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.