From Jeff Gammage’s excellent article on whether the Chester stadium deal is yet another snake oil sale for a town that's suffered way too many broken promises:

The prospective team owners, leading a St. Louis group in the contest to secure MLS's 16th team, predict a huge financial impact:

More than 2,600 temporary construction jobs and 800 permanent full-time jobs. About $19 million in annual tax revenue. An estimated $670 million in personal earnings and $335 million in taxes over time.

Those are giant numbers to a city where half the households get by on less than $25,000 a year.

And they leave sports economists shaking their heads. Whether it's Kansas City or Charlotte, Chicago or Chester, they say, the argument is always the same, and so is the result.

"Plopping down a stadium," said Temple University assistant dean Michael Leeds, coauthor of The Economics of Sports, "does nothing for a city."

It’s hard to put my finger on what rankles me most about the Chester stadium deal.

Of all the things that public schools in the Commonwealth need, what wouldn’t be on this list?

A. increased state funding to address the 95% of PA districts which are considered underfunded by nationally normed averages, according to a recent state study ;
B. focusing on a statewide school capital plan so districts aren’t left to their own devices to come up with the millions to repair or build new schools;
C. a teacher recruitment initiative to build incentives and retain quality public school teachers;
D. more tests

Well, thanks to the State Board of Education, more tests is indeed at the top of the agenda.

It's hard to imagine that the Parking Authority could get any lower but they sure know how to bottom out. In today’s Inquirer story, the Parking Authority blames a decline in ticketing as a major reason why they can't meet their financial obligations to the City and the School District. Never mind the doubling up of a padded payroll; more than $46 million in largely unaudited cash reserves; unconscionable perks like fat pensions checks, free cars/gas; six figure salaries including an Exec. Dir. who makes more than the governor and a board chair who earns $75,000 a year for showing up once a month. Nah none of that could have anything to do with their failure to meet their goals.

Now, they blame the police. Had enough?

Come on down to the Parking Authority Board meeting this morning where:

Parents United for Public Education, the Philadelphia Home & School Council, Germantown Clergy Initiative, JUNTOS, Philadelphia Right to Ed Task Force and the Association of Philadelphia School Librarians name --

The Philadelphia Parking Authority

the

2007 Inductee into the Grinch Brotherhood

Yesterday, in a sneak move, the PA Senate re-authorized the Philadelphia Parking Authority’s red light cameras . The bill stripped away an earlier effort by the House Appropriations Committee to designate all new revenue to the public schools and provide minimal fiscal oversight to the Parking Authority. This new bill which passed unanimously in the Senate and the House (with the opposition of about 50+ representatives in the House), now turns over all money to PennDOT and has no reference to the need for public oversight on the PPA.

Symbolically, though, it provides yet more light on the struggles and hurdles we face to bring any new revenue to the public schools, make any reforms in the patronage heavy PPA, and bring to light the backdoor deals cut by Dwight Evans (whom it was recently reported has a brother at the Parking Authority) and Republican legislators who are deeply vested in the agency.

It’s also a demonstration of the failure of state takeovers: the state took over the public schools and the Parking Authority in 2001, the results of which have both lost public trust and remain largely out of the realm of public oversight, responsibility and accountability.

For more information and supporting action on the Parking Authority campaign, please contact parentsunitedphila@gmail.com > Parents United for Public Education.

The Parking Authority Grinch: A Fable
(with apologies to Dr. Seuss)

Every Who
Down in Who-ville
Liked decent schools a lot . . .

But the PPA,
Which wanted a fleet of SUVs for itself,
Did NOT!

The PPA hated public scrutiny! The whole budget perusin’!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be that its salaries and pensions had taken a good bite.
It could be, perhaps, that its payroll was outta sight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that its sense of shame was two sizes too small.

With high expectations and more than a mixed amount of trepidation, the long-awaited Costing-Out Study on the state of Commonwealth spending on public education was released last week. As Dan U-A has already posted, it quantifies why our state ranks at the bottom of the nation and maintains one of the country’s most inadequate and inequitable funding systems for its most valuable resource – our, yours and mine, children.

The study, commissioned by a bi-partisan committee of state legislators last spring and conducted for more than a half million dollars by a national firm which has done similar studies across the nation, determined that the average cost of educating a child in the state came to around $12,000. According to the study, the state underfunds public education by $4.8 billion. About 95 percent of the school districts – 474 out of 501 – are underfunded, Philadelphia by as much as 50 percent. What has often been billed as a Philadelphia complaint has now been proven to be a massive system of inequity and poverty that touches all but the wealthiest of districts in the Commonwealth.

The billion dollar question of course is not what the study says but what are we and our legislators going to do about it. This study can and should shake things up but it can also sit on a shelf along with plenty of other proof that injustice exists.

Hoping to emulate the many impressive YPP interviews before, I talked with Justin DiBerardinis, a proud Central H.S. graduate, who has spent the past two years criss-crossing the eastern region as an organizer for Good Schools Pennsylvania about what the study means and where we need to go with it.

Wow:

Pennsylvania is underfunding public education by $4.8 billion and it will take a 28 percent spending increase to remedy the problem, according to a study on school funding commissioned by the Pennsylvania legislature and released yesterday.

The state's poorest districts were the most underfunded, the study found.

If the legislature goes along with the recommendations, the state's share of education funding would increase from 37 percent to 60 percent. The average per-student spending would increase $2,545, to $12,057. And almost all districts - 474 of 501 - would get extra money.

Philadelphia would get $1 billion more. Many other area districts also would see big hikes: Delaware County's Upper Darby would get about $52.7 million and Central Bucks would get $42 million, for example.

One billion dollars a year! Think about that number for a second, and then ask yourself if there is any wonder that, given all of the other contributing factors (like, poverty, for example), Philly schools are not performing. One billion dollars!

So, you get a report detailing how shamefully underfunded our schools are, and of course, the most prominent Philadelphia Rep. is outraged and demands more money, right? Well, sort of:

State House Appropriations Chairman Dwight Evans, D-Phila., said accountability measures have to accompany any new school money.

Obviously, I'm not against making more investment, but there has to be accountability," he said.

Now, lets ignore for a second the irony of Dwight, who has demanded underperforming private education companies keep their contracts, now demanding accountability on schools. (And seriously, with this and his opinion that the problems with the Parking Authority are a 'public relations problem,' Dwight has really not inspired remorse that he didn't win in May.)

But, a state report comes out saying schools in your city are stunningly underfunded, and your response is that? Yikes.

And, of course, State Republicans demanded more money, too:

We will review it and look for ways to implement recommendations, but to get to a $4.6 billion increase in school funding would take a 48 percent increase in the sales tax, or a 47 percent increase in the personal income tax. I don't think the public or the General Assembly is willing to take a step like that," said Erik Arneson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, a Delaware County Republican.

I think Pileggi is right. If you called up someone and said, I will increase your taxes 47 percent to fund schools, OK?, they will probably say no thanks. However, please note that in reality, what we would be talking about would be the PA tax rate going from a whopping 3.07 percent, to about 4.5 percent. A 1.4 percent increase to fully fund schools. I bet if you asked people how they felt about that- Would you be willing to raise the PA Income Tax rate 1.4 percentage points to raise the 4.8 billion dollars needed to fully fund PA schools?, the answer would be a lot different.

1 billion dollars... Roll that number around for a while...