Fight to save Philadelphia schools

Philadelphia students protest school closings and cuts in staff. WW photo: Joseph Piette

The wholesale privatization of Philadelphia public schools is underway. A broad-based movement will be needed to stop it.

A decade ago, protests by students and parents temporarily blocked the massive privatization of Philadelphia’s schools by the for-profit education management corporation, Edison Schools — now EdisonLearning Inc. Once again, an attempt is now being made to turn over control of education in the fifth-largest U.S. city to a handful of for-profit corporations.

This January, the unelected Philadelphia School Reform Commission, after announcing that the district was “on the brink of financial disaster,” appointed former Philadelphia Gas Co. CEO, Thomas Knudsen, as district “recovery” officer.

Knudsen will be paid $150,000 for six months’ work. His first “cost-cutting” measure was to award a “short-term” $6 million contract to The Boston Group to implement $61 million in budget cuts over the next six months. He is calling for more than half a billion dollars in cuts by 2017.

Knudsen’s recommendations are to close 40 “low-performing, underutilized” schools in 2013 and 24 more by 2017. The remaining 185 schools in the district would be broken up into “achievement networks” of about 25 schools each, to be run by private companies who bid for management contracts. The number of charter schools, now handling about 25 percent of the city’s roughly 200,000 students, would increase to accommodate 40 percent.

Washington Post blogger Karen Strauss described Knudsen’s proposal as a “desperate Hail Mary pass with no more chance of succeeding than previous efforts.” (April 28)

The plan is also clearly an attack on school workers and their unions. The central school district office staff, already only half of what it was last year, would be further reduced from 600 to 250 workers. Cuts in wages and benefits would total $156 million.

More than 2,500 blue-collar union jobs will be outsourced, forcing workers to give up wages and benefits. Knudsen calls for the “renegotiation” or even “abrogation” of existing school employee union contracts.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry T. Jordan described Knudsen’s proposal as “a cynical, right-wing and market-driven plan to privatize public education, to force thousands of economically disadvantaged families to select from an under-funded hodge-podge of EMO [education management organizations] and charter company-run schools and to convert thousands of professional and family-sustaining positions into low-paying, high-turnover jobs.” (TheNotebook.org, April 24)

Disaster capitalism

The 2011-12 Reform Commission budget made draconian cuts in Philadelphia’s already underfunded schools. Knudsen’s plan for 2013-17 promises even more. It contains no provisions for smaller classrooms, art and music, school libraries, full-time nurses or adequate security. And the promise of better education through charter schools has proven illusory.

Helen Gym, a mother of three, told Knudsen, “You’re not speaking for me.” Gym, a community organizer active in addressing conflicts between Asian and African-American students at a South Philadelphia high school, described the Knudsen Plan as “disaster capitalism that tries to shock a besieged public with unproven, untested, and drastic action couched as ‘solutions’.”

Gym challenged Knudsen’s use of terms like “achievement networks” and “rightsizing” schools when there is no plan to reduce class sizes or increase support personnel, noting that “seat expansion” just means “larger class sizes without extra funds.” Gym went on to criticize the plan to “expand charter populations willy-nilly despite a national study showing two-thirds of Philadelphia charters are no better or worse than district-managed schools.” (TheNotebook.org, April 24)

It’s not just in Philadelphia. A new University of Texas study found African-American high school students in Texas are three times more likely to drop out from a charter system than from a regular public school. The rate for students who leave school because of transfers to another state, homeschooling or by being expelled was 5 percent for large urban school districts but 15 percent for charters. In districts with less than 100 African-American students, the numbers were even worse: 22 percent dropped out and 18 percent left. The study compared districts in Austin, Houston and Dallas from 1998 to 2008. (Austin Chronicle, April 27)

Without jobs to offer, who needs educated students?

There is no lack of money that could be used for education. Last year’s state budget for Pennsylvania slashed nearly $1 billion in public education funding yet approved spending $600 million to construct new prisons. The state’s total spending for prisons is over $2.1 billion. The state’s annual education subsidy for Philadelphia averages $6,953 per student, while it spends more than $32,000 to incarcerate each prisoner.

Taxpayers in Philadelphia will pay $476.2 million in 2012 alone for the cost of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enough to finance the salaries of 7,029 elementary teachers for a year.

There has been plenty of money to bail out the banks and lending institutions. If you add up what the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank spent to bail out banks here and in Europe and Japan, the total poured into the world capitalist financial system was close to $20 trillion. That’s $20,000,000,000,000.

In the book, “Capitalism at a Dead End,” Fred Goldstein notes: “The system of capitalism is facing a crisis unlike any it’s experienced before. This is not simply a cyclical problem of overproduction that will go away in a few years, but a systemic problem aggravated by over 30 years of globalization and growing global unemployment.”

Youth have been hit the hardest. At the end of 2009, globally there were 81 million unemployed youth ages 15 to 24. In the U.S., official youth unemployment is 20 percent, but in most urban areas it’s 50 percent or higher.

The new generation of workers coming into the workforce is largely shut out, whether or not these workers have obtained higher degrees of education. With capitalism needing fewer workers to produce more and more goods and services in less and less time, the need for an educated workforce diminishes.

A new report by the Associated Press found that more than 53.6 percent of the people under 25 having a bachelor’s degree were either out of work or doing jobs that need only a high school diploma or less. (FightBack!News, April 28)

High tech has driven down the level of skills required for many jobs in modern industry today. Most jobs under 21st-century capitalism are low or medium level and require little or no formal education above middle or high school. Rather than having our tax money spent to educate workers they don’t need, the corporations and banks push to lower their own measly taxes and pressure politicians to spend public funds on bailing out the banks.

Capitalism is proving bankrupt when it comes to providing for human needs and social services, including education. A fightback movement is certain to develop in response to the Knudsen Plan. As devastating as these proposed cuts to Philadelphia’s schools could be, it would be a mistake to limit our demands to school reform issues.

To be successful, this struggle must also be a fight for jobs, union wages and benefits, and for an end to the school-to-prison pipeline. And to have lasting success, the fight must be against the greedy, rotten, capitalist system that puts profits before all else. n