It’s not so much that Philadelphia’s schools are bankrupt, but that our politicians are are morally impoverished.
The number couldn’t possibly be right, Marc Gosselin thought: $160.
That was the total discretionary budget he was handed as the brand-new principal of Anna Lane Lingelbach Elementary, a public school in Germantown.
That’s all he’d have to pay for a whole year’s books, supplies, staff training, after-school activities, and incidentals — small but important items like postage and pizza parties.
“You can’t even buy groceries for $160, let alone run a school for 400 kids for a year,” Gosselin said.
Read the whole thing. Read about the kids with no reading specialists, the clogged toilets, and the poison ivy climbing in the windows. Read about how there’s no playground equipment or arts programming, but plenty of mice.
And read about the unelected, unaccountable School Reform Commission unilaterally -and probably illegally- canceling the contract with the Teachers Union, and then using that “savings” as a quick cash infusion for places like this. An infusion, I might add, that is in question as the Commission’s radical move has been halted by the courts pending a lawsuit.
It’s enough to make a man hang his head and weep. What a monstrous nation we have become. What horrible savages we are, throwing our own children into the garbage can.
“What a monstrous nation we have become.” …. Greed does that to people, throw in some fear and prejudice and we are close to understanding the makings of the poison kool-aide many seem to be dependent on.
Remember, it’s not the bullies that are the cause of this. It’s the nice, well-meaning non-billies who have not resisted these people effectively.
Pace Chris Hedges, the problem is the rotten liberal elite, who aren’t the monsters but are the cause of the monstrous, disastrous results all the same…
So the check, if it comes is going to get spent on… Google Chromebooks for Everyone!!!!
Ugh. Just ugh. The principal acknowledges, in the article, that the free online tutorials can’t do what an honest to goodness reading specialist could do, and yet his first answer for how he’ll spend a one-time check taken from the illegal raiding of the Union contract is “put a tablet on it!”
I teach the final teaching methods class that a particular subset of ed. majors take before they enter 7-12 classrooms in the greater Philly area to do their student teaching. It takes them a couple of weeks to realize what a waste of money the tablets are, even in the schools that ~aren’t~ falling apart and ~do~ have all the support staff they need. A tablet doesn’t do squat if the kids are spending their time checking instagram, and if the school staff don’t have the content knowledge, internet literacy, and pedagogical skill to use the tablets in ways that do more than what can be done with pencil and paper. I get that this principal is facing a one-time infusion of $46,000 that may or may not come, so it’s not like he can do any long-term planning or hiring based off of a one-time maybe-arriving check. But still, Chromebooks? There’s no other element of school infrastructure or teacher support or student needs more pressing than TABLETS FOR EVERYONE!!!
They’re probably a waste of money for middle class kids, but for kids with no access to computers at home, I find it hard to believe that more the exposure to computers doesn’t help. Even if it’s instagram.
In any case, 46k doesn’t buy you much in the way of staff. They probably don’t have a full time volunteer coordinator on a budget like that either. He’s in an ugly position.
The problem is that NO ONE KNOWS what the tablets will do. This whole “get the kids on computers” thing is crazy. I look around in restaurants. Parents are looking at their devices. 2 YOs are looking at their devices. No one is talking. Parents push kids on strollers. They talk into their cellphones.
It used to be that middle-class kids did better than poor kids partly due to the fact that they had better exposure to language. 3x as much, 3x better results. Not anymore.
Today, we see everyone on tablets. It could be that attention span will adapt to devices. I myself have a huge problem staying on task with devices.