SUMMARY: The Philadelphia Eagles won their first Super Bowl championship Sunday, defeating the favored New England Patriots 41-33. Philadelphia fans took to the streets in celebration, climbing light poles and jumping off awnings. Bob Ford, columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer talks about the Eagles’ championship drought and Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles’ remarkable story.
SUMMARY: Emergency crews found another victim in the wreckage of Amtrak train 188, which crashed Tuesday night in Philadelphia; all passengers and crew members believed on board have now been accounted for. Officials identified the train's engineer as Brandon Bostian, who suffered a concussion and other injuries during the crash. Gwen Ifill reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The search for answers of what caused the deadly derailment of an Amtrak train continued, as the focus shifted to the engineer.
Emergency crews labored steadily for a second day on the wreckage of Amtrak Train 188 in North Philadelphia, as officials confirmed grim news of another death.
DERRICK SAWYER, Fire Commissioner, Philadelphia Fire Commissioner: We utilized our hydraulic tools to open up the train a little bit more so that we can reach the person, and were able to extricate that person and have them transported to the medical examiner’s office.
GWEN IFILL: All 243 passengers and crew aboard the derailed train have now been accounted for. According to investigators, the train was moving at 102 miles an hour Tuesday night, more than twice the speed limit, when it careened off the tracks.
Elsewhere in Philadelphia this morning, a freight train also derailed in an unrelated incident. No deaths or injuries were reported. The Amtrak train’s engineer was identified as 32-year-old New Yorker Brandon Bostian. He suffered a concussion and other injuries during the crash.
On ABC’s Good Morning America, Bostian’s lawyer, Robert Goggin, said his client remembers nothing of the wreck.
SUMMARY: Last December, Brandon Tate-Brown was killed by Philadelphia police after being pulled over for driving with his headlights off. His family is not alone in their pain -- there have been 394 shootings involving the police in Philadelphia since 2007. Despite efforts to review and reform police training and transparency, the changes are far from reality at this point. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The death of a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, in Baltimore is the most recent in a string of stories spotlighting use of force by police.
Many cities across the country are trying to improve relations between police and the citizens they protect. In Philadelphia, a recent Justice Department report found nearly once a week over the past eight years Philadelphia police opened fire on suspects, who are almost always African-American.
Hari Sreenivasan has more.
TANYA BROWN-DICKERSON, Mother of Brandon Tate-Brown: On December 15, 2014, I was going to work. I got to work a little late. I got there, I want to say 6:26. And I was getting ready to cut my car off. And I heard a black male, on the radio, a black male, 26 years old, gunned down by police at the 6600 block of Frankford Avenue, driving a white Dodge Charger.
So when I heard that, unfortunately, I knew that it was my son.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Last December, Tanya Brown’s son Brandon Tate-Brown had been killed, shot by Philadelphia polices, after being pulled over for driving with his headlights off.
TANYA BROWN-DICKERSON: To know that my son suffered like that and that I wasn’t there to protect him or lay my body on him, and them probably kill me too, it breaks my heart. I’m his mother. And I couldn’t do nothing to help him.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Tanya Brown is not alone in her pain. There have been 394 shootings involving the Philadelphia police since 2007. In many years, the department saw more police shootings than New York City, a city that is five times its size.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): As we have been reporting, it’s been a very rough go for the Philadelphia public schools this year, for its students, teachers and parents, and even further back.
Now the school superintendent is taking new steps and trying experiments with expanding charter schools to fight back.
The “NewsHour” special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has the first of two reports this week.
JOHN MERROW (NewsHour): Philadelphia public schools are in trouble. Not enough money. Overflowing classrooms. And the unkindest cut of all, more than one-third of its students, 70,000, are in charter schools, which Philadelphia has to pay for, but doesn’t control.
WILLIAM HITE, Superintendent, The School District of Philadelphia: Individuals are choosing away from us, simply because they don’t think that our schools are meeting the needs of our children.
JOHN MERROW: William Hite is superintendent of Philadelphia’s public schools.
WILLIAM HITE: So what we want to do is to become a part of that choice. Our survival depends on our ability to innovate, to think differently about how children are educated.
MAN: You noticed there’s mirrors. Mirrors are, like, fascinating to kids. They, like, look at them and they’re like, who is that kid? What brain development stuff is going on with those kinds of things now?
JOHN MERROW: This is the kind of innovative model superintendent Hite is talking about. These 12th graders at Science Leadership Academy are learning about brain development by designing toys for babies and infants.
WOMAN: Aaron, what do you think? Do you want to do like little infant or do you want to do like 4- to 5-year-olds?
STUDENT: I want to do toddlers 1 to 3.
MAN: You will need to research what’s going on and then think of what you could build, design that would help develop those parts of the brain that are developing during eight to 12 months.
JOHN MERROW: Some teachers might have given a lecture on brain development, but that’s not how things work at Science Leadership Academy. Here, kids learn by finding their own answers and working collaboratively on real-life projects.
SUMMARY: Can schools that enroll students of all skill levels use the same methods as more academically selective programs? In the second half of our report on Philadelphia’s public schools, special correspondent for education John Merrow reports on the city’s U School, a neighborhood school that’s copying the project-based learning curriculum of some of the city’s more exclusive charter schools.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): It’s a tough time to be a student, a teacher or a parent in the Philadelphia public schools. The nation’s eighth largest school system is experiencing a severe budget crisis.
Special correspondent for education John Tulenko of Learning Matters looks at the impact hitting the classroom and what’s being done about it.
JOHN TULENKO, Learning Matters: Last month, about 1,000 ninth graders marched to the football field at Northeast High School for a very different kind of kickoff ceremony.
WOMAN: We are doing a mock graduation. It’s an opportunity for our incoming ninth grade class to make a commitment. We want to put the urge in them that they promise they are going to be right back here in June 2018.
JOHN TULENKO: But hanging over this ceremony and the odds students will graduate is a school budget crisis that’s been called the worst in the country. Northeast has 3,000 students and two principals, Sharon McColskey and Linda Carroll.
SHARON MCCOLSKEY, Northeast High: In past years, operating budgets were probably 10 times what ours is right now, if not more.
Just the thought of opening the schools with what we have in the bank, real or in our budget, was really scary.
LINDA CARROLL, Northeast High: You know, we’re hoping that money will be coming, but I don’t know. We don’t have enough to even carry us through the end of this month, actually.
JOHN TULENKO: Since 2011, when the cutting began, Northeast High School’s budget for extracurricular activities has dropped to zero, its budget for books zero, and for supplies to $14,000. That’s roughly $5 per student to last the entire year.
What is that supposed to pay for?
SHARON MCCOLSKEY: Everything that makes the school run, books, supplies, toner, ink, paper.
LINDA CARROLL: Lab equipment, textbooks.
SHARON MCCOLSKEY: Technology.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): We return tonight to the subject of poverty and inequality.
In recent days, we have spoken with members of both political parties weighing in on the problem for our series of conversations Closing the Gap.
For a closer look at how one particularly hard-hit city is coping, we turn to Philadelphia, where more than 28 percent of residents live below the poverty level. That’s the highest rate of any U.S. city with more than one million people. The median income in Philadelphia is just above $34,000. Now, that’s the second lowest of any U.S. city, just ahead of Detroit.
Well, joining us now from Philadelphia is that city’s mayor, Democratic Mayor Michael Nutter.
