Don't agonize ... organize!
With so much turmoil to write about in the School District, readers may wonder why right now we are devoting an edition to organizing work.
All the changes in leadership at the District should be a reminder that an organized community can keep school reform on track while leaders come and go - as they often do. The communities served by our schools are not as transitory. The hopes, priorities, and needs of these communities should be driving the reform agenda, ensuring that no group of students is overlooked. Organizing helps bring community needs to the fore.
Organizing is a process in which people come together to work in unison toward their common self-interest. Organizing helps communities realize their rights as tax-paying citizens to place demands on public officials. By organizing, communities can hold officials accountable for their responsibility to remedy injustices. Organizing can provide a powerful and direct voice to communities that have been shortchanged.
With an organized voice, groups that are working for better schools have a fighting chance of ensuring that our leaders stay focused on community needs and that no community is ignored. As one famous organizer, Frederick Douglass, put it, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
While parents and students in Philadelphia may not have always been as well organized as teachers and other school staff, many groups are organizing to change that. For instance, the city has a solid nucleus for a youth movement around equity in education with two effective student organizing groups in Youth United for Change and Philadelphia Student Union.
Philadelphia was recently rewarded by a group of national foundations for the promise of its array of organizing groups. While this issue's focus is on those established nonprofit organizing groups, we appreciate that they are just a drop in the bucket. The large-scale need for more public involvement throughout the city calls for a diversity of organizing efforts Ð both formal and informal.
Every organizing effort starts small. In fact, organizing often begins with two or three people talking about a problem over the kitchen table. Bringing people together and speaking up is almost all that it requires. Whether your stab at organizing is starting a letter-writing campaign - or just joining a dialogue about how to make things better at your school - even a small group can make a big difference.
Parents change District budget
For proof of the value of organizing, look no further than the recent activism around the District's budget crisis. Organized parent groups sounded the first public alarm about the impending crunch and have been steering the District to minimize the damage from a potentially catastrophic situation.
The crisis itself should be a reminder of the importance of an informed, involved public. For four years, recently departed CEO Paul Vallas and SRC chair Jim Nevels had persuaded many people that they had miraculously solved the District's financial woes - claiming each spring that they were submitting "structurally balanced" budgets. All the while, they were overspending - with at least some of it in the form of lucrative, sweetheart contracts with the likes of Edison, CEP, and Princeton Review. Without enough independent scrutiny of their spending, they managed to dig the District into a deep hole.
When the financial mess started causing teacher cuts and reductions in schools' discretionary budgets last year, Parents United for Public Education emerged to hammer away at the message that schools must be held harmless - "Cut contracts, not teachers."
While effective in protecting school-based spending and class size, the parents' response was never simply a defensive one. Groups like Parents United, Home and School Council, and the Right to Education Taskforce were also insistent that the District open the books, explain the budget shortfall and proposed cuts, and allow for public discussion.
Their demands have resulted in a gradual shift in how the School Reform Commission does business. We have seen more budget information, more public hearings, more give-and-take with the public, and more explanation of business as it's conducted. The SRC even backed off from its stubborn refusal to regularly hold some meetings in the evening.
Parents also played a decisive role in convincing the city and state to chip in more revenues to help the District. Pressure from parent groups clearly made the difference at City Hall, and increased city funding in turn greased the skids for more school funding from the state.
If not for the organized pressure mounted by parents, we would be looking at the necessity of much deeper cuts, and we might still be in the dark about where all the money is going. To put the District's budget problems to rest, we'll need more of this kind of organizing to build an unprecedented movement for real school funding reform in Harrisburg and true transparency here at home.