City Council is asking Philly schools to account for why they’re still engaging in ‘leveling’

City Council wants to know why the Philadelphia School District is still engaging in leveling, the practice of moving teachers a month into the school year based on schools’ actual enrollment.

City Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson introduced legislation Thursday calling for hearings on leveling, which she has called a “troubling” practice.

The district has long shuffled teachers weeks into the school year, often for financial reasons but, recently, because it cannot find enough educators to fully staff its classrooms. Though 96% of positions are filled, in a 115,000-student district that employs about 9,000 teachers, that means hundreds of teaching jobs are still open.

Leveling works this way: If one school has fewer students than projected, it might lose teachers to another school that enrolled more students than expected.

Better-resourced districts don’t use leveling, and even some urban school systems have moved away from it.

In Philadelphia, this year, 50 teachers were forced to change schools. Some schools also lost positions that were never filled, for an overall reduction of 87 positions. Fifty schools gained a cumulative total of 66 teacher positions.

Some schools were “held harmless” and did not lose teachers to leveling, even though their less-than-expected enrollment meant they usually would have. Officials said 46 schools fell into this category, and 94 teachers who otherwise would have been moved got to stay put.

But Gilmore Richardson said that wasn’t good enough. She said COVID-19 learning loss made leveling an especially counterproductive process.

Leveling, the resolution she introduced Thursday says, “disrupts classroom instruction and forces school communities to grapple with major changes on very short notice” and “requires teachers to move to new positions with only a week of notice, and results in some classes doubling in size overnight.” It also “actively interrupts the relationships teachers have developed with their students, leading to decreased student engagement in classrooms, and it takes away the opportunity for one-on-one instruction for classes that see significant increases in size.”

Asked how the district might avoid leveling without adding to its teacher vacancy problem, Gilmore Richardson acknowledged the school system’s hiring challenges but said “we know that what we’re doing now is not working to increase overall student achievement and increase reading and math skills. I simply want to find a more sustainable solution, one that will help us fill the vacancies and ensure our young people are being prioritized.”

Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. has said leveling is necessary to ensure equity, and cited the nationwide teacher shortage and Philadelphia’s decades of underfunding as reasons why Philadelphia continues to use leveling.

“In order to serve our students equitably, and support all students in receiving a high-quality education from an excellent teacher, we must reassign teachers from our under-enrolled schools to over-enrolled schools,” Watlington said in a letter to district staff and families this week.

Gilmore Richardson said the hearings will help Council build a roadmap so it can “do our part to appropriate funds to the district and help fill any gaps that currently exist as it relates to this issue.”