Saving the Philadelphia Public Schools - Brainstorm

Here is a brainstorm of ambitious ideas for saving the Philadelphia public schools. As this is a brainstorm some of the ideas are very stupid (see the toxic dumps), and many of them wouldn't stand up in our unjust courts -- but the goal is to provoke better ideas.

1. Protest in Lower Merion Township or another school district that spends 80-100% more per student than Philadelphia.

2. Nutter and city council should publicly support a drive to unionize the charter schools.

3. Refuse every request by charter schools for zoning variances.

4. Run a "Save the Philly Schools" political party in the 2015 municipal election. In the UK, "save our hospital" parties have elected one or two people to parliament.

5. Refuse to support any Democrats or Republicans in the future.

6. Tear up the streets near the charter schools for street repair. Leave it for a couple months.

7. Tear up the water lines near the charter schools.

8. Investigate whether the for-profit charter schools are properly paying their city taxes (notably the business privilege tax).

9. Provide monetary rewards for whistle blowers into charter school corruption.

10. Increase the Use and Occupancy tax on large buildings, while adding an exemption for small businesses (as proposed by council member Sanchez).

11. Blockade one or more charter schools (civil disobedience).

12. Create a tax that targets charter schools (the hard part is that many taxes have to be approved by the state legislature).

13. Create a Public Bank that would reduce city lending costs and save the city huge amounts of money.

14. Sue the state government for not treating students equally across the state. In the federal constitution you could use the Equal Protection. Or does the state constitution have a better statute?).

15. Create environmental regulations that would target charter schools (this might be tricky as the public schools may have greater problems - but they really should be doing things about unsafe drinking water, toxic plastics, and other environmental hazards in the schools).

16. Locate toxic dumps near the charter schools. Or landfills. Or industrial sites. Or other undesirable buildings, highways, etc.

17. Change the charter school zoning to residential.

18. Buy out the charter schools and then close them down. See Public Bank.

19. Create a living wage ordinance to increase wages in charter schools so that they equal those in public schools.

20. Merge Philadelphia with the suburbs. As done by Montreal and Toronto in Canada.

21. Teacher sick-out / work to rule

22. Teacher strike

23. Student strike

24. Write a budget proposal to fund the schools without regressive taxes (like the regressive cigarette, drink, and sales taxes).