Philadelphia guts public education: no responsibility to provide water or teachers' desks [View all]

[HiPointDem]

Last week four members of UNITE HERE, one of the four unions representing staff in the School District of Philadelphia, began a hunger strike that would culminate nine days later with a thousand-person rally at the state capitol. Two parents, organizers with UNITE HERE, and two cafeteria workers represented by the union fasted in protest of what the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) has termed the “doomsday budget.” That budget is an attempt by the School District of Philadelphia to fill a $300 million deficit by laying off 3,700 staff and eviscerating the teachers’ union contract.

In addition to ending teachers’ seniority protections and step increases , the district’s proposal includes a wage cut, an increase in employee benefit contributions, and the elimination of necessary overtime pay—prep time for teachers and emergency visits by nurses. The plan would institute unlimited class sizes and reserve the right for the district to contract out union jobs. Other clauses absolve the district of the responsibility for providing water fountains and educators’ desks...That’s just the teachers.

The district’s entire safety staff (employees whose roles fall somewhere between hall monitor and security guard) will be gone in the fall, more than halving UNITE HERE Local 634’s membership. The staff is vital in a district that reported over 2,600 violent incidents last school year (the union says closer to 10,000).

Whereas the teachers’ contract was proposed in February, it is this more recent announcement about security that brought parents and staff out to Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett’s office for a week of protest. While the community may have been displeased with the mistreatment of teachers, it was outraged at the prospect of dangerous schools...In addition to the UNITE HERE-represented safety staff, the proposed layoffs include every assistant principal in the district...The quality of public schooling is set to be drastically reduced alongside safety: the district proposes eliminating all extracurricular activities.

The School Reform Commission, created in 2001 as an early foray in replacing elected officials with state-appointed managers, is a profoundly undemocratic body. Composed of a five-member board, three appointed by the governor, two by the mayor, it is instrumental in implementing the state’s strategies for restructuring the city’s education system. Because the governor will always have a majority, there are few institutional channels for the parents of the district’s 200,000 students to shape the future of their children’s schools.

The tumultuous protests represent this year’s high water mark in the struggle for a democratic alternative to the school reform program being pushed by the Broad Foundation in Philadelphia...
The recent rally on June 25 against the cutting of safety workers, drawing some thirty busloads of protesters, marks an escalation against the Broad agenda....the crisis in Philadelphia has revealed potential for a citywide insurgency. Between the March arrests, the student strikes, and the safety staff layoffs, much of the blame, in the eyes of many Philadelphians, is not on the union but the district and the state. Rural Pennsylvania—the source of Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature—may see the issue differently. But layoffs are hardly unique to Philadelphia, and rural austerity may have the potential to sway votes in 2014.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/is-philadelphia-the-next-chicago


The bit about desks reminded me of a documentary I saw about some poor country where the kids had to bring their own desks to school.