Pennsylvania Working Families Director: 'Our Message Of Keeping Philly Schools Public Helped Kenney Win'
By Dom Giordano
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Kati Sipp, the Director of Pennsylvania Working Families, spoke with Talk Radio 1210 WPHT midday host Dom Giordano about the effect that she feels that her organization had on Jim Kenney winning the Democratic primary for mayor of Philadelphia.
"We saw that one of the mayoral candidates clearly had an enormous financial backing, not through his camp personally, but through super PACs from folks that were interested in the privatization of education and we were able to defeat that money through a pretty aggressive field program that was run by us and other other folks who were out knocking on doors for months in the community talking about the need to improve Philly schools and to do that by keeping the schools public."
While she does feel that there are some good charter schools, ideally the ones run by non-profit organizations, Sipp maintains that her biggest problem with the for-profit charter schools is their business model, because "part of the point by the company's perspective is to make a profit. I think that my kids and everybody else's kids are not people that somebody should be making a profit off of."
She also feels that they all "do not have the same requirements that public schools have in terms of making sure that they are serving every single student from the community."
Sipp wanted to make the difference clear between the working families that she wants to represent and the members of the "1 percent."
"My personal definition of a working person is somebody who has to get up and go to a job every day in order to pay their rent or pay their mortgage or put food on their table...There is a pretty clear distinction in the world between folks who have to worry about 'am I going to work everyday to put food on my table or because god forbid I might have a medical emergency that I need to pay for and people who fundamentally don't have that same worry."
