Thanks to former city councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty’s failed campaign for the 2023 Democratic nomination for Mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, this site has reported several times on the Edward T Steel Elementary and Middle Schools, noting something that The Philadelphia Inquirer never bothered to tell readers as Mrs Flaherty, who campaigned on her educational record, used that school as a backdrop for her campaign, proudly telling the voters that she helped keep the school from “going charter.” What didn’t the newspaper tell its readership? That the school had an absolutely abysmal academic performance. That school is ranked 1193th out of 1591 in Pennsylvania Elementary Schools and ranked 656th out of 875 in Pennsylvania Middle Schools. Schools are ranked on their performance on state-required tests, graduation, and how well they prepare their students for high school. In the current rankings, 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and 2% of students who scored at or above the proficient level for math.
This Philly principal struggled as a student. Now she inspires kids in Kensington.
Awilda Balbuena was one of several School District of Philadelphia principals recognized with the 2025 Lindback Award for Distinguished Principal Leadership.
by Kristen A Graham | Tuesday, April 8, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
Awilda Balbuena graduated from high school unable to read proficiently. She was rejected from every law school she applied to.Gloria Casarez Elementary School, via Google Maps.
Now, she’s one of Philadelphia’s best school leaders, the recipient of a 2025 Lindback Award for Distinguished Principal Leadership.
Balbeuna’s rise is remarkable, but emblematic of what the Gloria Casarez Elementary principal tells the students and staff of the Kensington school: There is promise and power inside all of us, and with hard work, we can accomplish great things, even among difficult circumstances.
“I want to breathe hope into people who were discouraged like I was,” said Balbena. “This isn’t your most uplifting neighborhood; it’s not like you’re going to leave my school and go run into hope. You have to go looking for hope. You have to be connected to someone who has that hope.”
It’s a moderate-length article, in which the newspaper’s primary education reporter tells us about Principal Balbuena’s early struggles and how she eventually overcame them. But in all of the positives Miss Graham told readers about the Principal’s personal accomplishments, she omitted the same thing that the newspaper’s stories on Steel School omitted: basic indices on how well the school is educating its students.
Well, The First Street Journal doesn’t omit things like that. We actually look up the data!
At Gloria Casarez Elementary School, 3% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 12% scored at or above that level for reading.
Compared with the district, the school did worse in math and worse in reading, according to this metric. In Philadelphia City School District, 31% of students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 14% tested at or above that level for math.
Gloria Casarez Elementary School did worse in math and worse in reading in this metric compared with students across the state. In Pennsylvania, 53% of students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 37% tested at or above that level for math.
Flags mounted outside Casarez Elementary School.
I suppose that’s better than the Edward T Steel schools, but that’s damning with faint praise!
The rankings weren’t difficult to find at all; Google is our friend, and we have no doubts at all concerning Miss Graham’s ability to do that research.
It has to be asked: why did Miss Balbeuna win a 2025 Lindback Award for Distinguished Principal Leadership when the school she runs is doing such a terrible job? Gloria Casarez Elementary School’s function is not to promote the personal achievements of its principal and staff but to actually educate children. In that, the school is failing, and that means the Principal has failed.
The image of Casarez Elementary gleaned from Google Maps included the school’s flagpole. It’s a bit difficult to see, but it’s there: an American flag, with an “LGBTQ+” flag immediately below it. What, exactly, is being taught at this Kindergarten through 5th grade school? It would seem rather obvious that reading and mathematics aren’t being taught well enough, certainly not well enough for the school to be wasting times on alternative sexual preferences and identifications.
But, whatever is being done in the Gloria Casarez Elementary School, it is being done wrong.
Part of my job is assessing applications for a fairly prestigious award given by my employer. Most of the applicants are high school seniors, self-selected for the program. What is astonishing to me is that the overwhelming majority of these bright, motivated young people is that they are utterly illiterate and innumerate. Asked to tally up a column of 6 numbers to calculate total hours on the project, the candidate put “3.” The correct number was 165. When I showed this, he couldn’t grasp how he got the addition wrong. Addition I would have been expected to do in 2nd grade. Worse still, they don’t have any “new” skills to compensate for inability in language and math. The application form is a fillable pdf, making it a breeze to complete. A large minority of candidates print it out and fill it in with their illegible scrawling because “nobody taught me to use a pdf.” We are doomed.