Congrats to Helen Gym

8 Comments

1. 

   BooMan on November 4, 2015 at 12:46 am

   Helen Gym advances, and Mayor Nutter inches warily back. She waves a thick stack of papers at him, each sheath a complaint lodged by parents lamenting the calamitous conditions in Philadelphia’s reeling public schools. There’s the kid with dangerous asthma at the school without a nurse on hand. The dyslexic, orphaned high-school senior applying for colleges with no counselor to lean on. The bullying victim who fled Overbrook High only to find it impossible to enroll at another school.

   “This is what we’re fighting against,” Gym tells Nutter. The Mayor is just a few yards from his office door, but he’s the one shifting his feet, looking to get away.

   Minutes earlier, Gym had wrapped up a news conference in the ornate Mayor’s Reception Room, where, with the assistance of City Council, she’d usurped a podium usually used by Nutter and his invited guests. Gym and her allies were there to tout their latest pressure tactic: written complaints designed to compel the state to meet basic education standards and shake loose some badly needed dollars for the district.

   “It would be nice to have your support, Mayor,” Gym tells him. Nutter issues a few noncommittal mumbles, cleans his glasses, and back-steps for the stairway. Gym shrugs. Powerful figures often look for the exits when she approaches.

   That’s what happens when you develop a rep as perhaps Philadelphia’s preeminent public agitator. Relentless, whip-smart, meticulously prepared and utterly fearless, Gym–a private citizen who works without the heft of any meaningful institutional support–has managed to build herself one of the city’s largest bully pulpits.

   And bully she does. Her foes are “hilarious and dishonest.” Education reformers are “corporate raiders” and “party shills.” Columnists she disagrees with are operating a “Corbett PR flack machine.” And that’s just a sample of a 10-day run on Gym’s Twitter feed. She’s equally relentless when face-to-face with her targets.

   Gym’s critics, and they are legion, consider her assaults out of bounds and unhelpful–and that’s sometimes true. But it’s a little rich to hear some of the city’s most powerful people complain that they’ve been wounded by a school parent. (Gym’s three kids attend Masterman and Central, two elite magnet schools.) More importantly, in a city where there’s precious little public questioning of authority, and where most movers and shakers would actually prefer that not much move or shake, Gym’s candor is bracing.

   It was Gym (and, she would insist, her allies as well) who refused to let the school district get away with covering up horrendous racial violence at South Philadelphia High in 2009. It was Gym who ratcheted up the political pressure on the patronage-dense Philadelphia Parking Authority, helping produce reforms that have generated millions of dollars for the schools. And it was Gym’s constant banging of the transparency drum that has led the district–and City Hall–to make public formerly secret documents, contracts and arrangements.

   A youthful 45, Gym is as ferocious as ever, and her public profile has never been larger. But these days, she’s laboring mightily not so much to remake the system as to preserve what’s left of it.

   Philadelphia has become a premier battleground in a high-stakes national debate over the future of K-12 education. On one side are the self-styled reformers, a group with not much patience and a thirst for bold experimentation. On the other sit the teachers unions and, more interestingly, activists like Gym, whose opposition to the reform agenda is layered and nuanced but boils down to an aversion to the dismantling of traditional public schools and a deep-seated mistrust of the reformers’ motives.

   All of which has meant that Gym now expends much of her energy resisting the potent forces working to transform the nature of education in Philadelphia. These days, Gym says “no” an awful lot. No to unchecked charter expansion. No to dramatic union concessions. No to the philanthropists using their checkbooks to influence public-education policy.

   The iconoclastic Helen Gym is digging in. So I ask her: Helen, have you turned into an advocate for the educational status quo?

   Her eyes widen.

   “That’s such fucking bullshit,” she says.

   link

   

2. 

   BooMan on November 4, 2015 at 12:53 am

   LOL.

   

   • 

     Phil Perspective on November 4, 2015 at 12:58 am

     Yeah, the Democrats won all 3 seats.  That’s a “holy crap!!” moment.  Go figure.  There were some rays of light but also some big blows in races around the country.

   • 

     Joelcr on November 4, 2015 at 9:20 am

     Western PA, represent!

   • 

     Joelcr on November 4, 2015 at 9:23 am

     Also, this gives PA a real chance to end its fucking gerrymandering — worst in the country. We’ll have to wait a few years, though.

     http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1-busting-the-both-sides-do-it-myth/

3. 

   rikyrah on November 4, 2015 at 9:57 am

   ot:

   uh uh uh

   know it’s true, but still.

   ……………….

   Half of black millennials know victim of police violence

   Jesse J. Holland, Associated Press
   Updated 4:02 am, Wednesday, November 4, 2015

   WASHINGTON (AP) — Years before the high-profile deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, more than half of African-American millennials indicated they, or someone they knew, had been victimized by violence or harassment from law enforcement, a new report says.

   The information, from the “Black Millennials in America” report issued by the Black Youth Project at the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, reflects starkly different attitudes among black, Latino, Asian and white millennials when it comes to policing, guns and the legal system in the United States. Researchers, who have surveyed millennials several times during the past decade, point out that the disparities existed well before the “Black Lives Matter” movement began.
   
   In the 2009 Mobilization and Change Survey, 54.4 percent of black millennials answered yes to the question “Have you or anyone you know experienced harassment or violence at the hands of the police?” Almost one-third of whites, 1 in 4 Latinos and 28 percent of Asian-Americans surveyed said yes to the same question.

   http://abc13.com/news/report-50-percent-of-black-millennials-know-a-police-violence-victim/1067557/

   • 

     Anonymous on November 4, 2015 at 1:40 pm

     More whites than Latinos?

4. 

   MtAiryGrl on November 4, 2015 at 12:01 pm

   My kid dragged me door-knocking for weeks:

   https:/scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/11146176_10153228664902629_81604900940516
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   Our favorite voter got off a plane that was delayed by flodding in Texas, hopped on a train in Philly and was met by my co-committeeman in a car to make it to the polls with 4 minutes to spare to vote for Helen:

   https:

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