Please help Philadelphia: Poster child for disasters of corporate reform
Dear parents and PAA colleagues:
It’s taken me a while to talk about what’s happening in Philadelphia because of the destructive forces threatening public education in our city.
In case you haven’t read the news, Philadelphia’s Chief Recovery Officer – a gas industry executive paid $150K over six months – hired the Boston Consulting Group for a cool $1.4 million to create a “Blueprint for Reform”. The Blueprint sets out a five year course of action which calls for closing one-fourth of Philadelphia’s schools, 40 alone next year (64 total), placing 40% of students into charters, and dividing up the remaining schools into NYC-inspired “achievement networks” run by third party operators under a five year performance contract.
There are of course the standard union-busting threats, the exclusion of parent and community voices, and the consolidation of political interests, large charter operators, and
Standardized testing and scoring: driving out meaningful assessment
A teacher notes yet another damaging effect of the overwhelming amount of standardized testing and teachers removed from the class to score these exams in our schools:
Our last day of five ELA teachers out of building is tomorrow. Thursday starts the five math teachers per day. That only lasts one week. With normal unexpected absences we have had up to nine teachers out of building on any given day since grading began two weeks ago.
The DOE thinks that's okay. I had another testing consequence come my way today when an eighth grade parent asked about their child having multiple subject tests on the same day. I know that having tests on same day is not ideal, but I pointed out that it has been three weeks since some teachers could give
