Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, April 19, 2011

The affairs of the Philadelphia School District have been generating a considerable amount of news as of late.  A bomb threat at the district headquarters, potential school closings, charter school fraud, IRS problems for the superintendent, are a few of the breaking stories. But the top story continues to be the District’s $620 million budget deficit. To deal with this gap, considerable cuts will have to be made to current expenditures.  This means that virtually all instructional and non-instructional programs will be affected and considerable cuts in personnel will occur.

Even when faced with this fiscal Tsunami, Superintendent Ackerman is still determined to protect her costly Imagine 2014 plan.  In particular she is intent on proceeding to create 10 new Promise Academies in addition to the 8 already in operation. According to the Philadelphia Public School Notebook the estimated additional expenses of operating 18 Promise Academies will exceed $30 million.

Most of this money will be used to compensate the staff of these schools for the extra hour per day they are required to work as well as an eleventh month to their school year. The revenue that will be required to accomplish this objective will have to be drawn from other program sources.  The price tag for the experimental Promise Academies is hefty.  Is it worth the cost, particularly when it will drain resources from other critical areas of the district budget?

Here are several possible options of targeted programs that the district might decide to cut in order to raise the thirty million dollars necessary to fund the Promise Academies.  The cost and number of positions cited were drawn from the budget requests for the current budget year. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, April 14, 2011

Last Tuesday I published a post that examined the misguided budget funding priorities of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  In the budget proposal offered by Governor Corbett for the 20011 fiscal year, he has suggested increasing the allocation to the state prison system by 11%.  His proposal also recommends a 10% cut to public K-12 schools and a whooping reduction of aid to state colleges of 50%.  In my post, I pointed out that these fiscal recommendations are exactly of the type referred to in a recent report released by the NAACP titled “Misplaced Priorities”.

Nationally, $70 billion is spent in a year to incarcerate 2.3 million people in American prisons.  Another 7.3 million people who are either on parole or probation, are also being monitored.   Although the population of our nation is equal to 5% of the world’s population, the prison systems of America detain 25% of the world’s prisoners.

“The majority of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails are people of color, people with mental health issues and drug addiction, people with low levels of educational attainment and people with a history of unemployment or underemployment.” (Misplaced Priorities, page 1)

During the last two decades, states across our nation have increased the amount of their discretionary spending in order to pay the cost of our seemingly ever-expanding prison systems.  This cost is one that is being seriously questioned by individuals and groups across a wide spectrum of political ideologies.

This PBS video clip features an interesting pairing of Benjamin Jealous, President of the NAACP and Grover Norquist a leading conservative advocate for tax reform.  The similarity of their views regarding the inappropriate use of tax revenues to pay for the cost of incarcerating large numbers of American citizens is noteworthy.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, April 12, 2011

In a recent published report, Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Ramsey expressed the desire to place Philadelphia police officers in selected public schools.  In doing so, they would focus on reducing violence in those schools having a high rate of reported serious incidents.  Most likely the institutions our elected leaders identify will be the same ones cited in a recent report, Misplaced Priorities, released by the NAACP.   This report examines the vicious cycle resulting from our nation’s failure to make funding for education a priority, while instead increasing funding for prisons.

Philadelphia was one of six cities profiled in this report. The information provided in this profile should be of concern to every citizen. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, April 7, 2011

Children in Pennsylvania have benefitted from better access to quality early childhood education since the mid 1990s.  Full day Kindergarten programs became the norm in Philadelphia during the administration of David Hornbeck.  In the years since, other districts throughout the state have followed suit. In the current school year, local Pennsylvania school districts are providing instructional services to 62,000 kindergarten students, thanks to the availability of a state accountability block grant.   Funds from this source also made it possible to provide pre-K instructional services to an additional 3,500 children.

The push to adequately fund early childhood education programs in Pennsylvania has deservedly received much attention from local educational activists and Governor Rendell during his term in office. This effort was rooted in the knowledge that high quality preschool programs can lead to greater school success for the children who attend them. Research has indicated that children who have been enrolled in such programs demonstrate significant gains in their language, literacy, and mathematical development.  The long-term economic benefits to the children who attend high quality early childhood programs are substantial.

Newly elected Governor Corbett wants to change all that, as indicated in his recent proposal to significantly reduce aid to local districts.  Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Field

Submitted by, Frank Murphy, March 31, 2011

Many School District of Philadelphia employees were appalled recently when they read the comments of Mr. Benjamin Wright contained in part three of a six-part series on school violence being reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  This particular article elaborated on several incidents in the last two years involving elementary school students assaulting teachers. Wright, who is Philadelphia’s Assistant Superintendent of Alternative Discipline, oversees student discipline in the school district.

According to the Inquirer report, Mr. Wright views violence in schools as being largely a result of teacher ineptitude.  He believes that the poor responses of school staff to troubled students “inflame rather than defuse bad behavior” of students.  To support this contention, Wright references the case of a pregnant teacher in Philadelphia who was punched in her stomach by one of her nine-year-old students last year.

“Pregnant teachers should know how to protect themselves. ….In this case, the teacher should have given the boy what he wanted at the time and then called for help.  If I’m in a school, and I’m a teacher, and I’m pregnant, I make sure I don’t put myself in harm’s way, because kids are going to be kids”. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, March 24, 2011

We live in a time where good public policy is seemingly being usurped by the ideological agendas of extremists.  In these times of financial crisis, bad ideas that would gain little traction during normal circumstances are increasingly being turned into awful government policies and legislation.

We can see this happening in Wisconsin where Governor Scott Walker under the pretext of closing a budget gap, has worked to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christi has similarly exploited the state’s budget crisis in order to decrease school funding, promote school vouchers, and launch an attack on the pension benefits of state employees.

In his 2011 budget proposal, Governor Corbett of Pennsylvania has earmarked drastic cuts to education funds throughout the state.

Budget crises, whether real or fabricated have been used recently as an excuse to launch all out attacks on teachers and other government sector employees in many locals across our nation.  The anti-democratic nature of many of these efforts to eliminate the rights and jobs of public service sector workers is becoming an alarming trend.

Such attacks are becoming real crises themselves as in the case of Michigan’s  Governor Rick Snyder, who is using his state’s budget deficit to take the privatization of the public sector to an entirely different level.

Here is an interesting account of his efforts to suspend the rights of the citizen’s of his state.

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Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, March 22, 2011

Can you create a sense of solidarity with a group of people who mainly identify themselves as anonymous when commenting on a blog post?  When you stand together at a protest demonstration with hundreds of other like-minded people, is it possible to have a meaningful and substantial dialogue with them?  The answer to both of these questions would be “No”!  That is, according to the organizers of TAG’S community budget forum.

In order to physically bring together and mobilize this virtual community, TAG has organized a town hall meeting on Wednesday, March 23, 2010.  The meeting will be held at Calvary Church in West Philadelphia from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.  This forum will provide another opportunity for concerned citizens and educational activists to voice their concerns regarding the direction of educational reforms in our city.  It will also create an opportunity for individuals who generally engage in on-line discussion to be able to meet in person. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, March 10, 2011

The general public should carefully consider the data recently released by the school district regarding the academic performance of the students at Audenried High School.  This information was not presented at the time that the decision was made to turn this school into a charter school.  It appears to be a hastily constructed response to the criticism that has been directed at the school district administration regarding their decision to turn this school over to an outside manager.

This reaction is almost identical to the one received by the Meade School community when it was placed on the Renaissance alert list in the spring of 2010.   It was a shocking announcement.  For several years prior to being labeled as a failing school, Meade had achieved Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on the Pennsylvania State System of Assessment  (PSSA).  Meade had succeeded over the course of this time to positively transform its school climate and to make considerable instructional progress. The staff at the school was upset and confused by this determination. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy, March 1, 2011

I was invited to speak at last Friday’s community protest rally at the School District of Philadelphia’s headquarters.  This event was organized by the Teacher Action Group (TAG) and endorsed by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT).  According to media reports, more than 500 demonstrators gathered outside of the district’s central office complex at 440 Broad Street.

The participants were enthusiastic and vocal.  The lineup of speakers: parents, students, teachers and community activists, was representative of the diverse members of our school communities.

It was great to see such a large turnout of people advocating for the well being of the children of our city.  It is evident that many of us share the same apprehensions regarding the reform efforts of the School District of Philadelphia.

I was proud to have been invited to be a participant at this protest.  To join with a large gathering of fellow citizens in an expression of our basic right to the freedom of speech was an exhilarating experience.  This is a feeling that I am sure I shared with many of my fellow demonstrators.  It isn’t often that we can publicly exercise the right to express our dissatisfaction with the manner in which our leaders are exercising governance over a public institution.

The organizers of this demonstration had requested that I speak about what great leadership should look like in a school district. In the few minutes that I was allotted, I knew that I would barely be able to skim the surface of this broad topic.  So instead of becoming bogged down in a theoretical discussion of leadership qualities, I decided to focus on identifying three attributes that exceptional leaders regularly demonstrate.  These are: respect, engagement and support.

The text of my speech is provided below . Read the rest of this entry »