I was just for 6 hours at the inauguration of a new L.A. Citycouncilman. Everyone there thought the same for LAUSD as for the City of L.A. We give you 6 months to show us something so we can figure out if you are a new fresh wind or the same old thing. We will give you slack since you are new but you must “Show us the Beef.”
Many I know in L.A. would be happy to give you our expertise over many years of doing this in many different fields. It has taken time but we seem to have movement. You have to keep on the pressure and become experts in their budgets now and over time. Then you can counter their lies because you can figure them out and their game of priorities. It is like a balloon. There is only so much volume. You can squeeze the ballon in one area and it will expand in another. This is inter-fund transfers. How much do you have/student not what is the total. How much goes for what? What percentage is that? Is that proper? Does what they are spending for services like consultants make sense? Only by looking in and analyzing the budget will you ever beat them with arguments that they cannot get out of. Example, Superintendent Deasy and then Board President Garcia were testifying at a Calif. Assy. Select Committee hearing on Preventing School Districts from going into Receivership, bankruptcy. LAUSD being none of the named districts. Deasy and Garcia both testify that LAUSD only has only $4,800/student. LAUSD seems to not know, as they do not check the agenda, that CORE-CA is the last of the presenting groups. Also, because of the rules of the committee we had before the deadline submitted our presentation and data to the committee so that they would have it in print the day before the meeting to review. The 10 year spreadsheets on 20 school districts showed that LAUSD had $11,233/student not $4,800/student. That is not a minor difference. The committee knew the minute they opened their mouths. We also heard that this detailed data caused some problems in Sacramento. We were told that no one had ever done data in this manner and not on that many districts. Why not is my question? Do your homework. It works and we expect students to do it.
Diane: First, I am deeply honored that you find my comment worth passing on as an example of our (and by extension all) teachers’ plight in the face of corporate education reform. Unfortunately, I have that advantage all writers know but sometimes wish they could avoid: first-hand experience.
I hope that we can salvage something out of the up-coming contract negotiations, but only time will tell. Right now, we’re hearing nothing, which isn’t actually a good sign. But the bright spot is that people are starting to ask some questions now that the city-state funding deal is final (mostly.) Homeowners just had their property taxes raised, which is supposed to be dedicated school funding. Businesses did not, due to how the revaluing of property was done. When City Council was debating more funding options as their part of the deal, the single most lucrative option on the table (earning about $80 million/year ongoing) was a small hike in the business privilege, which could have been raised at the Council’s own discretion; instead they opted for a cigarette tax that didn’t raise as much and needed state approval (which they didn’t ultimately get.) The final big city contribution to the SDP budget is $50 million in loans against an extended 1% hike in the local sales tax. This will in theory provide more revenue in the future (est. $120 million/year) but isn’t available now (nor will it ever be in its entirety, since it’s now been mortgaged.) Yet the leading figures in negotiating this “deal” between the political leaders? Local CEOs and executives, mostly, especially Comcast Executive VP David Cohen.
I hope that the PFT will be able to resist what’s coming, but I fear that we’re going to take a hit no matter what. It’s not that there aren’t concession we can make, but with a new teacher evaluation system just coming in and the ways that Hite has changed districts in the past, we have to stand firm on most of the work rules (like class size caps) and on performance pay instead of seniority. If we’re going to have a hope of stopping this nonsense, we can’t let the SRC set up a system designed to drive out experienced teachers and replace them with TFA hires.