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Philadelphia School Reform Commission chairman Bill Green declared on Monday that my teachers union needs to “share in the sacrifice”.
And then the unelected, unaccountable entity charged with school oversight for the fifth largest city in the United States – in a last-minute meeting that took only 17 minutes and entertained no public comment – voted unanimously to cancel its contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and demand new healthcare contributions from its employees.
Of course, Green’s words sounded awfully familiar: Republican governor Tom Corbett said the same in August, when he declared – not for the first time – that it was up to the teachers of Philadelphia’s public schools to fix the funding crisis that Corbett created through tax breaks for corporations, his refusal to tax Marcellus Shale drillers, the abandonment of an equitable state school funding formula and $1bn in budget cuts to education funding in Pennsylvania (in which poorer districts like Philadelphia were disproportionately hit).
Bashing teachers is an integral part of the political playbook of America’s most vulnerable governor: Corbett insults the teachers (and their union) in order to pit them against their own students, schools and communities. That it was more than just a personal bugbear became clear in June 2013, when we learned that PennCAN, yet another so-called “school-reform” group focused on vouchers, privatization, and the destruction of public schooling, had financed a “secret poll” that encouraged Corbett to attack the PFT in hopes of gaining support ahead of his midterm reelection campaign. (Not that his prospects for winning were any good – an actual, legit poll has Corbett down 17% with less than a month before Election Day.)
Starving the public education system and demanding that teachers personally make up the shortfall is not about the kids or the classrooms, or some considered ideological position, or even about budgetary savings. Cancelling contracts for people who educate your kids is about politics, plain and very cynical.
Why cynical? Because all of this – the systematic underfunding of schools, the cutting of budgets, the laying off of staff, the closings of schools to the point that the phrases “doomsday” and “empty shell” are commonplace to describe our educational system, this patched-together program of borrowing-and-advancing against our future and still cutting more services that our kids so desperately need – this was all intentional.
Our counterparts in surrounding districts do not have to contribute thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for the most basic supplies, like paper, pencils, even toilet paper, just so their students can have something beginning to resemble an appropriate educational environment. Those districts aren’t lacking in counselors, or nurses, or libraries and librarians, books and curricular materials – all while working with the neediest children. Their class sizes aren’t skyrocketing – with sometimes more than 40 kids per classroom – without adequate furniture, or textbooks, or space. Those schools in the rich suburban districts aren’t crumbling and sporting mold like it’s the newest back-to-school fashion accessory.
They also don’t serve a student population that is almost 86% non-white. And they’re not being asked to ante up to fix a problem of the governor’s making in a city where he’s expected to be voted out of office by embarrassing margins.
Green and the SRC say that the new, mandatory contributions to heathcare premiums of 10-13% are “not a reduction in salary”, though they’ll reduce the already-stretched paychecks of every teacher and employee of Philadelphia’s public schools. But not only do Corbett and his appointees at the SRC think that the educators of Philadelphia can’t do basic math, they also think we have amnesia.
Over a year ago, we offered to make the “sacrifices” that our elected officials demanded: we offered to take a pay freeze and make changes to our benefits, including making contributions to our healthcare premiums, totalling tens of millions of dollars. Those proposals were rejected out of hand – Corbett’s SRC refused to even met the PFT at the bargaining table to negotiate because to do so would have been to undermine their ultimate objective. They wanted this moment of political opportunity, and they wanted it in time for Corbett’s reelection. They wanted to present the revocation of our contract and the reduction in our pay to the citizens of Philadelphia (and, more importantly, the rest of Pennsylvania, where Corbett stands a remote chance at the polls) as though it were a foregone conclusion that our city’s educators are irrevocably opposed to the needs of our kids – that we wouldn’t have stepped up or sacrificed enough.
But to demand that the very educators who go to work and serve our kids every day be the only ones to pay for the mistakes of our political leadership is outrageous. To posit that we are a legitimate source of funding to cover corporate tax breaks is an insult not only to us teachers, but to the Philadelphia citizenry as a whole.
This is a lame-duck governor with no wins in his legislative agenda, who faces terrible poll numbers and the prospect of an election day haunted by the specter of laid-off educators, reduced services and skyrocketing property taxes as his impending legacy, unilaterally imposing unreasonable terms on a population his campaign advisers told him he’d look good being bad to. This is not even a Hail Mary for his campaign – it’s a “screw you”.
We hear you loud and clear, Governor Corbett. And it will feel damn good to return the favor in the voting booth, in the courts and, most importantly, in the classroom.
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