Inefficiencies of Scale
Some of the big news in Philadelphia education this week is the unveiling of the latest draft of a Facilities Master Plan to close some schools and reconfigure others in order to deal with population changes and the departure of many Philadelphia public school students to charter schools. The proposal would close nine schools over the next few years, including the high school that shares a building with the one where I teach. The proposal is much less ambitious than the draft of options that was leaked last June, and high schools in particular still have another study coming on how they should be structured. So part of the much anticipated news is that we should keep anticipating.
One thing that strikes me is how hard it is to juggle the needs of different parts of the city. The news is full of stories of “empty seats” and “underutilized schools,” but there are also a number of schools that are overcrowded because their particular neighborhoods are still relatively stable in terms of student population. It’s not a realistic solution to have kids from the Northeast part of the city commute to a building that has extra classroom space in South Philadelphia. But it’s also not realistic to expect the district to be able to spend a fortune in this political and economic climate to build new classroom space in the Northeast when every headline will talk about the “wasted space” elsewhere. Different areas have different problems, but because they’re part of the same district it’s much harder to solve either.
I was thinking about this in the context of the textbook and curriculum I’m using for 9th grade World History. It’s not a terrible textbook as textbooks go, but I don’t think it’s right for my students. The language and vocabulary are presenting an obstacle to the ideas and content, and when you’re already struggling to make the 6th Century Frankish kingdoms relevant to a hundred 14-year-olds, you really don’t need another obstacle. But this is the book that every school in the city uses, because the district decided to standardize textbooks and curricula for logistical purposes and to accommodate students who may move from one school to another during a school year. Neither of those are bad goals, but the result is a bad fit for my particular students. So once again I’m wondering if my district’s size forces it to adopt solutions that don’t quite work perfectly for anyone in the name of not failing miserably for anyone. And I’m not sure that’s an approach that’s going to create a major change.
Of course, it’s easy for one blogging teacher to say all of this. I don’t have a solution that’s politically and economically feasible for creating smaller, nimbler decision-making units that can better address specific needs. All I can say is that as a citizen I’ve starting thinking about how we need those solutions and I’ve started to try to think about what they might look like.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.