The Republican-dominated legislature in Pennsylvania passed a radical bill that could lead to the closure of public schools in Philadelphia.
The district superintendent William Hite called the bill “a recipe for disaster.”
“Aimed squarely at the Philadelphia School District, the “opportunity schools” language would remove from local control up to five low-performing schools per year.
“The state Department of Education would seize the struggling Philadelphia schools for at least three years, with the option to either turn the schools over to either a charter or outside manager or close them outright….
“Forcing the district to lose five schools per year – and possibly creating that many more charters – would deepen the very financial problems that cause lawmakers to be skeptical of Philadelphia.”
The district has been controlled by the state since 2001.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This has nothing to do with improving the education of children. Only a fool or a fraud would think so. The goal here is to destroy community based, non-profit, transparent, democratic public education and turn OUR children over the for-profit, opaque and often fraudulent corporations managed by a highly paid autocratic CEO like Eva Moskowitz.
To succeed, they must hold on for at least one or two generations after the real public schools are gone until no one alive remembers how it was before they took over and started to rob taxpayers and abuse children.
I’ve read a lot about Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and what is happening in the U.S. is the same thing. The only difference is that the Cultural Revolution in China was from the bottom up with approval from a majority of the leadership of the Communist Party that did nothing to stop the insanity that ravaged an entire nation for a decade. The one in the United States is from the top down and the resistance to safe the public schools is from the bottom. Most of us here are members of that resistance.
Yes, forget social services, call in the gentrifiers. Forget support, remove the nets and social fabric altogether. Let kids hit the moving plates of a conveyor belt; sorting, hard knocks, rejection, sausage.
Be careful. Don’t give the corporate public education demolition derby any ideas. They might like the idea of turning kids who don’t get an arbitrary passing grade on a high stakes standardized test into sausage so they could make a profit off the sale of that meat. Maybe they could even label it as not genetically modified but organic and charge more for it.
Helen Gym asks the right question. “Why are Philadelphia’s schools being targeted?” Lots of hedge funds in Philly have made out like bandits under Tom Corbett’s padded reimbursement formula and mismanaged regime. They want the gravy train to continue to flow. So the compromise is seizing the bottom 5% that will most likely wind up under charter control? The hedge funds can count on a continuous cash flow. We should do better for our poorest students.
Here’s a kind of terrifying article about how much clout ed reformers have in DC:
“Proponents of “choice” welcome CityBridge as a policy force. Others find Bradley’s influence unsettling, especially at a time when cities are pushing back against privatization of public education as a pathway to successful outcomes and equality of access. Bradley describes herself as a “cross-spectrum advocate,” and denies she has an outsized role: “Like most others in education philanthropy, I have a strategic view about how to build a system of schools that will serve all children well, and I have shared that perspective broadly, if primarily, with a business and philanthropic audience,” she wrote last year in response to inquiries for this story.”
“Cathy Reilly of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators adds, “D.C. has ceded power to the private sector without public input. Katherine Bradley certainly embodies that.”
I don’t know- these are some powerful people and they seem to be bound and determined to privatize every public school in the country. You get the sense the decision has already been made and we’re all just watching it happen. There are just so many of them and they’re all so well-connected. They just get extraordinary access.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/47754/shadow-chancellor-katherine-bradleys-influence-dc-education-reform/
I just read the article. What is happening in DC is very unsettling. The elite use phrases such as “modeled after a traditional venture capital fund,” to describe the schools they want, as well as labeling individual persons as “capital.” The analogies are cold, calculated and greed-driven.
If the elite paid their fair share of taxes, there would be no need for this so-called “philanthropy.”
will this have any effect on Gulen and his string of charters…….I thought he lived in Pennsylvania…
No state or city takeover has ever successfully turned around anything that lasted more than a cycle or two of questionable testing gains. They have no real interest in fixing anything exception their bottom line in service to their political ideology.
I’m glad to see some here finally acknowledging the long game is complete destruction of public education. Petitions and boycotts and stern letters will have little effect against this agenda of conquer and destroy. Money talks louder than any of us. It will take a fight of revolutionary proportions to beat this back.
That’s the problem with the new bill. No matter how well a school “performs” there will always be someone at the bottom, whether it’s the bottom five or bottom 5%, those schools are doomed to be penalized.
Imagine if this philosophy were adopted throughout society – the “least of these” will get even less. Oh wait – isn’t that why we need homeless shelters?
Hang on to what you’ve got because if you drop to the bottom you are doomed.
Survival of the fittest at its worst.
This is the same cookie-cutter agenda ed reformers imposed in Louisiana, Tennessee, Michigan and Ohio, right?
Can we get some lawmakers who do their own work and use their own judgment instead of these fad-followers? It seems silly to bother with electing 50 state legislatures if they’re all following a national ed reform “movement” agenda.
“Two of the three most powerful political leaders in New York State are now convicted felons. This places an immediate burden on the third member of that club, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to radically transform a political culture that has made the word Albany virtually synonymous with legislative self-dealing.”
I wish we could hire 500 prosecutors like this NY prosecutor and put a corruption team in every statehouse.
Can we draft him for President? 🙂
Send him to Florida! Our 2nd term governor holds the record of the company found guilty of the biggest Medicare scam in history. He didn’t recall anything about how he bilked the government out of billions on the witness stand.
Chris- Scott scammed the government, but he won’t expand Medicaid for the poorest folks in Florida. Then the good people of Florida voted him in AGAIN!
Recent studies show that many poor people do not vote and the media propaganda war on the poor that alleges wrongly that they are lazy welfare queens has probably been going on longer than the war on public education.
The number of real welfare scam artists is small compared to the number of working poor who sometimes work two or more jobs to pay the bills and avoid becoming homeless. In fact, a large number of people who are poor are children or over the age of 65 and at least a third of those who are of working age have jobs.