Here is my testimony from today's City Council Hearing on School Closings in Philadelphia. Teacher Action Group organized a panel of 4 classroom teachers from across the city to speak on the impact of the proposed closings and our suggestions for solutions to the current education disaster the we find ourselves in.
My name is Anissa Weinraub, and I am in my 7th
year teaching in the School District of Philadelphia. I am a proud member of the Teacher Action
Group and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and am also an active part
of the PCAPS coalition to save our public schools.
Please, allow me to first say THANK YOU for
hearing the true feelings of so many of your constituents across the city, and
voting on a Resolution for a Moratorium on School Closings. It is absolutely a crucial first step, and
reveals to all of us the council’s commitment to our neighborhood schools as
important hubs for community health and security.
My question to us all today – you as elected representatives, and all of us
an as engaged civil society – is: what will be our next step? I am hoping that it is a collective effort to
go after the resources we need.
Allow me to offer a reflection I have gained
from my years of teaching: As a teacher, my students learn infinitely more from
my ACTIONS than my WORDS.
Young people can see when those words and
actions don’t line up, and they will not be shy about telling you. For example, if I say that reading is
important, but then my school has no books in the library or I only teach short
excerpts from test-prep curricula, then my words end up falling short because
I’m not actually SHOWING them with my actions that reading is something of
value. So I work hard to make sure my
words and actions are aligned.
The same thing, I think, can be applied to
our words and actions as school leaders and elected officials. We can tell our young people to “stay in
school” and “stop the violence” and that “education is the key to their
futures,” but we also must take concrete action to SHOW that we value their education,
our city’s safety and their futures, and so should they.
Right now, the actions of many adults in
decision-making seats are not teaching our young people that we care about
them. In fact, we’re showing them quite
the opposite.
Over the past 2 years, we have had our public
school budgets slashed by $1Billion from the state level. Those who have been elected to “lead” are
vigorously disinvesting in our communities by underfunding our schools, and
forcing our local District to shut down our schools or hand them over to the highest
bidder, taking away the vital relationships that have been built between adults
and young people, expecting us to teach and learn in overcrowded classrooms, to
do more with less, and forcing us into shallow, scripted curriculum in order to
chase test scores, instead of encouraging real student-centered, engaging and
participatory learning.
But this doesn’t have to be the lesson we
teach the young people of Philadelphia about what they’re worth. We can make different choices that show them
they are our priority and we won’t settle for less than what they deserve.
In Philly, it feels hard to stomach the chorus
that “there is no money” when the glow of Comcast’s glorious LED screen lights
up 17th street or the University of Penn continues to acquire
property in my neighborhood, when the Department of Corrections’ budget
increases and Natural Gas keeps being drawn out of the earth.
So, I have come here today to ask you,
members of the City Council, to take the next step. Show us your continued moral leadership, and help us to get the resources our
city’s schools so desperately need, so that we don’t have to throw our
communities into chaos through massive school closures, and so that we can
actually redesign our schools to meet our students’ true needs.
Help us raise hundreds of millions here in
Philadelphia:
1. by
taxing major center city commercial real estate holders and corporations that
don’t pay their fair share.
2. by
taxing the Mega non-profits on their real estate holdings.
And then join with us, your constituents, and
let’s go after the money in Harrisburg together. Let’s use your political muscle and our
strength in numbers of teachers, parents, students, and community members, and
let’s go get the money that our young people deserve. If you lead, I promise you that thousands of
Philadelphia residents will follow.
And then we will truly be aligning our
actions with our words, as we put down our collective foot and fight for fully
and equitably funded public schools, so that our young people can be prepared
to build a future which prioritizes human dignity over corporate greed, a
future where the suggestion of selling out our communities to balance a budget
will never again be on the table.
That
will be the most profound lesson we could ever teach.
