No love lost for Paul Vallas when he fled the City of Brotherly Love.
Vallas fled Philly for New Orleans. Poor New Orleans.
I’m in Brooklyn this week with family and friends.
Gone from Chicago with the mayoral election just two weeks away.
Early voting begins on Monday. I’ll vote for Brandon Johnson as soon as I get back.
My home town of Philadelphia is just 90 minutes down the road.
Philadelphia is the home of the fictional Abbott Elementary on TV, which I love.
But Philadelphia’s experience with Paul Vallas isn’t fiction
Philly is one of the school districts Paul Vallas has left his signature on along with a lot of wreckage.
Chicago, New Orleans, Philly, Bridgeport Connecticut as well as the entire nation of Chile and the impoverished country of Haiti have all been victims Vallas’ leadership.
Now, with the backing of the Chicago’s billionaire class, he wants to be the mayor of Chicago.
On December 21, 2001, Philadelphia became the largest school district ever taken over by a state government.
After the state’s take-over of the schools, the district was led by a five-member School Reform Commission (SRC).
The first thing to happen was Chris Whittle and his Edison Project, early to the school privatizing game, were brought in by the SRC to study the Philadelphia school system and create a reform plan.
That summer, the SRC hired Paul Vallas to lead the school district.
In an article he wrote for the Black Agenda Report, Bruce Dixon shared some of his observations about Vallas’s tenure as school boss in Philly.
“Serial School Privatizer “Chainsaw Paul” Vallas Gets Ready For His Next Job,”
Vallas next landed in Philadelphia, where, he surrounded himself with the usual dubious cloud of yes-men and consultants, engineered the privatization of a significant chunk of that city’s public schools, selling off public buildings to charter operators and well-connected developers and firing hundreds more mostly black teachers. … Vallas’s “blame the teachers, blame the deficits, blame the parents” rhetoric and practice exactly matched those of … Michelle Rhee. He left Philly schools in shambles, just in time to make New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
It was Paul Vallas who welcomed billionaire Eli Broad to Philadelphia with administrators trained at his unaccredited Broad Academy.
Vallas was an Eli Broad kind of guy. Vallas didn’t know shit about teaching or education, but he had a reputation as a budgeting genius and a manager.
It is the same phony reputation he is claiming on his endless Chicago TV ads in his run for Chicago mayor.
Ironically it was a financial failure that led Vallas to flee Philadelphia.
Vallas was fired following the disclosure of a $73 million "surprise" deficit that surfaced in 2007 in the Philadelphia school district's budget.
"We thought we were getting a budget expert," James Nevels, head of the RSC said about Vallas when the deficit came to light.
Vallas quickly left Philadelphia for New Orleans in the fall of 2007.