Doing and Undoing: How the School District of Philadelphia Came Undone, 1967-2013

• In Event: Philly Under Fire: Counternarratives on School Reform, Pedagogy, and Community Voices

Abstract

This paper presents Black educators’ counter narratives about school reform in Philadelphia since 1967, through seven superintendents and a state takeover of the city’s schools. It explores power relations and disjuncture between the goals, assumptions, and rhetoric of school reform in Philadelphia as expressed through its policies, politics, and practices. It uncovers how Black educators’ perceptions of SDP combined with their interpretations of the historical, social, and political contexts, influenced how they defined their professional situations, and interpreted the culture of the District, how they performed their roles, and how school reform has been attempted, enacted, and thwarted in SDP.
Critical race theory (CRT) is the epistemological lens through which this research examining the experiences of Black educators within an urban school district engaged in constant reform is examined. Counter narratives and story-telling are essential to CRT (e.g. Milner, 2007; Delgado, 1990; Bell, 1983). People make sense of their lives through the stories they tell about them. Identities are socially and historically constructed, context matters, and one needs a narrative in order to process one’s identity and to make sense of the world (Bruner, 1991; Bruner, 1998; Vila, 2000).
A phenomenological, historical ethnography approach was used. Separate, semi-structured, interviews were conducted of 20 Black educators. To corroborate newspaper accounts and Black educators' stories, five community members who had worked in or alongside SDP were also interviewed.
Rorrer, Skrla, and Scheurich (2008) advocated research that uses longitudinal data-rich case histories that capture the social, political, and economic contexts of districts. This paper builds on the work of Cuban and Usdan (2003), Tyack and Cuban (1995), Foster (1990), and Dingus (2006) by focusing on educators located between school reform policies and their intended outcomes; by demonstrating how the professional situations of Black educators are influenced by the policies and politics of the school and school district in which these educators work. It also presents Black educators' counter narratives of power relations and disjuncture between the goals, assumptions, and rhetoric of a school district engaged in constant reform.
This work began with the assumption that the experiential knowledge of Black educators as central to understanding the sociopolitical context of urban school systems. These counter-narratives contradict nostalgic memory and master narratives of education as the great equalizer and public schools as the vehicle of social mobility. Rorrer et al. (2008) advocated conducting research of districts that would examine the complexity and interrelatedness of their various components over time to capture the social, political, and economic contexts of districts. This paper argues that SDP is peculiar, unforgiving, and deeply politically entrenched. Its politics are complicated by issues of race and insider-outsider tensions and are compounded by state politics and the national political landscape. The politics are inter-racialized and intra-racialized because of the context of the city, the composition of the students in the District, the history of the District, and the limited funds of the District. No educator is immune to the politics that plague and thwart attempts at reform in SDP.

Author

• Camika Royal, Loyola University Maryland