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The Pennsylvania Department of Education has made it easier for charter schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on standardized tests, in what seems like an effort to make them look better than traditional public schools.
Public schools are evaluated by whether they meet certain test score targets in each grade tested. Under the changes, implemented by Education Secretary Ron Tomalis without federal approval, charter schools would only have to meet those goals in one of three groupings of grades: 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. This means that a charter school's 3-5 and 6-8 graders could perform abysmally as long as high schoolers scored well.
An Allentown Morning Call investigation found that the new scoring method may provide a false impression that charters outperformed traditional public schools last year. A 2011 Stanford University study found that charters performed worse over all.
This isn't the first time the administration of Republican Governor Tom Corbett has been accused of giving charters special treatment, as City Paper reported last month. A new state law requiring that test scores be included in teacher evaluations only applies to teachers at traditional public schools--and excludes charters. So much for accountability.
The quiet changes made to charter school evaluation is particularly striking given that public school test scores plummeted last year. Secretary Tomalis credited his crackdown on standardized test cheating. But the cheating was most likely prompted not by lax rules, but by the increasingly high stakes of standardized tests. And others, including a member of his own advisory committee, contradicted his assertion that major budget cuts to education had not impact. Gov. Corbett's cuts fueled the elimination of 3,800 teacher and staff positions in districts statewide.
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The woman who was punched in the face by Philadelphia Police Lt. Jonathan Josey has a middling criminal record, according to Philadelphia Magazine's Victor Fiorillo: a DUI, theft and “drug charges.”
“Last weekend in North Philadelphia, Philadelphia Police Lieutenant Jonathan Josey struck 39-year-old Ida Guzman with a single punch that has now been seen around the world,” Fiorillo writes. “But it wasn’t the first time that Guzman had a run-in with the police.”
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Activists are organizing a protest against police brutality in the wake of a sensational Puerto Rican Day police beating: Friday, noon, at Philadelphia City Hall.
The protest, organized on Facebook with no group claiming responsibility, declares: "We, Puerto Rican women residents of Philadelphia repudiate the violent police attack against one of our sisters, Aida Guzmán, during the Puerto Rican Day Parade last Sunday, September 30."
Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey announced yesterday that he would fire Police Lt. Jonathan Josey, who was captured in a now-infamous YouTube video punching 39-year old Aida Guzmán in the face. The Facebook page urges protesters to bring signs and Puerto Rican flags.
The Fraternal Order of Police has spoken out against the firing.
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Lawyers for the poor and disabled have filed suit against Republican Gov. Tom Corbett's cuts to the society safety net, including the elimination of $205-a-month General Assistance payments that supported 68,000 Pennsylvanians who are disabled, recovering from addiction, and victims of domestic violence. They are also challenging a provision of the law, Act 80, that creates a pilot project rolling line-item social-service funds into block grants, which advocates charge will pit providers against one another ― especially since the block grants were initiated as part of a 10-percent overall cut to social service funding.
The plaintiffs argue that Act 80 violated the state constitution by making changes to seven separate state programs in a single omnibus bill; that the legislature did not spend the three days debating the changes as required by the constitution; that the block grant illegally allows counties to spend money on services other than what the legislature directed; and that it is being implemented without appropriate legislative oversight.
“All we are looking for is a fair and level playing field,” according to a statement from Michael Froehlich, an attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. “If Pennsylvania really wants to eliminate General Assistance, a last-resort safety-net program for nearly 70,000 people with disabilities who are unable to work, it ought to be done lawfully and consistent with our state Constitution.
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Whether you take a shot each time Obama utters “let me be clear” or Romney touts “job creators,” presidential debates are one of the few moments in national politics that inspire drinking for not purely depressive reasons. Sadly, Pennsylvania candidates running for U.S. Senate and Attorney General have yet to debate. It turns out that substantive discussion, much like third parties and independents, have little place in our state's democracy.
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Relentless and accurate media coverage was decisive in bringing about the judicial defeat of Pennsylvania's voter ID law. Civil rights and civic groups organized and highlighted how the poor, non-white and elderly would be disproportionately impacted by the controversial measure, which required the presentation of photo identification to vote. But the media, oftentimes hamstrung into he-said-she-said reporting by accusations of “liberal bias,” played a critical role by doing their jobs. And doing them well.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporters Bob Warner and Angela Couloumbis wrote what must have been dozens of stories on the subject. Columnists Annette John-Hall and Monica Yant Kinney chronicled the law's personal stories and political absurdities. Daily News and Inquirer editorials frequently hammered the measure. Dave Davies at WHYY skewered brazen state Republican efforts to willfully misinterpret Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt's report on “voter fraud.” Radio Times had (I believe) three six shows entirely dedicated to the subject.
Reporters covered community education efforts, the twists-and-turns of the legal challenge, the long-long waits and employee confusion at PennDOT, and the state's increasingly comical efforts to make the law seem less burdensome. For the record: the Secretary of State, desperately scrambling before a potent legal challenge, changed requirements for acquiring voter ID four separate times, ultimately only requiring that someone basically walk in and ask for one. The story received extensive coverage in the national media, from The Nation and Daily Show to the Washington Post and New York Times.
Last May, with little fanfare – with no fanfare at all, in fact – the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed HB2224, a bill which, on its face, made it easier for municipalities to sell off unwanted/unused land.
That, at least, was the purported purpose of the bill – and that's what several conservation-minded Pennsylvania lawmakers understood the bill, which was sponsored by Republican State Rep. Adam Cutler, to do. The bill passed the House unanimously, without dicussion or debate.
Conservationists and some lawmakers are now saying that might have been a mistake.
According to various conservation groups (and hunting clubs) around Pennsylvania, the bill's real effect (and maybe purpose) is to strip away a protection long held by city and town parks: a requirement that any sale of such public park lands be approved in Orphan's Court. HB2224, these groups say, would strip that protection and give city officials the ability to sell off parks willy nilly.
Philadelphia Deputy Mayor for Environmental and Community Resources and Parks & Rec Commissioner Michael DiBerardinis says that the bill, if it in fact does what its opponents say it does, "is ia disaster. A lot of this land was donated and bought with the assurance that these gifts [were] for perpetuity. ... This bill basically opens the door for local government to dispose of parkland based on a whim."
And that, say some state reps, isn't what they meant to vote for.
Take Rep. Kate Harper, a Republican representative from Montgomery County, and well regarded among land conservationists. Harper, like the rest of her colleagues, voted “yes” on HB2224 because “it appeared to me that parkland was an exception to the bill.”
But after re-reading the legislation on the phone with City Paper, Harper admitted that “I now believe that maybe the bill was written wrong.”
State Rep. Greg Vitali, a staunch environmentalist who lead the House campaign to impose a moratorium on the leasing of state forests for natural gas drilling – and who voted “yes” on HB2224 – appears to be having a similar moment of buyer's remorse.
“If you read the bill on its face, there is really no language to alert you that there is any problem,” says Vitali. But now, he says, “there seems to be a uncertainty about how broad, how much of a problem this is for people who value parkland in municipalities.”
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Gov. Tom Corbett quietly appointed Republican City Commissioner Al Schmidt to the Philadelphia Parking Authority board on Friday, delivering a boost to insurgents taking on the Republican Party establishment led by Michael Meehan. The PPA has been known as a hotbed of Republican patronage since then-state Rep. and now-prison-inmate John Perzel orchestrated a state takeover in 2001.
“On the list of people Michael Meehan would not like to see on the Parking Authority Board, Al Schmidt would be on the top,” says Matthew Wolfe, the Republican 47th Ward leader and a lead dissident. “There was an agreement between the Republicans and the Democrats for some sharing of that patronage. ... Over time, the Democrats took it over. And then John Perzel got a bill passed and basically put it under his control. And then the Republicans' began to share again in that patronage.”
Republican politics in Philadelphia are defined by a split between reformers, who complain about party decline and patronage, and the party establishment led by Michael Meehan (technically the party's “legal counsel,” he is the third generation of Meehans to run the city party). Vito Canuso Jr., an attorney and establishment candidate, was voted party chairman in 2010 in an election later overturned by the state party. In May, the insurgents elected Rick Hellberg chairman. But Meehan supporters boycotted the meeting. Both men claim to be chairman.
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The bitterly contested Chicago teacher's strike is over and both sides have declared victory. But in a little noticed statement, The U.S. Conference of Mayors has announced that it backed the city's tough fight against the union, “strongly commend[ing] Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for achieving an historic education contract” and “commend[ing] Mayor Emanuel for his commitment to the children in his great city.”
This afternoon, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a long-anticipated decision regarding Pennsylvania’s controversial requirement that voters bring state-issued photo IDs to polling places. But if you were expecting lofty speeches you were to be disappointed.
The issue at hand turned out not to be what either side framed it as being about — electoral integrity on the one hand, the sacredness of the right to vote on the other; the right of states to oversee elections as they see fit versus the historical need to protect citizens from targeted disenfranchisement; a principled offense over the potential for voter fraud versus a mathematical defense over the likelihood of disproportionate effects on poor, old and minority voters.
No, the main problem the court identified with Pennsylvania's Act 18, supported almost exclusively by state Republicans, was the very thing Republicans in general say they most despise: bureaucracy, government ineptitude and over-regulation.
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