While no one looks good in Wednesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer story about Noreen Timoney’s Evergreen Solutions contract with the School District (see
href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/10198016.html"> http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/10198016.html), there’s clearly one big loser – the students and families in the District.

There’s no end to the irony of a $700,000 contract that went nowhere, but the more important lesson is the insight this gives us into a massively contracted out system with no capacity to monitor the contracts that are supposed to monitor it. These contracts define our District more than any “Declaration of Education.”

When the School Reform Commission came to Philadelphia in 2002, it promised to take a broke, run-down, old-fashioned “status quo” system and inject a little of that corporate competitive pep that would get the schools leaner, more competitive, more aggressive, and thereby better.

The SRC accelerated the role of private contracting on an unprecedented scale, from curriculum to testing to accountability to school management. It even turned itself into its own contractual Frankenstein; as a 5-person volunteer body that formally met twice a month, it allotted itself more than $3 million/year in contracts and salaries, almost all of them duplicating extant services in the district. For example, the SRC has both a chief of staff and an executive director, a public relations consultant, its own lobbyist, its own lawyer, and reserved almost a million dollars for contracts such as Public Financial Management (fiscal oversight in addition to the Budget Office, the CFO, and the City Controller’s office which is on the district’s payroll) and Evergreen Solutions.

Not surprisingly, too many of those contracts, rather than making the system leaner, ended up diminishing the district’s internal capacity and bloating the budget. Huge expenditures of money, lack of accountability and oversight, and disappointing results – Evergreen follows a line of contracts like Aramark, Community Education Partners, the education management organizations, and others that have come under fire recently.

Whatever the intent of the Evergreen Solutions contract, and I am sympathetic to Commissioner Daniel Whelan’s call for efficiency, the School Reform Commission is not the body to execute such a contract. The commissioners ought to know more than anybody that a signed contract guarantees nothing unless there is the will, the capacity, and the experience to monitor that contract and manage their consultants.

And when they go wrong, then the direct consequence is to the classroom. The real loss of $700,000 is not on paper but in my daughter’s elementary school which lost a full-time special ed and gifted teacher this year because we didn’t have the $30,000 to pay for a full-time position. That teacher now spends her week scrambling between three different schools. That $700,000 loss exists in the $5,000 discretionary pot for the 250 kids at her school. That's less than $20 per child, to pay for additional books, programs, supplies, field trips, and heaven forbid maybe a halfway decent graduation ceremony.

There’s nothing new about a contract gone bad, but it doesn’t erase the fact that it’s the kids of this district that pay for it.