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The Philadelphia Schools Partnership (PSP) yesterday announced that it has raised half of the $100 million goal for its Great Schools Fund. What readers might not glean from press reports is that PSP is an integral part of a broad and well-funded campaign to privatize public education in Philadelphia.
PSP received $15 million from the William Penn Foundation, as City Paper first reported, at the same time that the foundation appears to be cutting off groups like the Philadelphia Student Union that have been critical of privatization. And PSP's board is loaded with key wealthy figures in the privatization movement: Real estate developer Michael O’Neill, whose brother Brian O’Neill, according to a Daily News investigation, is close to a major Catholic Church-aligned pro-vouchers PAC; Janine Yass, wife of conservative Bala Cynwyd hedge-fund manager Jeffrey Yass, is among the state’s most high-profile voucher supporters who has together with his business partners spent millions to support pro-voucher candidates.
And PSP helped launch PennCAN, the state affiliate of the national reform group 50CAN. PennCAN embraces privatization more explicitly than PSP does, and supported an expansion of the state’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC), a voucher-like program that pays corporations back via tax credits for private-school-tuition donations. But the organizations work hand-in-glove: PennCAN executive director Jonathan Cetel works out of PSP’s Philadelphia office.
PSP has not invested in a single traditional public school, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan noted to the Inquirer.
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As presidential hopeful Mitt Romney blazes his campaign trail, he’s been calling on Republican governors from New Jersey’s Chris Christie to Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal for help. Not, it seems, invited to the party: Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Corbett.
A new Franklin & Marshall College poll might hold a clue as to why: Corbett isn’t winning any popularity contests these days. The proportion of Pennsylvanians who view him unfavorably has shot to 42 percent; just 32 percent hold favorable views. His job approval fell below 30 percent for the first time.
Corbett's public relations difficulties have prompted an early discussion of which Democrats might run against him in 2014 (it's a long list). It also means the governor might not be a helpful advocate for Romney's presidential campaign in this much-watched swing state. If Corbett does appear on behalf of Romney, Democrats might focus attacks on the governor's unpopular cuts to education and the safety net (the Democratic National Committee has already run an ad slamming Corbett's social conservatism, highlighting his infamous comment that women, who under a now-shelved bill would be forced to undergo a pre-abortion ultrasound, “just have to close your eyes”).
Presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan is headed to Philadelphia tomorrow for a 5:30pm dinner at the Union League, a club representative has confirmed. The down-to-earth event is $50,000-a-plate, according to society photographer and gossip maven Hugh Dillon.
The Union League's old money charm will likely provide Ryan a warmer welcome than presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney received during a much-protested visit to West Philly in May. Though I do suspect demonstrators will manage to track Ryan down in Center City.
Before dinner, the congressman will stop by the American Helicopter Museum & Education Center in West Chester. The event, before a backdrop of seriously manly and tough-looking aerial hardware, is billed (perhaps somewhat prematurely) as a "victory rally."
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Philadelphia has hired Wall Street consultants at Lazard, the firm paid to conduct a study that recommended privatizing Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW), to manage the privatization of PGW.
The city plans an initial payment of $2 million in fees to Lazard and a slew of other contractors, including investment bank M.R. Beal. The contract also hands work to the locally well-connected Ballard Sphar law firm and Ceisler Media public relations outfit, among others.
City Paper first discovered that Lazard planned to bid to manage the sale, and would be allowed to do so, in March. The contract could be perceived as reflecting one of a few potential conflicts of interest on Lazard's part.
Do we gush? Yeah, maybe -- but it isn't every day (or every year, or every administration) that the public suddenly gets access to vast sets of tremendously useful data, and some congrats are in order here.
This week, the city's Department of Licensing and Inspections, along with the city's Office of Innovation and Technology unveiled all kinds of new web features, including the ability to review a history of L&I visits to a given property. (Until now, getting this information required taking a trip to the L&I service counter at the Municipal Services Building or, in the case of a few lucky journalists, pestering overworked city officials or Council sources to run endless queries into city databases on our behalf.)
The site also features new mapping technology that lets users scan a map of Philly for permits, licenses, zoning variance applications, vacant properties, bike trails -- it's really quite impressive.
The site, for those data-heads already asking the question, does not provide the raw data for these maps and queries; hopefully, that will be made available sometime soon. And those looking for zoning variance data going back more than a couple of years will have to use the Zoning Archive (which should probably be pointed out somewhere on the new website).
But overall, it's a huge, huge step in the direction of transparency, access, and just plain old good government -- so good job, city.
Philadelphia's District Attorney withdrew charges yesterday against Khadijah White, the Occupier and Penn doctoral candidate who was arrested last March amid a spontaneous protest that erupted during a hearing on proposed Board of Health regulations for outdoor meals (the mayor had also announced the day before his proposed ban on serving meals in city parks).
White’s lawyer (and frequent Occupy defender) Larry Krasner, says that police were ready to testify that White had pushed a police officer, but that video of the incident showed nothing of the sort (Philadlephia Police declined to comment on the case). “Maybe they were all suffering from a mass-hallucination, but what they were willing to say ... is not confirmed by the video,” Krasner says. “Frankly, it sounds like a big fat lie to me.”
Krasner never got to make that case in court: the DA withdrew all charges, news that came right on top of a federal judge’s upholding last week an injunction against Mayor Nutter’s proposed ban on the serving of meals in city parks, the very policy that had brought White out to protest in the first place.
“I’m just really happy,” said a relieved-sounding White on Monday evening. “It’s great to have these victories back to back,”
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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is criticizing the Scranton Times-Tribune, Philadelphia Daily News and Associated Press for running an article last week that described an organization led by prominent neo-Nazi Steve Smith as a "white people's rights group.”
“It’s a shame that the European American Action Coalition is being described, ridiculously, as a ‘white rights group,’” SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok tells City Paper. “The reality is obvious from the group’s website. The EAAC is a white supremacist group that promotes well-known right-wing extremists like Derek Black, the son of former Alabama Klan leader Don Black and a racist activist in his own right, Canadian neo-fascist Paul Fromm, and the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society, which once accused President Eisenhower of being a ‘communist agent.’ A simple Google search would have made this plain to anyone who took five minutes to look.”
A Google search would also have quickly produced a photo of Smith, head shaved, standing before a framed portrait of Adolph Hitler. One of the state's most outspoken white supremacists, Smith is described by the SPLC as “a longtime racist activist with a history of violence and top-level ties to numerous white nationalist hate groups.”
“Oh no they didn't ...” is Daniel Denvir's weekly blog post on the past week in state politics. Philadelphians know precious little about the legislature or governor, but pretending that Tom Corbett doesn't exist will not make him go away. Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir.
Mitt Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate signals his desperation to shake up a race that seems increasingly tilted in favor of his opponent, President Barack Obama. It also promises to transform the presidential campaign into a national debate in which progressives are eager to engage: Should social safety-net programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security be defended or destroyed?
That debate will dovetail with the political conflict underway in Pennsylvania, where Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has slashed spending on education, and on programs for the poor and disabled.
Progressives are excited about this debate because the majority of the public backs spending on education and aid to the safety net. The “Ryan budget” (which House Republicans have now passed twice) would scrap Medicare and instead give the elderly vouchers that would not keep up with medical costs, cap and block-grant Medicaid spending to the states, and deeply cut spending on pretty much every federal program that is not the U.S. military.
Ryan's plan, according to polls, is unpopular. So was George W. Bush's failed proposal to privatize Social Security which, incidentally, Ryan pushed him to introduce.
Follow Isaiah Thompson and his column, Man Overboard, on Twitter.
This morning, I received a letter from a Philadelphia private criminal defense attorney who took issue with my most recent Man Overboard! column, about the Philadelphia Public Defenders Association "boycott" of three rooms in the Criminal Justice Center. We usually save this kind of feedback for the occasional "Letters to the editor" section, but I thought it was a timely, thoughtful response and might spark more conversation (maybe, even, another article). So I've reprinted it below.
A quick sum-up: for several weeks now, the Philadelphia Defenders Association has refused to staff three CJC courtrooms in protest of what Chief Defender Ellen Greenlee calls insufficient support from the city. The Public Defenders are currently 20-some lawyers understaffed, she says, and have have gone since 2007 without a raise from the city -- a bitter pill to swallow, since it sure appears that attorneys working for the Philadelphia District Attorney's office have been getting raises.
Indigent defendants, of course, have a right to an attorney -- and so the court has been forced by the boycott to appoint private attorneys, who receive a low fee to represent defendants who would normally be served by the Public Defender. As I noted in my column, I've been contacted by several attorneys (not just public defenders), who feel that some of these court-appointed private attorneys have been providing sloppy representation.
I wrote:
... The standoff is costing more than just dollars. Several lawyers — both public defenders and private attorneys — have contacted CP with stories of sloppy and borderline-improper representation by (some of) the private hires, who get a (low) fixed fee for cases and have very different institutional motives than public defenders. The stories range from lawyers failing to convey plea offers to clients to lawyers advising clients to take pleas on the fly, in front of the entire courtroom, to attorneys just not giving a crap what happens. “They have a paying client on [another] floor,” as one defender put it. “And that person is taking precedence.”
A wire story in today's Philadelphia Daily News refers to an organization led by Pennsylvania white supremacist Steve Smith as a “white people's rights group” and does not discuss Smith's long history with the neo-Nazi movement.
The article, about a dispute over an event permit, was originally published in the Scranton Times-Tribune and picked up by the Associated Press.
The original sin certainly lies with the Times-Tribune, but why did the phrase “white people's rights group” make it past editors at the Daily News?
“I suggest you call AP and the Scranton Times-Tribune,” says Daily News city editor Gar Joseph.
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