Will the School District squander the $1.1 billion stimulus windfall?
Jul. 16, 2021
In recent weeks, we've seen a couple of red-flag stories that ought to lead us to wonder whether our School Commune—the recipient of a $1.i billion windfall from the federal American Rescue Plan—is really upward to this moment. Showtime came give-and-take that, despite such historic investment, the District had botched its summer school rollout. Manifestly, coming out of the pandemic, they'd prepared for a 40 percent surge of attendance and were caught off baby-sit when nearly double that amount of students—xv,000—turned out. Staff shortages are rampant and many classroom supplies like paper, pencils and smartboard markers aren't scheduled to get in until late next calendar month—correct when summer school is ending.
Nada to see here, the Commune spokesperson told the Inquirer. "It's new, it's taking some getting used to from all parties involved," Monica Lewis said. "It's non unlike activities y'all would see during the get-go of a new school twelvemonth."
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Let's be clear: Other cities seem to have had no trouble figuring out how to exercise summer schoolhouse. You really only planned for 7,000 summer students in a commune of 140,000, after over a year of remote learning? Merely who'due south thinking through these things?
And so came news this week that the District posted a list of new start times for the fall, with most high schools starting at 7:30am, at least half-an-hour before than in pre-pandemic times, which flies in the face of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that middle and high schools should outset no earlier than viii:30am. The Commune was met with howls of backlash and promptly removed the posting of new start times from its website.
A string of direction snafus
These unforced errors follow a string of direction snafus during the tenure of Superintendent Bill Hite, equally I've written most. Hite is a fine fellow and an able educator, but there will never exist B-school papers written about his management expertise. (My favorite example of asleep-at-the-switch District management happened last year, when it came to calorie-free that the employee Hite publicly praised for her expertise in digital learning was simultaneously belongings down a full-time chief academic officer gig in Ohio—you can't make this stuff upwards.)
I've written earlier about how Mayor Kenney'southward "back to normal" budget acts equally if the year 2022 was simply a collective fever dream. Well, are we about to experience deja vu all again when information technology comes to school spending? How confident are you that the metropolis's historic windfall of federal funds will be competently invested in a way that takes advantage of this opportunity to rethink urban education?
We've been down this road earlier. Back in 2009, coming out of the Great Recession, the Commune received in excess of $400 meg in stimulus funds. Under embattled Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, it promptly squandered information technology. The windfall was spent largely on salaries and continued consultants with their easily out; when the onetime funding ran out, the District underwent some iii,000 layoffs, including 50 percentage of fundamental office personnel and school nurses. (Incredibly, Ackerman said she never understood the budget numbers her staff provided to her. Again, try making this stuff upwards.)
"This is non lottery money, where you lot're going to purchase a big boat and a house and be fix for life," Uri Monson, the District'southward primary fiscal officer, told me when I defenseless up with him this calendar week. "I've been doing governmental budgeting for 20 years. The second hardest thing to do is to make cuts. The start hardest thing is to spend one-fourth dimension coin wisely."
After speaking to District CFO Monson, I was comforted, merely non necessarily excited. What's missing is some rethinking when it comes to how we educate our kids.
Monson is in his sixth twelvemonth with the School Commune; nether his leadership, fiscal dysfunction and drama has become a affair of the past. When he first started—after helming the innovative cipher-based budgeting revolution in Montgomery County under then-Commissioner Josh Shapiro —Monson raised eyebrows past releasing a five-year plan showing a $ane-billion arrears. It presaged a penchant for directly-shooting and an embrace of accountability.
Monson has since brought the District's financial house into order, even though it still suffers from a longstanding structural arrears that will at present exist papered over by the stimulus coin for the side by side few years. He says the District has a "framework" for how to spend the American Rescue Plan money. It consists of four buckets: $350 meg over iv years on "educational recovery" coming out of the pandemic, including summer learning and tutoring; $325 million over four years in facilities improvement and new construction, which will add to previously planned capital investments to a potentially game-irresolute melody of $ii billion over half dozen years; $150 meg over iv years addressing social and emotional needs of children, and nearly $100 meg in educator investments, such as giving more budgetary discretion to principals and doubling the reimbursement for teacher purchased supplies.
Decades ago, Monson cut his teeth working for then-Vice President Al Gore'due south Reinventing Government project, which shrunk the size of the federal government to 1960 numbers while the Clinton administration fabricated big investments in R&D and created xx million jobs. Borrowing from Clinton phraseology at the time, Monson has a guiding principle scrawled on a white lath in his District headquarters office: It's The Implementation, Stupid!
An emphasis on the nuts and bolts of smart policy implementation is comforting coming from inside a historically sclerotic bureaucracy. But Monson is the District's numbers guy—not its visionary. The framework he outlines seems fine, but appears to simply spend more than on a lot of stuff the Commune has already been doing. Is that enough?
"We need a Principal Plan"
"I've said often, nosotros need a Primary Plan," says City Councilmember Allan Domb. "You lot desire to have on poverty and abound jobs? We should be teaching fiscal literacy, we should be teaching tech, we should be teaching entrepreneurship—Commune-wide."
A few years agone, Domb enlisted the help of the Federal Reserve Banking company of Philadelphia and has provided financial literacy training to 178 public school teachers, which reaches some 5,000 students. Now, he suggests, the moment is ripe to scale such experiments and to think boldly. "We should be building and financing new schools in neighborhoods, which invests in our kids and raises the value of real estate throughout the city. But all of that requires long-term thinking, which there may non be an appetite for."
This calendar week, we gathered some educational disruptors for a terrific public discussion about reimagining teaching. Among them was Dr. Heidi Ramirez, the former SRC Commissioner who went on to serve as the main academic officer for Milwaukee and Memphis public schools, and who has returned to Philadelphia. She shares a business organisation that, by doing what has always been washed, many districts are in danger of not capitalizing on this moment.
"At a time when most of usa are looking forward to getting back to normal, the last 18 months have confirmed that our students and schools demand and deserve something very dissimilar," former SRC commissioner and Milwaukee and Memphis Chief Academic Officer Heidi Ramirez told me.
"At a time when most of us are looking forrard to getting dorsum to normal, the terminal xviii months have confirmed that our students and schools need and deserve something very different," she told me. "And we now have an opportunity unlike whatever other to significantly change the learning experiences of our most marginalized children. We can have schools that are acutely educatee-centered, where everything from the concrete space to materials, instruction, and hallway interactions reflect a systemwide commitment to rigor, relevance, relationships and respect. What nosotros need now is a new vision and aligned, ambitious plans—and non just collections of strategies, constituent concerns, and budget allocations—but clear goals and priorities (including things we say no to), and a pathway to get in that location that is clear about what we can do now and what we volition build toward. Large and pocket-size, public and private, urban and rural systems around the country accept already proven we tin do business differently. For the sake of our students, let's not get back to normal."
Ramirez went on to cite chapter and verse about what nosotros could be doing. Focusing on child literacy by training teachers in the science of reading and a robust "aligned Grand-16 career readiness" strategy, for case. Only I kept coming back to that phrase: Allow'due south not get back to normal.
That's the real danger hither, folks. That, despite the windfall, nosotros'll only keep treading water, only keep celebrating incremental progress. Aren't you tired of a graduation rate uptick from 65 to 69 percent over the course of Hite's tenure eliciting Mission Accomplished-like high-fives?
Progress elsewhere in the U.s.—and Cuba
At that place are school districts that, while not exactly revolutionary, seem to be open to trying new things these days:
- In Ohio, the Cleveland Metropolitan School Commune invited teachers to submit grant proposals for enrichment classes to teach during summer school. The District approved lxxx proposals, and now elementary school students are taking photography classes and high schoolers are learning the intricacies of finance.
- While Philly has patted itself on the back for (finally!) achieving a one-to-one ratio of student to Chromebook, other districts have targeted a ii-to-one ratio every bit the gilt standard, because they've learned that you just may be putting a student in harm's way by requiring them to travel to and from school when everyone knows they've got an expensive slice of technology in their backpack.
- The Guilford County, North Carolina, School District is building a new $35 million staff training and family education facility, and has recruited an army of math and science grad students from HBCUs; they work closely with the students and the students' teachers equally tutors, an peculiarly thought-through policy. In addition to benefitting from the bodily tutoring, Guilford County students of color are now in regular contact with classroom authority figures who look like them. And, from the District perspective, the program allows them to effectively recruit a next generation of teachers.
After speaking to Monson, I was comforted, but not necessarily excited. What's missing, every bit both Domb and Ramirez point, is some rethinking when information technology comes to how we educate our kids. And we merely need to look ninety miles off the coast of Florida for an inspiring case study.
I'one thousand not i to commonly sing the praises of Fidel Castro, simply in 1961 the Cuban dictator unleashed the Campaña Nacional de Alfabetizacion en Cuba—the Cuban Literacy Campaign. In the first year after the Revolution, Castro and Che Guevara made learning how to read office of a political move. At the fourth dimension, the illiteracy charge per unit was 11 percent in Havana and 42 percent in the countryside. They actually closed the schools and sent brigadistas—literary brigades of teachers and students—abroad for a two-week crash form and and then out into the peasant fields to build schools and teach. Students lived with host families, tutoring the adults and their children in reading and writing.
"Yous will teach, and you lot volition learn," Castro told the 100,000 volunteers. Newspapers carried photos of each one, student and teacher alike, contributing to the widespread sense of mission. (Today, in a museum in the western suburbs of Havana, give thanks you notes to Castro from formerly illiterate peasants are on brandish). Within a year, 707, 212 adults had learned to read and write.
The country'due south illiteracy rate dropped from 25 percent (the same as ours!) to less than 4 percent—within a calendar year. Today, Republic of cuba nonetheless has its problems, as recent protests propose. Only education, which is costless at every level, ain't i of them.
The Cuban Literacy Entrada was the most aggressive and successful reading and writing movement in earth history. Today, Republic of cuba's literacy charge per unit is 99.8 pct, higher than in the United States and Corking U.k..
Cuban Schools open at vi:30 a.m. and close 12 hours later, providing morning and after-school care. There is no truancy and inappreciably any misbehavior. Teachers make house calls if kids are too ill to make it to school. Cuba spends 10 per centum of its budget on didactics, compared to 2 percentage of the Usa' federal upkeep. The result is that 60 percent of Cubans accept some level of higher education.
The Cuban Literacy Campaign was the most ambitious and successful reading and writing motility in world history. Today, Cuba's literacy rate is 99.8 pct, higher than in the The states and Bully Great britain. True, information technology hasn't led to economical growth. In this country, we tend to think of teaching as the primal to expanding opportunity. Merely Cuba is mired in poverty despite its stellar didactics system. Turns out, education isn't plenty; free markets are as well needed to create jobs.
Simply think about what Castro did in 1961. Patently, I doubt that Domb, Ramirez and other civic leaders would be on board for replicating the particulars of the Cuban experiment, merely might there be an object lesson for us in it still? Castro seized on a moment full of revolutionary fervor and changed the course of what educational activity was and ought to be in his country.
At that place wasn't much that ol' Fidel and John F. Kennedy agreed on, but in the then-senator'southward 1959 remarks at the convocation of the United Negro College Fund in Indianapolis, he said, "When written in Chinese, the give-and-take 'crisis' is equanimous of two characters—i represents danger and i represents opportunity."
Kennedy was suggesting that, throughout our history, times of crisis take always sparked a heightened appetite for big ideas. Remember of it: FDR's social programs, LBJ's civil rights laws and fifty-fifty George W. Bush's creation of the Department of Homeland Security were all examples, to varying degrees, of leadership in uncertain times striving to meet its moment with disrespect and ingenuity.
Wouldn't it be cool—and an inspiring bulletin to our students—if Philadelphia thought and acted the same way?
Header photograph courtesy of Philadelphia City Council 
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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/school-district-squander-billions/