Every once in a while, I’ll come across a news story in the credentialed media that tells an entire story in just one sentence, but then moves on to a side issue.
This Philly 10th grader has had no English teacher all year. Now, the district wants her to take a high-stakes test.
Almost 300 teaching positions are vacant across the School District of Philadelphia. One student went to the school board to share how a vacancy is hurting her and her classmates.
by Kristen A Graham | Friday, May 9, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
Kalorena Gonzalez’s English teacher left Martin Luther King High School in October.
“A kid slapped him and he never came back,” said Gonzalez, a motivated student who likes volunteering and is a member of King’s JROTC program.
Since then, Gonzalez, a 10th grader, has had no English teacher. There have been a series of subs — most recently, a man whose name she doesn’t know.
“He doesn’t teach anything, he just takes attendance,” Gonzalez said. “He says nothing.”
Reporter Kristen Graham’s story is about the failure of the school district to put a permanent teacher in young Miss Gonzalez’s class, and how the school system is short several hundred teachers, but the story is in that second paragraph: a (supposed) student assaulted — minimized by saying “slapped”, but that’s a direct quote from Miss Gonzalez, not Miss Graham’s word — a teacher, and the teacher bailed. We are not told whether the teacher was seriously injured, whether it went beyond a ‘slap,’ whether the now-absent teacher had been the victim of previous assaults and simply had enough, or what happened to the young assailant.
Is the assailant still in school? How was he punished, or was he punished at all?
Did the teacher quit? Is he still an employee, but on leave? Is he still being paid?
Martin Luther King High School is not one of the better schools. The school is ranked 499th out of 656 Pennsylvania high schools, and 21st out of 51 city high schools. The very awful math tells us that there are 30 Philadelphia high schools that are even worse than MLK High! On the state grade-level proficiency tests, MLK’s students performed particularly poorly, as is seen in the chart on the left.[1]One curious demographic appeared in the report. Rather than an expected ratio of roughly 50:50, MLKHS is 59% male and 41% female, along with 100% of students being “economically … Continue reading
Miss Graham, whose Inquirer bio states that, “I cover Philly schools, taking readers inside one of the largest districts in the country,” doesn’t tell us about how rotten MLK High is, or how terrible the School District as a whole performs. How, I have to ask, with those grade level proficiency scores, are 41% of the students there being graduated? Is the school simply handing out diplomas to students who can’t read, write, and do simple math?[2]This happened several years ago. I was getting a fried chicken lunch box from a local grocery store, but my order was slightly complicated. The girl behind the counter couldn’t figure out how … Continue reading
Miss Graham walked us through Miss Gonzalez’s complaints and her appearance before the School Board. We are told that, in effect, money is at the root of all problems:
Folks wonder why high numbers of Philadelphians are in jail, experiencing housing insecurity, or using drugs, Gonzalez said. One reason?
“When we don’t have the proper and ideal education,” said Gonzalez. With a looming district budget deficit, the city could “see these problems increase, while the empowered are given more money each day, and people like me struggle to make that money each year.”
Everybody has money woes, and the School District of Philadelphia has not been at the forefront of the city’s economic problems; far more attention has been paid to the deficit suffered by SEPTA, the regions public transportation system, and the fact that the evil, reich-wing Republicans who control the state Senate won’t vote more money for them. Apparently, the School District can’t find anyone willing to teach English on a permanent basis at MLK High. Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has already said that she wants to increase the percentage of city tax revenue going to the public schools, but not in her current budget proposal.
Philly is our nation’s poorest major city. The city’s median household income is $60,698, and the lowest step salary for teachers is $54,146, for the ten-month school year. The lowest step salary for teachers who work 12 months is $64,975. It’s not as though the city’s teachers are mired in poverty. Teachers, individually, are paid more than half of the households in the city earn, but no one wants to teach 10th grade English at MLKHS?[3]Miss Graham noted, on April 29th, in a subscribers’ only article, that the Philadelphia-based Center for Black Educator Development was among those suing the Trump Administration over the … Continue reading
The School District is, on the whole, a waste case. Perhaps it’s not a problem that our education professionals can solve, but a cultural one, a problem not of what the schools are trying to teach and who is doing the teaching, but of far, far, far too many uncivilized savages in the classroom, disrupting any real attempts at teaching anything, and of better-behaved students to learn something.
That’s the story on which Miss Graham needed to report.
References
| ↑1 | One curious demographic appeared in the report. Rather than an expected ratio of roughly 50:50, MLKHS is 59% male and 41% female, along with 100% of students being “economically disadvantaged.” Even in East Germantown, not 100% of families are in poverty, which makes me wonder if the families who are decently off are sending their children to private schools, perhaps skewing the sex balance at the school. East Germantown is very heavily black, but the white percentage of the population, 3%, is still significantly higher than the white percentage of the MLKHS student body, 0.6%. |
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| ↑2 | This happened several years ago. I was getting a fried chicken lunch box from a local grocery store, but my order was slightly complicated. The girl behind the counter couldn’t figure out how much to charge me, so I told her how much it was, because the math was ridiculously simple, and I calculated it in my head. When I told her what it was, and then pointed out the addition to her verbally, she responded back to me that her teachers had told her that there’d always be a calculator handy. This wasn’t Philadelphia, but it demonstrated to me how rotten some teachers really can be, just passing on a student who hadn’t learned much, to push him, or in this case her, through the system. |
| ↑3 | Miss Graham noted, on April 29th, in a subscribers’ only article, that the Philadelphia-based Center for Black Educator Development was among those suing the Trump Administration over the President’s decision that institutions which continued their unconstitutional “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” policies could not receive federal funds, when the CBED wanted to increase the number of black teachers in schools. But Miss Graham also noted, in the main article cited, that the School District was almost 300 teachers short of full staffing, which ought to mean that any qualified teacher who can pass a background check and drug test and who wants to work there ought to be hired, regardless of race or ethnicity. The problem isn’t too few black teachers, but too few teachers, period. |