A defeatist plan to restructure Philadelphia public schools
Philadelphia school “recovery” officials have announced a radical restructuring plan that calls for:
* closing 40 low-performing, underutilized schools in 2013 and a total of 64 more by 2017
* organizing “achievement networks” of about 25 schools that would be run by outsiders who bid for management contracts
* increasing the number of charter schools, which now educate about 25 percent of the city’s roughly 200,000 students
* effectively shutting down the central office, which is already half the