Photo: Lisa Haver
When attending any meeting of Philadelphia’s Board of Education, but especially the Goals and Guardrails meetings, continual reality checks are a necessity. As the Trump/Musk administration in Washington moves to trade in democracy for authoritarianism, to purge civil service employees and replace them with political loyalists, to dismantle the Department of Education and threaten the elimination of protection for LGBTQ students and programs for students with special needs, the board sticks its collective fingers in its ears and la-la-las through two hours of analyzing standardized test score data.
After a lengthy presentation from members of Superintendent Tony Watlington’s cabinet on Reading test scores gathered after an overhaul of the K-12 curriculum, most board members offered thanks to the superintendent and his staff, with board member Joan Stern entreating them to “keep doing what you’re doing”. Questions were so amorphous as to be meaningless, such as asking how the district can be more “intentional” when teaching children to read. None of the board members raised concerns about 3rd graders having to take PSSAs, Benchmarks, Star assessments, and tests for report card grades. No one questioned the cost of the new curriculum, especially on the heels of a brand new Math curriculum. Nor did anyone ask the superintendent, when he says that “research suggests” that the Science of Reading-based curriculum is better than the previous one, to cite specific studies. Written testimony about the new curriculum, sent in by an award-winning high school teacher and parent of a district middle school student, related the curriculum’s almost exclusive use of books by “dead white men” and the “army” of people from 440 who “relentlessly patrol for compliance”. That elicited no reaction from any member of the board.
One gets the feeling that board members may consider raising any criticism or asking a pointed question of the superintendent to be, well, gauche.
Board President Reginald Streater spoke of his role as a parent in teaching his children to read and said that the district must cultivate a “life-long love of reading”. Yet the Board of Education, reinstated after seventeen years of state control, has done nothing in six years to restore school libraries with Certified School Librarians, with fewer than five now working in the district.
Superintendent Watlington, as he does at every board meeting, repeated his (inaccurate) assertion that the most important factor in a child’s learning is having a high-quality teacher. Yet his administration has made no move to lower class size, which remains, after decades, at 33 students in a regular classroom. Kindergarten teachers would be much more effective if the district restored their classroom aides, who were eliminated during the Hite administration.
Watlington told the board that “we are all in this together”. Streater repeated his claim that the board cares what parents and community members think. Yet the board has gone to court to fight challenges to its speaker suppression policies that limit the number of public speakers and cut their time by a third. At the board’s last action meeting, members of the public were denied admission even though the auditorium was half empty. Only after APPS members interrupted the meeting were they finally admitted.
In my testimony, I read from a letter APPS sent to the board in January that asked that the schedule of all meetings of the Facilities Team committee, which will be making recommendations on school closings to the board, be posted on the district website, and that the meetings be open to the public and accept public testimony. President Streater’s reply: “No comment.”
I also related a comment made just hours before the meeting by newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in which she equated the teaching of African-American history with “radical indoctrination” and declined to say whether schools that taught it would be defunded. McMahon also said that schools with clubs that focused on students “with a particular racial or ethnic identity” may be violating one of Trump’s executive orders. None of the board members commented.
Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is carrying out a purge of federal employees. How will that affect federal grants that fund district programs? News stories report on Hispanic families in many cities keeping their children home as the president’s deportation offensive ramps up. People are afraid, and rightly so. They are afraid for their children’s future, for the safety of their families. Teachers are looking over their shoulders for the enforcers of the latest curriculum.
It seems that the one thing that Philadelphia’s Board of Education fears most is taking a stand.
Lisa Haver is a former Philadelphia teacher and co-founder and coordinator of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools (appsphilly.net).
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