#phillyeducation

#PAGov: Corbett Keeps PSD in Perpetual Crisis Mode

What Governor Corbett is doing to public education in Philadelphia is pretty sadistic.  When faced with crisis, Governor Corbett chooses to keep the Philadelphia School District in perpetual crisis mode.  School district won’t open in time?  Attack the teachers union, give the lowest possible amount of money to keep schools open.  Child dies of an asthma attack in a school with no nurse present?  

Will a popular neighborhood school be forced into a charter "transformation"? Parents at Munoz-Marin Elementary School are asking hard questions. The school is the anchor of their community. Public meetings have not been pretty and the community was ready to vote today. It looked like a big “No!” to the charter makeover.

But now the vote has been pushed towards the lazy days of summer...after a phone call from the charter operator, ASPIRA, to buddies in school district management.

Today is the beginning of EduCon, the 6th annual teaching and learning conference sponsored by Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. I am getting the final things together for a “conversation” on Saturday that I’m in with colleagues called Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom.

You can see our agenda here and we invite you to join us online or in-person at 1pm ET tomorrow to participate.

What I am thinking about right now as I prepare for tomorrow is that it is always so much fun to bring together a group of folks and come up with a plan for a conversation like this … mostly because it’s always so much different than I initially expected! Not really a surprise, I know -- I truly believe the more heads are better than one and that when you really co-construct something it’s subject to the collective thinking and creativity in the room. Even so, it’s cool that it’s always so different than I thought and always so invigorating as a process even if sometimes momentarily hard to figure out along the way.

And what’s more is that it’ll be totally different again once we get into the conversation with all the folks who choose to come. What I like about this plan is the goal to create a connected learning experience out of the conversation … and if we really can facilitate that then we really don’t know what will emerge on the other side. It’s not just an open time -- we are really trying to foster something and planned some activities to support that -- but it’s also a time with open spaces and that again can be so much fun if we let it be and just do what we can to support collective mean-making.

Governor Corbett Reacts to Governor Corbett Running Away from High Schoolers of Twitter

Like a couple hundred residents of the Philadelphia area who are angry about Governor Corbett’s…

When I was researching this piece about the Philly public school crisis, I asked Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the school district, what would happen if a child experienced a medical emergency on a day when there was no nurse present at his or her school. He said that in that situation, "the first thing to do is call 911 with a nurse or without a nurse -- nurses are not there to handle that kind of emergency."