Did you hear about the budget crisis that stripped Philadelphia’s public schools of teachers, nurses, librarians, supplies, and many other things? Did you read that the school district has a budget deficit of $300 million and that Governor Corbett wants teachers to take salary cuts and layoffs to save over $100 million? Did you read about the 12-year-old child who died because she had an asthma attack on a day when the school did not have a nurse?
Surely, the city of Philadelphia must be in dire straits if it can no longer pay for public education?
Think again. Read this eye-popping account of the great financial success of Philadelphia’s corporate sector. Read about the salaries of Philadelphia’s university presidents (in one case, $2.1 million–job well done!). Read about how Philadelphia’s elite is thriving but unwilling to pay for decent schools for the city’s children.
Here is one corporation that is very successful indeed:
- Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA), currently the largest mass media and communications company in the world in terms of revenue and the namesake of the tallest building in Pennsylvania, saw its stock value rise 36% from $38 to $52. According to Comcast’s most recent SEC filing, the corporation’s trailing 12 month revenue stands at nearly $64 billion with a gross profit of $42.64 billion. Those 12 month trailing profits, again, stood at $42,640,000,000. I thought I’d add the zeroes there for dramatic effect. Oops, there’s one $0 I forgot: the amount of property taxes that Comcast pays to the School District of Philadelphia – NONE.Comcast has cost the children of Philadelphia $28.8 million since 2008 by not paying its fair share of property taxes.
Higher education in Philadelphia is doing very well indeed even if the city’s teachers and public schools are not:
2013, however, wasn’t a bad year for all educators in the city – just for those who choose to work with society’s poorest and most vulnerable members. While the School District demands that we public school teachers take a 13% pay-cut, make 13% contributions to our healthcare, and forego all cost-of-living adjustment until 2017, other educational institutions in the city such as the University of Pennsylvania gave their professors and administrators exorbitant raises. PENN’s President, for example, was given a whopping 43% raise in 2013 and now earns nearly $2.1 million… God forbid these educators who sacrifice themselves in order to mold the privileged future Wall Street gluttons of Wharton should not be properly compensated.
The chairman of Penn’s board of trustees is David Cohen, vice president of Comcast. He is a key player in the negotiations over the future of the Philadelphia school district:
- As Vice President of Comcast, he cashed in an annual salary of $16.2 million (Pulling in that kind of money, I’m sure he’s a public school parent with vested interest.)
- He held a $32,400 a plate dinner fundraising event for the Democratic Party at his Mt. Airy mansion. President Obama was in attendance as well, and why wouldn’t he be? Cohen helped raise over $500,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign back in 2012.
- He held a Republican fundraising event at that same Mt. Airy home to help kick-off Governor Corbett’s re-election campaign. Who cares about political ideology when you have the money to pay off both sides?
With so much money and power at the top, who is protecting the interests of the children of Philadelphia? Don’t they deserve to be in schools with libraries and librarians, with experienced teachers, with social workers, with guidance counselors to help them prepare college applications, with teachers of the arts and foreign languages, with reasonable class sizes?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
wew, so sad
Classic sociopathic behavior by the elites
Agree. There’s gotta be a GREED gene.
“Who cares about political ideology when you have the money to pay off both sides?”
And this is precisely why we actually have just one political party today, the RepubliCrats, owned outright by America’s plutocracy.
Just as there is no real crisis in our schools, there is no real budget crisis, just a skewed set of priorities.
You could just as easily be talking about Chicago. Or anyone of dozens of other cities, probably.
Yep. Washington State is in the same boat. If Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon paid their share of taxes, our K-12 system would be sitting pretty. Higher Ed too. Instead, we give Boeing additional tax breaks, then cut money from teachers to help cover the budget issues.
Gasp! You mean, tax the job creators! Blasphemy!
/sarcasm
This isn’ t just happening in Philly. At my school, the concentration has been adn sill remains improved test scores. So to accommodate , we rid the curriculum of art, music, gym, activity periods,health class. All the high interest stuff .All these events help motivate our students to want to come to school and participate. Calms them down . Encourages them. . It gives our children a holistic approach to education. It brings joy and creativity a piece in the picture. So sad we have given up and won’t pay for these wonderful things. Our students need all of this good stuff. “Just a test score” is correct. I hate it 😦 Let’s make a chnage and let’s hurry…
We need to be careful and not lump highly paid administrators together with “professors”. While some professors do make salaries far above the median income for their area, the highest paid ones are usually concentrated in certain departments. At most universities, the median salary for tenure-track faculty across all departments is no scandal – just a fair wage for the amount of hours worked and the amount of training involved. Lumping together these million dollar administrators with department faculty advances the notion that college costs are high because professors are paid too much. This is a false notion. College costs have beaten the rate of inflation for many, many other reasons than the salary of their Biology 101 professor. For many disciplines, a recent PhD would be paid more to go into industry rather than academia.
A somewhat related article on educational priorities in Pennsylvania:
GOP’s Enron-esque higher ed plan: Fire tenured faculty to fund student dorms
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/14/gops_enron_esque_higher_ed_plan_fire_tenured_faculty_to_fund_student_dorms/
GOP’s Enron-esque higher ed plan: Fire tenured faculty to fund student dorms
Here’s a blog post I wrote a couple of days ago on how corporate tax breaks erode public funding AND middle class wages: http://waynegersen.com/2014/01/11/tax-havens-erode-public-funding/ I’ve witnessed this “race-to-the-bottom” bidding war on several occasions as Superintendent and found it difficult to push back when the local political structure and state government all want to give tax breaks on the theory that “…a rising tide lifts all boats”. My experience is the last boat to get lifted is the school district… and nowadays that boat is being swamped by privatization schemes that are supported by corporations seeking lower tax burdens and higher profits. Like you, I don’t understand why more people don’t see that something’s wrong with this picture…
Oh… and in case you missed it, Philadelphia is one of the “promise zones” of the federal government: zones where corporations will get tax breaks to revitalize the economy. This is particularly maddening given the jobs lost due to budget cuts in the schools and the lives of children affected by those cuts.
I am not sure what the University of Pennsylvania should be required to do here. No doubt NYU would love for the University of Pennsylvania to lower administrator and faculty salaries so NYU could hire selected faculty and staff away. If Penn lowered them enough, maybe even my institution could hire some away, but it would be impossible to compete with NYU given the wealth of that school (for example, the president of NYU will get a 2.5 million dollar longevity bonus in 2015 and a life time pension of $800,000 a year when he retires. His pension is much more than the salary of my institution’s president)
I think the point is to demonstrate that Penn has ample resources to be a responsible community member and contribute towards the costs of public education. Penn is not “required” to do anything, but Penn is the largest private employer in the city and certainly has some moral responsibility for the stability of its neighborhood and the well-being of its staff. Penn currently subsidizes a public elementary school near its campus, and as a result this school has everything you’d want for your child. Meanwhile, other schools in Penn’s vicinity continue to suffer terribly from the drastic budget cuts. Penn did recently start a “partnership” to direct faculty expertise towards another elementary school near its campus, but it is not yet clear what the benefits of this partnership to the school and its students will be.
A total disgrace!
I am not defending inflated salaries but do you understand the difference between Gross Profit and Net Income?
Bernie, from what I can see corporations are making record profits while the average joe is trying to hold his own and has been trying to for the last 30-40 years if not longer. Tell me with whatever inflation adjusted numbers you know that corporations are paying their share of the costs of society. The tax break bidding wars are disgusting and from all accounts have not provided the value added promised. We are being sucked dry. I am serious in my request for a reason to hope that is not grounded in free market ideology that has not served us well as it has devolved into a tooth and nail battle for market share that seems to have no grounding in ethics or morality. The push is on to become too big to fail; it is a license to do as you damn well please.
2old2teach:
I grew up when AT&T dominated, exploited and paralyzed the telecommunications via a government enforced monopoly. I grew up when a PC cost as much as a year’s college tuition. I grew up with a single TV station and 3 radio stations. Paradoxically, while I am a born skeptic, I am much more optimistic than you are (See Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist) and do not take a company’s profits as some sort of personal affront. I have readily available choices for most things I need and I exercise that choice. Funnily enough, the area I have least choices in are associated with government actions, e.g., my real estate taxes just went up 20% with no warning and my health insurance went up 8%.
This is disgusting. People say watch out that we do not become an oligarchy, looks to me like we are there already. What a disgrace.
I’ve never seen people this disgusted and discouraged with politicians in my lifetime.
I think people know it’s completely corrupt and they know none of these people are working on behalf of anyone but their big donors.
Cohen is right. It doesn’t matter which side wins in the upcoming elections in Pennsylvania. Mr. Cohen will win, either way.
I’m sort of vaguely interested in the thinking behind these mayors “relinquishing” their schools to private interests. I get that it’s easier to have Gates or Dell foundations run your public schools, but doesn’t it also make them completely irrelevant?
They don’t even interview mayors on ed reforms in Ohio anymore. They interview foundation heads and think tank mouthpieces. The mayor of Columbus, for example, is so powerless they don’t even ask for a quote on Columbus schools.
“I’ve never seen people this disgusted and discouraged with politicians in my lifetime.”
Agreed. And I wonder if those politicians realize they’re expendable too? They gleefully participate in the constant demonization of teachers, unions, public workers, etc. with absolutely no concern of the possible consequences for those groups if and when public anger gets out of control. But they don’t seem to realize just how hated they are by the public too. Eventually the time will come when the oligarchs will have everything they need and they will turn the politicians out for public anger while they sweep in as the good guys, protecting us from the big, bad gubmint.
I teach in the suburbs of Philly where Corbett’s cuts have led to layoffs, demotions, larger classes, and the elimination of electives. My wife teaches in Philly and has seen her life skills class expand to 20 children, K-2, but with less aides, less counselors and nurses, less resources than before, a situation repeated throughout the district. I joined my wife and her fellow PFT members when they marched on the School District’s headquarters last August before school started demanding more funding. The march began in front of Comcast’s offices because it’s no secret they don’t support the public schools, want to bust the union, and have paid off both politIcal parties. What is the result 5 months later. Nothing. What can we expect. As long as the private institutions, the educational leaders, the business leaders in Philadelphia are oblivious and don’t care that the young people of their community are having their futures stolen from them, nothing is what we can expect. Do these universities even care about the lost enrollments in their education schools? What was it that Sinclair Lewis once said about so much of revolution is simply the waiting. When will teachers, parents, and students finally declare the wait is over and take back their governments and their public schools?
The image of a city which houses wealthy companies paying no property taxes situated in a city which is steadily being slummified by a dearth of tax income is strange. Is Philadelphia alone in this? Others above have said this is typical. Yet the typical slummy city with poverty-stricken school districts being pushed into questionable privatization alternatives is a city whose industry base has been hemorrhaging for decades (Detroit, Buffalo & Rochester,NY, Kansas City, post-Katrina NO… I can’t help think there’s something different about the Philadelphia paradigm.
I am not sure I’m at all on board with universities paying property taxes… but how long will Drexel, Penn et al be able to attract students to a declining city center which may soon become a dangerous place to be, as its public school students are abandoned?
And isn’t it interesting that a Philadelphia School Reform Commission member is employed at Comcast?
I can tell you that Penn definitely did not give their administrators exorbitant raises. And Amy Gutmann raised $500M for Penn, so the money isn’t coming from taxpayers, it’s coming from donors. By and large, their raises for administrators don’t even keep up with the cost of living, I think it was 2%. Penn has also made SIGNIFICANT contributions to public education in Philly, ever heard of Penn Alexander? Why doesn’t Temple step up and do something similar? Why not Drexel? Why not Holy Family or any of the other higher ed institutions. If every college or university in Philly sponsored a neighborhood and did what Penn did to turn around public education in their surrounding neighborhoods, we’d be a lot better off. It’s a shame that the author really can’t put things into perspective here.