The Truth About Underinvestment: Philadelphia's School Buildings in the Post-Vallas Years

• In Event: Informing Public Debates and Policy Making on School Finance: Critical Approaches

Abstract

How can critical school finance (CSF) as a framework help us comprehend the underinvestment in school facilities (Brunner, Schwegman, & Vincent 2021; Filardo & Vincent 2017)? In this paper we aim to apply CSF to school facilities by setting out three hypotheses (Jenkins 2021, Kass et al 2019, Sgouros 2015) and a state policy classification (Rivera 2017), using these to look at an historical case study of the Philadelphia School District’s facilities crisis in recent history (Kitzmiller & Rodriguez 2022). The main objective of our study is to lay out a clear CSF framework for school facilities and contribute to research in urban education focusing on Philadelphia.
Theoretically, we understand school facilities financing in the United States as predatory (Sgouros 2015). The predation can happen through the specific information channels and knowledge/value imbalances involved in school bond sales, as Kass, Luby, and Weber (2019) lay out in their study of Chicago Public Schools in the lead up to the financial crisis. Perhaps beyond predation, Jenkins (2021) shows how municipal debt is the “spider in the web” when explaining urban segregation and exploitation in US racial capitalism. While metanarratives such as neoliberalism, deindustrialization, and white supremacy are common large-scale frames he argues the bonding process provides specific agents, agencies, laws, policies, and protocols that are the material structure of these larger stories.
Methodologically, we look to Philadelphia for an historical case study to illustrate the CSF framework laid out in the first part. Looking at the facilities finance policy and outcomes during three recent superintendent’s terms—Paul Vallas, Arlene Ackerman, and William Hite—we can see the racial capitalist spider of municipal finance, predation, and imbalance of knowledges/values. Vallas’s leadership of the School District of Philadelphia began just after the state took over Philadelphia’s schools and replaced the mayor-appointed school board with the state’s school reform commission (SRC) in 2002. Their work began in Philly at the same time No Child Left Behind became the law of the land. The SRC and Vallas carved governance of the city’s schools under what they termed the “diverse provider model,” in which the District paid private entities to manage public schools. This model enriched external service providers, corporations, and corporate non-profits who received hefty contracts to manage schools and school supports based on the alleged failure of Black and Brown children in schools and the alleged ineptitude of a district seen as led by Black and Brown adults who couldn’t manage their own public schools. They decimated long standing neighborhood high schools with their small, boutique schools and created new schools, but when Vallas was succeeded by Ackerman and Hite, they closed 30 schools by deeming them underutilized and under-enrolled (Royal, 2022; Royal & Cothorne, 2021).
Given the dearth of research on school facilities finance from a critical perspective, the significance of this research is to fashion a specific kind of critical school finance framework—one focused on school facilities—and understand a key historical example through that lens.

Authors

• David Isaac Backer, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Camika Royal, Morgan State University
  Presenting Author