Jeré Longman’s long piece in the New York Times is important reading. It’s partly about the tragic budget cuts and job loss in the Philadelphia school system, but it is told through the prism of the closing of Germantown High School in Northwest Philly, and the merger of their successful football program with the next door doormats at Martin Luther King High School. Will the experiment even get a chance?
Layoff notices were sent to more than 3,800 school district employees, 20 percent of the work force, including 676 teachers. Officials described what they called a “doomsday” possibility: classes opening Sept. 9 with no assistant principals, secretaries, new books, paper, librarians, art, music — or sports.
While much public attention was focused on how the cuts would affect the classroom, the fear of empty football fields and silent basketball gyms deepened the uncertainty, dislocation and chaos that accompanied this latest budget crisis in the nation’s fifth-largest city.
For now, they will have sports in the fall, but they have no money yet for winter or spring sports.
Mr. Longman tells his story through the eyes of Mike Hawkins, the longtime coach at Germantown who retired when his school closed down, the new coach at MLK, Edward Dunn, who was laid off and may have to coach for free this year, and a couple of the top football prospects, including Dontae Angus, a 6-foot-6, 320-pound tackle who will be going to the University of Florida if he can get good enough grades this year.
These are not good schools, and they serve very rough neighborhoods. A lot of the kids from Germantown are afraid that they’ll be the victims of gang violence in school, or even on the way to school. The two schools have long been sports rivals, but administrators are hoping that sports might be a unifying force. Considering the condition of the schools and the neighborhood, they need something to lift spirits.
Decades of demographic shifts, however, had left the enrollment at Germantown High almost exclusively black and poor. During the 2012-13 school year, only 676 students attended a school built to hold four or five times as many. Young people had other options now: charter schools and selective-admission schools. An entire wing of Germantown High had been closed.
Ten percent or more of the students were homeless or in foster care, said Alexis Greaves, Germantown’s principal in its final days. One-third had special needs. The school had a reputation for violence.
Slightly less than half the kids graduate, and many of those who do are motivated to stay in school by the sports programs.
Many Germantown supporters despaired that Pennsylvania could find $400 million to build a new prison outside Philadelphia while the city’s schools struggled for financing.
“They’ll spend $30,000 apiece to keep them in jail but not $10,000 to educate them,” Hawkins said. “What’s our priority?”
He did not want to consider Philadelphia’s schools without sports.
“You have a lot kids who keep their grades up and their behavior under control to participate in sports,” Hawkins said. “This releases a lot of frustration in their lives. If you don’t have sports, where are they going to go? Where is that frustration going to go?”
Obviously, not all kids like or are any good at sports. But the cuts hit at all programs. Considering their priorities, the state is probably smart to build that prison. Cuz, they’re going to need it.
Considering their priorities, the state is probably smart to build that prison. Cuz, they’re going to need it.
Then we, and the state, have surely lost our way. It’s why we are f–ked as a country.
Don’t get me started, man. Do. Not. Get. Me. Started.
More than 52% of Philadelphians are functionally illiterate. 8200 kids drop out every year.
Worst city in US for deep poverty. Most racist state outside of the south. And of course, a tea party governor and solid republican majorities in the capitol.
Starting to see a pattern?
I’d give Michigan that honor.
I wish I would say you were right, but PA takes the prize.
try spending a fortnight in the Detroit burbs.
I highly recommend a book about a school in my neighborhood – it’s called “Next Up at Fenway” by Steve Marantz, and is about a really good public HS just across the street from Fenway Park – Fenway High. It follows one student from the Mission Main subsidized housing complex on Mission Hill – one neigbhorhood over – but spends a lot of time with teachers and administrators as well.
The Boston School Committee is playing a sort of dominoes/musical chairs game with all of our schools – moving on into another, pushing the latter into yet another school where the displace yet another school, as our infrastructure crumbles. We are apparently getting a new building in Chinatown sometime in the next decade, but that hasn’t kept threats/plans of moving Fenway High to Mission Hill (displacing a really good grade school) from moving forward.
We MUST figure out how to reduce the power of right wing nihilists to thwart the working of our government, or else we just give in and become a nation of basically homeless people scrabbling around outside the walls of gated communities.
Is it a for-profit prison?
Plenty of politicians find plenty of money for new prisons!
Plenty of companies are willing to run them as private for-profit prisons.
Education?
Why pay for education, when it would affect the bottom-line of the for-profit prisons?
Fewer inmates = less profits.
This is the invisible hand, showing its very visible middle-finger, to everyone who’s not rich and powerful.
Rahmism metastasizing in every jurisdiction. The systematic destruction of public education in its highly industrialized factory form. Mergers and acquisitions prior to privatization.
I consider what education was in rural South Carolina when my dad was growing up almost a century ago. He went to a one room school of about 20 kids that had two teachers. (He said he went through the first grade seven times.) And then he went to high school for five years in a graduating class of eight. The high school had five teachers, included strong science, math, Latin and French courses. The high school operated with an elected local school board and superintendent and a paid principal teacher, who also taught a full load. The elected board ensured that the building was taken care of, finances were in order, and payroll met out of a county appropriation. County-wide there was a single county superintendent whose sole purpose was to ensure that the schools got their county funds and that any complaints were vetted before being taken to the county elected supervisors.
There is not a lot of overhead, compared to today’s school systems, in that system.
There were no sports at that school. To play sports, one had to move into the county seat and go to that high school. Only if one were white.
Schools for blacks had black teachers but were included in the white school districts so that one elected board supervised both schools. And that was where the race discrimination came in, in the allocation of resources across all of the schools.
In both schools, there was a curriculum of subjects, the district bought books for the white schools, handing them down the black schools when new editions came out.
But within the classroom, the teacher had broad discretion about how to teach and how to grade and in dealing directly and collaboratively with parents.
What we have seen is that the racists would rather destroy public education completely rather than ever have integrated schools. And that is true everywhere in the country now.
And the market no longer needs educated people, despite all the lip service about education being a way up. So the folks with the money, who a century ago were looking for sufficient skills to help with their businesses and would gladly pay taxes for education under the banner of progress, are now disinvesting from education under the lie of failure. It’s just the case that educated people are not longer useful in American capitalism; in fact they have become an hindrance and even a danger. Not to mention a financial drag.
The cost of education is no longer justified by the temporary or lifetime benefits.
All that is left is the rah-rah of high school sports, formerly a unifying force in small communities whether rural, urban, or suburban. (Two films come to mind about this–“Hoop Dreams” and “Hoosiers”) In many places they still are, but one-by-one the the stadium lights are being switched off. Sometimes after outliving the school they were extra-curricular to.
A relative?
If so, quite distant.