A lot of school news in the past few weeks to share:

School Safety
The District’s Safe Schools Advocate has been in the news slamming the District regarding its failures on ensuring safety – or should I say, some strange interpretation of it, since apparently he defines it as the number of students expelled from schools and closing “loopholes” like an appeal process, according to a yet unpublished report.

What he gets right: the climate is declining in schools, and options for getting troubled students help in time is as impossible as ever. Teachers, who have seen the loss of aides, NTAs vice principals, school-home liaisons and a burgeoning class size, ARE dealing with far more abuse with far fewer resources.

What he misses the boat on: his recommendations – expelling kids automatically, closing appeals processes, increasing the number of disciplinary school replacements and hiring a “discipline czar”? Anyone who argues that the solution to complicated issues of violence and climate is throwing out thousands of students onto the streets and closing appeals processes is not only short-sighted but irresponsible.

In another post on YPP, I discussed how the current model of public education is stuck in the industrial era- how, as Rabbi Stone put it, the best thing which could happen to the Philadelphia public schools would be to go back 50 years. I then said that we need to create a new model of public schooling for the post-industrial, information era. I wondered whether or not Microsoft's High School of the Future in West Philadelphia was such a model, and made an aside about how I would prefer an open source model- an aside which I noted was more than merely a gratuitous jab at Microsoft.