Helen Gym is a brilliant, eloquent progressive candidate for Mayor of Philadelphia. She is an activist and a member of the City Council. I enthusiastically endorse her candidacy. I have known her for a dozen years and am repeatedly impressed by her values, her energy, and her passion for justice. Philadelphia schools have suffered grievously due to budget cuts imposed by the state. A decade ago, two young children died because their schools had no nurse. Helen thinks that every school should have a nurse and counselors. In the suburbs, such services are taken for granted. But not in Philadelphia, where public schools and their students have been shortchanged for years.
Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who has followed the mayoral race closely. He sums up the reasons why she is the right person at the right time. Her election would bring hope to Philadelphia. This election could be a turning point for this great but neglected city.
He writes:
Philly needs a bullhorn mayor to slice through decades of status quo baloney
In a crowded Philly mayoral race, Helen Gym is fighting for the city’s poor and neglected. No wonder status quo elites are so desperate to stop her.
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Philadelphia City Councilmembers Helen Gym, Jamie Gauthier, and Kendra Brooks walk with protesters following the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Steven M. Falk / MCT
It was one of those raw late April afternoons in Philadelphia where the weather in the far corner of Love Park — unrelentingly grey, windy, occasional drizzle — seemed to match the grim civic mood looming over the City Hall tower in the background. At the supposed 12:45 p.m. start time for this Helen-Gym-for-mayor campaign rally, just a few folks milled around and chatted with the candidate in her bright red coat, carrying a reusable Target shopping bag, and you briefly wonder if you got the time or place wrong.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a blue-clad army of about 50 supporters — young and old, Black, brown and white, including members of the teachers’ union that has endorsed Gym, carrying signs that read “The Wealth To Fix Our City Exists!” — crossed JFK Boulevard all at once, and it was showtime. Over the next half-hour, speakers from the various Jenga blocks of Philly’s shaky civil society reimagined the city as it could be. A librarian from South Philly spoke about the dream of reopening on the weekends as a community refuge. An instructor and union leader from the Community College of Philadelphia imagined the benefits of free tuition.
“When I say, “Moral!,” chanted emcee Elisa King, a minister and counselor at CCP, “you say, “Budget!’” — driving home the rally’s theme that City Hall needs to focus on restoring vital services, not more incremental tax cuts.
When the 55-year-old former city council member finally got the microphone, the spring sun had seared through the layer of clouds. Gym declared her idea of a moral budget “is not defined by the corporate-backed interests, the developers and the status-quo electeds, bureaucrats and wealthy individuals who have long tried to buy this campaign with their tired ideas and their technocratic solutions.” The crowd whooped. “Those candidates have played it safe all their lives.”
The only remaining progressive in a May 16 primary field whittled down to five or six major candidates defined her rivals’ ideas as “just too small for this moment. They’re talking about safety that’s only defined by policing. They’re talking about development only in terms defined by the tax cuts and those people who get to benefit. They manage crisis — we’re here to end them!” Almost on cue, a passing dump truck on the boulevard tooted its horn loudly in support.
It’s fitting that the race to pick the 100th mayor of America’s founding city is also arguably its most consequential in decades, perhaps since the divisive Frank Rizzo era. That’s because the coronavirus also attacked the civic immune system that had allowed the city’s leaders to ignore the warning symptoms of the nation’s highest rate of deep poverty and unacceptable schools housed in unsafe buildings while touting the surface glitz of Philadelphia’s comeback … for tourists, and handful of gentrifying neighborhoods. Now, a spike in gun violence and related dysfunction has put the nation’s sixth-biggest city at a crossroads.
I might be The Inquirer’s national columnist but I’ve watched this local election closely — not just because I work and pay taxes and ride the troubled subways here (or because my two adult offspring live here) but also because what Philadelphia voters decide in little more than two weeks will say a lot about how America is going to solve its urban problems, especially persistent poverty. In this (sort of) post-pandemic era, comparable cities such as Boston, Chicago, and L.A. have rejected old-school police-union fearmongering for young, progressive mayors who see how issues like attacking climate change or youth unemployment can bring real change.
It’s not at all clear yet whether Philadelphia has the courage or boldness to follow its sister cities down that fresh pathway. I’ve watched both televised debates and have been somewhat taken aback with how most of the major candidates have crafted a message around not new ideas but “leadership.” What they are really offering, in essence, is a pledge to restore some presence and personality to City Hall that’s been missing during the shockingly absent Jim Kenney administration, but with little evidence they’d change the status quo policies of minor tax cuts or FOP-endorsed policing that coincided with decline.
In the debates and on the campaign trail, Gym has set herself apart as the only candidate who fully grasps the root problems in the most desperate neighborhoods — and who wants to go big to actually address them. How many times can we hire more cops or return to “stop-and-frisk” policing with the same tired results? That’s why Gym is the leader in pushing for trained responders to replace cops on mental-health calls — hugely successful where it’s been tried — and is the only candidate who agrees with the majority of Philadelphians who twice elected Larry Krasner as DA, that some criminal-justice reforms were long overdue.
Elite critics of some of Gym’s bigger and bolder ideas — going all-out in fixing unsafe school buildings, or guaranteed employment for adults under 30 — call them unrealistic pie in the sky. Most everyday voters know what matters most about a political leaders is less about the budgetary small print and more about who and what they are willing to fight for. And in her seven years as an at-large city council member, Gym has fought for what cynics had written off as lost causes, and won a strikingly high percentage of the time.
A ”fair workweek” ordinance that mandates essential workers have predictable schedules. Long-overdue eviction protections for the city’s beleaguered tenants. A return to local control of the Philadelphia School District while fighting to restore school nurses and counselors. A push to get lead out of school drinking water. No wonder that after her first term on council, The Inquirer Editorial Board hailed her as “a savvy, passionate and progressive leader.”
Things are a lot different now that Gym is running for mayor. While she’s been endorsed by the influential Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and a panoply of other unions and progressive groups, many of the city’s elites — even some who’ve been somewhat supportive of her council work — seem dead-set on preventing her from running Philly. Some of that is with a budgetary magnifying glass, but much of it centers on attacking her personality and blocking her ideas. Yes, she changed her mind on charter schools after founding one — but who wouldn’t after watching them become a negative drain on public education? Of course it was a mistake to protest the Union League and go there just days later, but is that a big-enough reason to punish Gym — and the city — by voting for someone who doesn’t share your values?
“I think it’s about making things about individuals and reducing it to isolated incidences rather than looking at a track record that holds steady over time,” Gym told me Wednesday after her rally. “The way to marginalize real movements for change is to hyper-individualize faults within imperfect people. I mean, I’m not perfect — I make mistakes and all of that — but I think the difference with me is I have a 20-year-plus track record of standing alongside communities.”
One truism about politics is that a lot of times you can gauge a candidate by the enemies they make. The Chamber of Commerce crowd and their handmaidens aren’t fighting Gym because of her mistakes but because of the things that she gets right. There’s a reason that many of Philadelphia’s most essential yet underheard folks — the teachers and librarians and social workers — don’t just think that Gym is the best among a large field of candidates, but truly believe that her election in 2023 is a matter of civic life-or-death.
“She is rising to the moment, which is a moment of crisis for our city,” Stan Shapiro, vice-chair of Philly Neighborhood Networksand a former City Council staffer, told me before the rally. “It’s not a time for the status quo, for business as usual, for just keeping the lights on. There aren’t enough lights. There aren’t enough rec centers. There aren’t enough health centers.”
One of the other straw-man arguments from Gym’s critics centers on how she’s carried a bullhorn to protest in the streets on behalf of Philly’s kids, or its underserved people, or the moment when — the horror! — she was willing to get detained in Harrisburg to dramatize how state Republicans won’t invest in education. We’ve had decades of “conveners” and glad-handers on the second floor of City Hall with too little to show for it. It’s time to try a bullhorn mayor, a real fighter. In a race with many candidates, there is only one that truly matters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Philadelphia has suffered from leadership that has largely served special interest groups for decades. The working class and poor have largely been left behind. I grew up in Philly in what once was a working class neighborhood that has since been devastated by drugs, poverty and crime. When I grew up, Philly wasn’t a rich city except for its history, but the public schools I attended had school nurses, resources, and the buildings were well maintained. The city needs leadership that has vision and believes in equity. It needs leadership with new ideas and willingness to tackle difficult problems. It needs leadership that believes in and supports authentic public schools and is willing to stop the flow of public dollars into private interests.
The only person that has the potential to lead the city into a more positive is Helen Gym. I’ve donated to her campaign, and I hope she will win and usher in an era of more inclusive leadership that serves all the people in the city.
cx: a more positive direction
Helen has long been a respected leader in our community of advocates for public education in Philadelphia well before she ran for office as a member of City Council. She still is highly respected in our community today. She “gets it.” We all know that and understand it.
She knows that we need a rebirth of our public schools in Philadelphia and that we need millions of additional dollars to do so. We need new school buildings in just about every neighborhood and that our schools must be governed as “a community” based on the principles of democracy. That was the “vision” that public education was based on. That is part and parcel of her vision for our school district and our city as well.
I know Helen from my interactions with her as an advocate for our public schools along with my colleague advocates. She has always sought to do right for our community.
It was early on in the charter school movement when she helped found FACTS charter school. She did it for the right reasons — to enhance our community. She understands the original concept of charter schools and understands the perversion of that concept by those who want to divert public money into their very private pockets. She knows that some charter schools are valuable additions to our community, but many are not. She fully understands their drain of funds from our public schools and the destruction they have caused to our community in many ways.
Long before our charter school law was enacted, it was reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer that, in the face of a controversy at her daughter’s school, she said, “I told my daughter to see her school as a community.”
That is the best advice I can give to anyone in any school.
Wow, Diane! You have been on a roll lately! Where do you find the energy!!! xoxoxxoxo
Philadelphia schools have been shortchanged for many years. That led to the debacle about a decade ago [September 2013] when schools in Philly couldn’t open on time due to a lack of $50 million funding from the state. I remember being dismayed that Obama wasn’t there on the steps of some Philly school decrying the situation. [Even though it was well into the Race to the Top program, I still didn’t get it.]
Here’s my anecdote. 17 yrs ago a son’s gf had to leave our excellent NJ pubschsys for Philly. Her single-working mom (an acct), had been transferred there during the era when many ins, acctg et al corp support services were being consolidated and personnel abruptly transferred or terminated. [A situation made worse for that cohort as the ’07-’08 recession hit.] The housing the family could afford was zoned to an underfunded, under-par pubhisch with enough gang-affiliated students to make for a threatening atmosphere, so mom enrolled them in the available charter.
Already, nearly 2 decades ago, Philly had about 50 charter schools siphoning $ from the pubschsystem. The one this family chose due to age of kids/ location/ transportation was online. A redeeming feature: there was a sizeable in-person center where one could study/ get tutoring/ socialize a couple of days a week. They even had a system where advanced students [such as my son’s gf] could volunteer to tutor struggling students and receive some sort of credit/ commendation. But neither she nor her brother ever made it beyond community college. That had much to do with being middle-class children of a single working mom [w/associated changes in not only job but mom’s bfs/ future husband—more relocation]– but equally to do with having to suddenly change zipcodes after sophyr hisch due to economic disruption.
Incredible that “elite critics” call fixing unsafe school buildings a “pie in the sky” goal. Shameful and disgusting.
Ginny,
The logic goes like this: “They are poor. Why should they have nice buildings?”
After I retired from the School District of Philadelphia in 2009, I became a PIAA baseball umpire in Delaware County a suburb of Philly. Every school in Delco has a beautiful modern building with awesome athletic facilities, except in the city of Chester. In contrast, most of our schools in Philly are old and dilapidated. Many have no fields at all. We call City Line Avenue the “Great divide” between our city and our suburbs. The inequalities are “Savage Inequalities” as Jonathan Kozol calls them. The state of Philadelphia’s schools breaks my heart.
The “Fair Funding lawsuit” which we just won through the hard work and excellence of the legal team from several law firms gives us hope. But the legal victory is only the first step which took years to accomplish. Now the hard work begins to get our state legislature to fulfill the meaning and intent of the Opinion and Order of the PA Commonwealth Court. We will see what that brings and we will we see the character and integrity of our state and local legislators. We will see.