This is what education looks like when you go full metal wingnut with the budget:
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.
For many, Tom Wolf’s election as governor is a turning point, a change that could finally address years of Philadelphia School District cuts so deep that a school has just 40 cents to spend on each needy student.
And though Lingelbach’s situation is the extreme, public schools around the city grapple with similar problems.
***The school in the Poconos where Gosselin worked as an administrator had four reading specialists, three math coaches, a full-time school psychologist and two counselors for 800 students.
“Things are just tolerated here,” Gosselin said. “This would never happen in Neshaminy.”
Those kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Major Major Major Major
That’s horrifying. Corbett was such a disaster.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I read that article earlier today. Horrifying. Their school district is deliberately being set up to fail by the usual suspects, who are looking to charter, loot and then abandon it, in that order.
ETA: I know “political junkies” that can argue for hours over Jeb v. Hillary, but have no idea who is currently on or planning to run for their local school board. And a bad/corrupt/teatard school board will have far more of a direct impact on your life than anything a president does.
PsiFighter37
And even though Wolf defeated Corbett at the top of the ticket, PA Republicans picked up seats in both the State House and the State Senate.
So yeah – PA’s still fucked. With that result, it’s a minor miracle the race didn’t end up being closer…just goes to show how many people Corbett managed to piss off.
Major Major Major Major
@PsiFighter37: Severe gerrymandering, I presume.
Baud
You can’t even purchase enough bootstraps for the students with $160.
KG
@CONGRATULATIONS!: it’s very true that local elections are going to matter a lot more in your daily life – the city council and county board of supervisors can screw with your commute, they have more control (in theory) on the police. but people only have so much time/energy/attention that can be spent on politics, to know what’s going on locally, you have to exert more time/energy/attention to know anything.
Walker
John Oliver’s latest segment addresses one of the major problems: lotteries.
satby
Saw that at Booman’s and totally agree with what he said:
CONGRATULATIONS!
@KG: I guess my point then would be that people are focusing on exactly the wrong end of politics; I’d be a lot happier if people knew who was on their city council, school board, water board, etc, and had no fucking idea who was running for President.
But we really want a king, and that’s where all the attention and money goes. We don’t even get a really good one, given how much personal work we put into the process of appointing one.
Mike J
The folks in the burbs will complain if any of “their” tax money is spent on city schools and simultaneously talk about how awful it is to have to go into the city where the uneducated live.
Mudge
Once upon a time in John Cole’s WV there was a level of state funding for education and there were “special levies”. The “special levies” allowed rich counties to fund their schools at an adequate level. The WV Supreme Court declared certain “special levies” unconstitutional because equality. So now no one can fund the schools adequately. Regardless, WV is becoming more and more sociopathic, so “special levy” bond issues are defeated more often because: they got theirs. Needless to say the state has no way to raise taxes to adequately fund schools. So the well-off kids all go to Linsley or Wheeling Catholic, not Weir or Grafton.
Turgidson
@PsiFighter37:
The Wolf/Corbett race was much closer than polls indicated. Polls were mostly showing a 20+ point blowout in the works, and Wolf only managed to win by 10. Helps explain the downticket results.
I’m still not entirely clear on why Corbett was so, so much shittier than Walker, Snyder or Scott that he lost by 10 even with a GOP wave, while those assholes (most appallingly, Rick f’n Scott) all won. Was it all Penn State scandal dumbassery?
Villago Delenda Est
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
This is what the education “reform” movement is all about.
debbie
@satby:
Monstrous, and rapidly sliding into third-world status.
Villago Delenda Est
@satby: Moloch demands sacrifices! All hail Moloch!
Roger Moore
@Baud:
If they can’t even provide their own bootstraps then fuck them.
KG
@CONGRATULATIONS!: the attention goes to president because it’s one person and easy to follow. you drive 30 miles in southern California, you pass through 7 cities – that’s a hell of a lot harder to follow. the media doesn’t have the resources (or time, 30 minutes local news), so we pay attention to the top
El Caganer
If you want to get a close-up look at how fucked up we are in Pennsylvania, read the comments in the linked article. And bear in mind that the commenters are from the Philadelphia area (you can tell because they know the neighborhoods), the allegedly liberal part of the Commonwealth.
EconWatcher
@debbie:
I’m 48, and I’ve been politically aware for about 30 years. I feel like the country has just been hollowed out since then.
There was a whole, comfortable, blue-collar world that existed when I was a kid in Michigan–the UAW, the Detroit Free Press, bowling alleys and skating rinks, Coney Islands. Now everything from that life is fading into nothing, if not already long gone, leaving pockets of outrageously rich suburbs surrounded by grinding desperation.
How did we get here? It’s so depressing, I can’t think about it for very long.
debbie
@EconWatcher:
This won’t take long: Reagan.
RaflW
Along with moar tax cuts, ever moar, Scott Walker is reportedly going to push his proposed drug testing for welfare thing.
Any libertarian who thinks the GOP is coming around on pot is nuts. Of course, libertarians just want to end welfare for poors anyway, but the willingness to use drug testing as an attack method should give those libertarian dopes a pause.
It won’t, because libertarianism is both a sham, and a refuge of pot-addled FYIGM noobs.
geg6
@Turgidson:
The porn sharing emails didn’t help either. And the polls the week before the election showed the race tightening to about a 9-10 point gap. Slashed education budgets, regulation and extraction tax free fracking and his assholish demeanor were also factors. On several issues, especially education, even the GOP-led legislature didn’t agree with him. They actually added to the education budget (not as much as needed though) because they thought the cuts were too draconian.
Ripley
Republicans: Education abortionists.
RSR
My wife teaches in the School District of Philadelphia.
It’s just insane how much this is an orchestrated plan to destroy the existing public education system here and hand off the students and funding to charter schools.
The sick part is the charlatans and useful idiots who call it the civil rights movement of the century.
Kay
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
This sounds nuts, but that’s why I found it oddly hopeful. The piece is positive about the school and the people who work there. It’s not a public school bashing piece.
The principal is portrayed as wanting to succeed and the teachers and parents say the school runs on “love”. They’re devoted and hard-working.
That’s a huge change. In 2010 or so, when “ed reform” was ascendent this would have been written very differently. It would have been all about lazy union teachers and “low expectations”. Funding wouldn’t even have been mentioned.
Kay
@RSR:
Ah, but you have the unstoppable Helen Gym and the best public school parent-advocates in the country. They fight. I admire the hell out of them.
If they lose their schools it won’t be because they rolled over.
d58826
@Mike J: Having grown up in the Philly burbs, this problem goes back decades. If Jesus would show up at one of the Philly/ country lines, the suburbanites would demand the National Guard be called out to protect them from the rebel rouser and his 12 thugs. This isn’t to excuse the current crop of thieves in Harrisburg but it is not a new thing. The ONLY thing the city/suburbs could agree on was the effort to keep the Navy Yard open and that was because so many suburbanites worked there. The south Jersey workers had a gimmick where they parked on the Jersey side, took a ferry to their jobs and since they never stepped off of federal land they didn’t have to pay the city wage tax. They did expect the city cops/firemen/ etc. to provide complete and courteous service when needed however.
Chester and Norristown are beginning to experience the same issues as the Philly school district even though they are in Delaware and Montgomery counties. Of course the also share one same glaring defect with Philly and that is most of the students have an excess of skin pigmentation. Probably just a coincidence
Elizabelle
Thank you for spotlighting this story. I had no idea.
Teachers and principals worry they are using 1970s technology to prepare children for the 1970s.
@Kay: I was wishing I lived closer so I could volunteer.
The parents group is buying math books and school supplies, not “extras.”
The kids are in a uniform of sorts — khakis and polo shirts, it seems. I’m glad to see that. Less trouble for the parents. School clothes can be expensive.
The reader comments to the Philly.com article were interesting. Some stereotyping, and a lot of community concern too.
Ruckus
Pretty hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when someone’s stolen them.
Judge Crater
Education is this country, like wealth and income, is being distributed according to the same flawed “free market” ideology that has spread like an Ebola virus in our national thinking and way of life. I predict that lower and middle class students will soon leave secondary school with considerable student loan debts, incurred in the hope of getting aboard the charter school train before it leaves the wasteland station of inner city public schools.
The underprivileged, in our new, corporate, privatized, voucherized education system will get what they can pay for. Which will be very little.
Violet
Caught a bit of some BBA America discussion about ISIS or Boko Haram or some other terror organization and how they kill or kidnap kids who are in school because one of their goals is to keep kids from going to school. The person giving the report didn’t go into why they want to do that, but keeping the population dumb has to be a goal. Just like our American Taliban here.
Pogonip
This is terrible. The school won’t even be able to buy restroom supplies. I hope a lot of angry parents show up at the next board meeting.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
This is ParentsUnitedPA twitter:
https://twitter.com/ParentsUnitedPA
They’re something else. I don’t know how they do it. They just have to fight for everything. Last year they didn’t know if their schools were going to open in the fall.
RSR
also, too, this today:
Pa. Districts, Parents Sue Over ‘Irrational and Inequitable’ School Funding
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/11/pa_school_districts_parents_su.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-TW
This is not the School District of Philadelphia. They already sued once, back in ~1999, which led to the whole School Reform Commission which has eroded the system ever since.
It is a variety of districts across the state, which is a good idea. We’ll see.
Linnaeus
@EconWatcher:
I’m a few years younger than you, but I also grew up in that world, and every time I go back to visit, it seems to fade a little bit more.
And the Freep – the supposedly liberal paper in Michigan – endorsed Snyder.
OGLiberal
I have a vacation property in the Poconos and read the local news quite a bit. A lot of the Corbett haters are wingnuts. Seems they either voted Wolf or stayed home because they hated Corbett so much. Corbett raised the gas tax by a considerable amount. Also cut education spending which – surprise! – led to higher muni taxes and/or school closures and staffing issues. He followed the wingnut script – raised a regressive tax (gas) and cut something that helps non-rich folks (education) – and folks hated him for it. One thing I do notice being here is that the local crime news almost always involves white folks committing crimes…hard to blame lazy, welfare teet sucking blacks and Mexicans. And there are a lot of law abiding white folks not doing so well economically. The Scranton-Wilkes Barre metro district, third largest in PA after Philly and Pittsburgh, is deeply Blue (politically), deeply white, deeply depressed, and deeply sad (recently voted saddest metro are in the US) and it along with the Philly and Pittsburgh metro areas, are the three lone fields of blue in a mostly very red (and very sparsely populated) PA. So not just a white thing….Lackawanna County went 70% for Wolf on Tuesday. In 2012 it went 63% for Obama. White folks in areas that aren’t vast acres of farmland seem to know the deal, at least outside the South. (Lackawanna County is 92% white) Dems can win with among white voters where a) they have a message (apparently, Wolf had one) b) GOP folks are terrible (obvious for Corbett, but how did Scott and, to a lesser extent, Walker win?) and b) white voters aren’t infected with an institutional/learned/generation racism that even kids in the South can’t escape.
PIGL
@EconWatcher: How did you get here? The former 0.01% never stopped wanting all the monies, and about 35-40 years ago developed a long term plan to make that happen. It has succeeded brilliantly, and nobody has the brains or balls to stop them. This is because they can not be stopped within the bounds of the political system. If you think they can, ask yourself what it would take to change the composition of the US Supreme Court…..and the prosecution rests,
Kay
@OGLiberal:
He’s like my dream candidate!
I’m particularly fond of “ending tax credits that do not produce jobs”
All this and he likes public schools. I may have to move to Pennsylvania :)
pluege
the wingnut way says those moocher kids need to work to earn their education – they can all be janitors in the school. Builds character like all those fine upstanding wingnuts suckin’ off the wingnut welfare teat.
burnspbesq
@PIGL:
So what’s your proposed solution?
PIGL
@burnspbesq: I do not think there is a way out. If I thought violent revolution would lead to a solution I’d be all for it but I do not think that it would work. Failing that I see no way to prevent A continued slide towards feudalism and eventual collapse,
Applejinx
@PIGL: So you’re saying you don’t like violent revolution but it’s going to happen?
kindness
Hey John….wtf is up with Joe Manchin? Now he’s in Politico saying Democrats can’t obstruct Republicans like Republicans did Democrats.
Why doesn’t Manchin just switch to Republican and get it over with. The man is a total asshole from my point of view.