Reaping What We Sowed: How Fixing Failed and Created Chaos

• In Event: Let the Fire Burn: A 10-Year Retrospective on Public School Reform in Philadelphia

Abstract

One of the recurring themes of the data I mined to write my book, Not paved for us: Black educators and public school reform in Philadelphia, was district leadership’s constant necessity of austerity approaches for funding. This was apparent in every decade examined in my book from the 1960s through the 2010s. The impacts of impossible budgets were felt in school buildings for years but became grossly apparent and exposed via the COVID-19 pandemic and its fallouts. For this panel, I will discuss the ways concentrated underfunding, overcrowding, and school building neglect combined with an historic system of stratified schooling in Philly’s public schools to create untenable health conditions for students and faculty that got worse closer to 2020. I will discuss the educators who became ill, whose illnesses were tracked back to the unhealthy conditions in which they worked and the students who became fatally ill in schools without appropriate medical staff. I will also discuss the uptick in violence perpetrated by Philadelphia youth in 2020 and beyond after being neglecting by the school system and the city in the early 2010s.

Author

• Camika Royal, Morgan State University