Hite's Plan for Schools

With all the woes that the School District of Philadelphia has gone through and is currently going through, Superintendent Hite is looking for new ways to improve the way the School District "does business."  Hite wants to allow the strongest schools to run themselves beginning in 2016, and turn some struggling schools over to private contractors. The plan would require more than $300 million in new recurring revenue from the city and state for the next school year and a total of $970 million over five years in order to execute. Hite's "Action Plan v3.0" would also reorganize the district. The current eight networks - groupings of schools run by an assistant superintendent - would remain.

But three networks would be added: a "turnaround" network for the bottom 5 percent or 10 percent of schools.

I understand that the School District is in a tough fix financially, but in my opinion, Superintendent Hite is going about this all wrong. He makes a good point that almost half of the district's students do not meet the state's standards  in reading and math, AND that the district has thousands of students that are over-age and have not yet graduated. I'm aware that the School District need urgent care, but I think that the solution is what it should have always been: provide public schools with the resources they need so that principals and teachers can do their job and so that students can have a quality education and actually learn. Simple as that. When is the District gonna learn?