While there are four open Pittsburgh Public Schools board seats on the ballot this year, only voters in some East End and North Side neighborhoods have a choice on May 16 between two different visions of the district’s future.
First-term incumbent Devon Taliaferro says she wants another four years to continue her work to rethink school safety by bringing in more social services. Opponent Ron Sofo says he’d push the district to innovate in ways similar to those pursued by the charter school that he led before his retirement.
Both candidates canvassed the streets of District 2 on a recent rainy Sunday afternoon — Sofo in Lawrenceville and Taliaferro in Morningside. The district covers 14 neighborhoods and nine early childhood and elementary schools.
With stacks of flyers in hand, they each told voters that the district could be doing better. Its K-12 enrollment has declined by 18.5% — or 4,200 students — since 2016. The district’s schools on average are 89 years old and about 60% of seats are filled. And officials say there’s still much work to do to address learning deficits stemming from the year-and-a-half that district students learned remotely.
But while both candidates told voters that they would make decisions based on what’s best for children, their approach and vision differ.
Taliaferro aligns with education justice groups that fight to keep neighborhood schools open, arguing that they can provide community resources even if classrooms aren’t full and closing them might ease the district’s budget crunch. Sofo, for his part, wants an open enrollment model where families could choose which school to send their kids to, anywhere in the district.
‘Their voices have gone unheard’
Taliaferro tells voters that she wants to continue work on a new approach to school safety — an initiative that was stalled when former Superintendent Anthony Hamlet left the district. The board hired Wayne Walters last summer to lead the district. He will soon begin a strategic planning process which Taliaferro said will include safety work.
The district began using restorative justice practices as a discipline alternative in 2015 in about half of schools. After five years, results were mixed; the number of days students were suspended was reduced, but test scores in some grades fell, especially for Black students. Taliaferro said she wants the board to again pick up the work she started and evaluate if the restorative practice model is working.
“Our policies don't look restorative,” she said. “Our policies look punitive.”
That work has aligned her with education advocacy groups including Education Rights Network, 412 Justice, Black Girls Equity Alliance and the Coalition of Great Public Schools. She said the groups have led campaigns that have supported her decision-making. Taliaferro worked with the Black Girls Equity Alliance, for example, to revise outdated sexual education policies.
“Many of these groups represent populations where their voices have gone unheard. Collaborating and working to find solutions together and representing their voices is the type of board member I strive to be,” she said.
But her interest in alternative approaches to school discipline — including bringing in more social services rather than additional security — may have cost her some support. The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers also advocates for expanding the Community Schools model, in which selected schools hire a coordinator to connect families to resources and bring services into buildings.
But the union also argues that schools would be safer with more police officers. The PFT represents police officers and security aides and for years has asked the school district to arm its police officers. The board rejected a proposal in 2018.
Taliaferro said she doesn't think filling schools with armed police is the solution. She said she is concerned that the union wants to bring armed police officers into schools that don’t have a community schools coordinator.
The PFT did not endorse either candidate in the District 2 race. The union backed Taliaferro in her first bid, but President Nina Esposito-Visgitis said that neither candidate aligned with the union’s most pressing goals, without answering questions about what goals those were.
Taliaferro makes no apologies for pushing back on calls for additional policing, and said her experience — which includes a recent nine-month training on student-outcomes focused governance — sets her apart.
“Some [schools] don’t have a librarian; some don’t have music or arts programming in their school. But we’re going to say, ‘Let’s hire more police officers so we address all the issues’?” she said. “That’s not how we address the issue. That work is critical to me.”
She said the way the board operates is archaic and needs a governance model that would give board members more information before making decisions. Serving on the board is an unpaid position, and board members do not have a staff like, for example, City Councilors.
“I think being able to build a culture and a governance structure that is modeled and centered on transparency and accountability by way of setting measurable goals for the superintendent and being able to monitor for progress is important,” she said. “It adds to the effectiveness of how the board functions and it gives us the institutional knowledge that we need to be able to set policies.”
Such incremental behind-the-scenes moves may not generate headlines, she said, but do create change.
“It’s not the conversation that people want to hear, but I think most of that reason is because people don’t understand the role of a school board member,” she said.
‘Don’t ignore choice’
Sofo said his experience as a school administrator puts him in a good position to hold leaders accountable. In his more than 30 years in education, he led the Beaver County Freedom Area School District and spent six years as the CEO of downtown City Charter High School — one of the city’s most academically successful charter schools.
The school’s state test scores are on par with some of the city’s high schools, but behind the specialized magnets. But Sofo argues that the city schools graduate unprepared students. He said students would leave his school claiming it was too rigorous only to later return to the charter.
“At least half of them would come back and tell us, ‘I can't believe it. I'm in class and everybody's got their cell phones out, nobody's listening to the teacher, I can't concentrate’,” he said.
About 20% of Pittsburgh students attend a charter school, while about 18% of the district’s budget pays for their tuition. PPS officials say increased charter costs are damaging the district finances. Sofo shared that concern: He said the state should be paying charter schools directly rather than rerouting funds through the local school district. But he argues that local officials need to face the bigger picture.
“People have been choosing with their feet and leaving Pittsburgh. Don’t ignore choice because it’s in the room,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘There’s a fire, but I like my house and I’m not leaving, and I’ll let it burn around me.’ The way to stop the fire is to create quality opportunities for our kids, families and our teachers.”
In his 2005 book “No Bad Schools,” he and co-author Bill Renko advocate for businesses and foundations to contribute to public schools and give parents a choice of attending any school in the city.
“We submit that consumerism based on parent choice and more, not less, autonomy afforded to educational leaders, will result in greater accountability and higher achievement for all students,” they wrote.
Nearly two decades later, Sofo maintains that Pittsburgh Public would better serve families if it treated each of its schools like a magnet program. Magnets were created as a means of desegregating school districts by offering specialized curriculum to students citywide: Sofo said the model also encourages schools to meet student needs.
“If we want to increase the probability of keeping those families in the city of Pittsburgh … I would rather be part of that system and compete, as opposed to ignoring it and saying, ‘We’re the victim, just give us more money and shut down choice.’ … That horse has gotten out of the barn a long time ago,” he said.
Charter schools were originally intended to be laboratories of education innovation and share models with traditional schools. Sofo said he hasn’t seen that happen in Pittsburgh. He advocates for teachers to stay with one group of students for several years, a method used in City Charter called looping. At the same time, he said the district is dysfunctional and needs to address systemic problems.
“Nobody has done anything because they’re bad people or they wanted to hurt folks,” he said. “But let’s admit that it’s not working and take responsibility for a better future for more effective designs in our public schools.”
Endorsing change
With the teachers union on the sidelines, an outside group that is reshaping the school board has taken a role in the race.
The committee Black Women for a Better Education formed during the pandemic, voicing concerns about the district’s inadequate move to remote learning, and about the tenure of Hamlet, the former superintendent. Candidate’s endorsed by the group have already seen success: In 2021, three of its five endorsed candidates won.
In District 2, Black Women for a Better Education has endorsed Sofo — who is white — over Taliaferro, who is Black.
The committee said his experience in education finance is a much-needed skill set for a school board that “continues to pass status quo budgets year after year.”
“Ron also knows what it takes to move students academically (especially those who are Black, Brown, come from low-income communities, and have exceptionalities) because he has done it,” the committee said in a statement. “Ron has led schools that have achieved outcomes for children who PPS has otherwise failed.”
Sofo and Taliaferro both speak frequently about the disproportionately poor academic outcomes in the district for students who are Black, brown or disabled. And Sofo touts the endorsement frequently.
Sofo said “If you listen to all of the candidates backed by the Black Women for a Better Education, we are all saying there needs to be a deep, thorough, extensive independent audit of the Pittsburgh Public Schools finances to find out where is all this money going and where are there opportunities to redistribute it?”
Sofo was an early supporter of the PAC. Since 2021 he’s contributed nearly $800.
Taliaferro did not seek the endorsement, because she said it didn’t share her mission of, “strengthening public education, not dismantling it.”
“It’s stated on their website that they are ‘united with those who are willing to take action on behalf of Black children and families’, but in my experience I have seen more division than unity,” she said. “I question what is actually being done to work alongside the board and administration to influence and impact the lives of all children in Pittsburgh Public Schools.”
Taliaferro said her identity as a Black woman and lived experience as a graduate of Wilkinsburg High School — which now sends students to PPS — are important assets she brings to the board.
“I recognize what I didn’t have, but I always recognize the people who fought for me and who fought on my behalf,” she said. “And I think that’s just as valuable and important because there’s not a lot of native Pittsburghers that are Black and brown, and a woman in my case, those intersections you don’t often see in local politics in the city.”
Whatever the outcome of the race in District 2, by the end of the year, the results in 2021 and this year’s uncontested elections mean that a majority of board members will have been backed by BW4BE. On the other hand, Taliaferro and Sofo have both filed election petitions on both the Democratic and Republican ticket — a practice permitted for school board races.
That means that if the two party primaries result in a split decision, voters could hear the debate continue into the fall.
