Philly School Partnership's Gleason raises ire with “loser” schools remark
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP) executive director Mark Gleason set off a storm of criticism from public-school advocates after he called on the School District to close “loser” schools.
“You keep dumping the losers and over time you create a higher bar for what we expect of our schools,” Gleason said April 4 while speaking on a panel at the American Educational Research Association conference in Philly.
Last year, Philadelphia closed 24 schools in the wake of massive state budget cuts and amid the rapid expansion of charter schools.
Parents United for Public Education leader Helen Gym said that Gleason held “extremist” views on public education.
“Mark Gleason is not an educator, and I think that’s one thing that should be pretty clear. He has been a relentless promoter of questionable reform models that have really wreaked havoc in other places. And he has unprecedented access to the Mayor’s Office of Educa-tion, to the School District, to push his agenda,” she told City Paper.
PSP, which issues large grants to schools that it wants to see expanded, has been a lightning rod for criticism by public-education advocates since its 2010 founding. The group backs the expansion of charter schools and frequently opposes the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. It quickly became a major force in city education politics, thanks to millions of dollars in funding from the William Penn Foundation. Controversially, PSP’s board includes conservative figures Janine Yass, the wife of voucher-advocate and investment-fund manager Jeffrey Yass, and Republican powerbroker Chris Bravacos.
PSP and allied groups have also been criticized for failing to speak out against Gov. Tom Corbett’s funding cuts to public education, and for prioritizing charter-school expansion and eliminating teacher seniority instead of attacking the lack of funding for poor school districts.
David Hardy, the CEO of Boys’ Latin charter school, tweeted a defense of Gleason. “‘Dumping the losers’ means improving the schools, not eliminating students. That’s what we do now.”
Gleason acknowledged that it was a poor choice of words, but says he stands by his position.
“I do regret repeating a phrase that one of the other panelists, [Phil-adelphia Public School Notebook editor] Paul Socolar, had used just before me, about ‘dumping the losers,’” Gleason wrote by email. “But I stand by my support for that crucial element of a portfolio strategy, namely closing or transforming the lowest-performing schools and thereby gradually raising the bar for acceptable school performance.”
Socolar, however, was not endorsing the model, but describing its origins.
“The term is borrowed from Wall Street,” Socolar said in his panel remarks. “You hang on to the successful companies in your stock port-folio and you dump the losers. Proponents here talk about it in terms of replacing low-performing seats with high-performing seats.”
Gleason also called New Orleans, where charters took over most of the school district after Hurricane Katrina, “the great example of [a] portfolio” model, using a district central office that manages schools run by an array of typically private providers.
Superintendent William Hite, who also was a panel speaker, criticized Gleason in surprisingly strong terms — especially given that reformers consider New Orleans the portfolio par excellence and that the District itself has embraced the model.
Hite told his “buddy Mark” that he “could not disagree more with some of the comments,” and that New Orleans has seen mixed results for students.
Philadelphia Student Union executive director Hiram Rivera, a co-panelist, also harshly criticized Gleason.
“His comments showed an inexcusable lev-el of insensitivity for the community of New Orleans [which is] still trying to piece itself back together after Hurricane Katrina, and a lack of understanding and empathy for poor communities of color in which nearly all of these ‘losers’ reside,” Rivera wrote in an email to City Paper. “Mark Gleason and his PSP should be shut down and kicked out of Philadelphia.”
Socolar says that Philadelphia stands apart from other cities in the way private organizations and public officials support a private role for managing public schools. Currently, more than a third of public-school students attend charters, which has created a major financial burden for the cash-strapped District.
