And guess what? Of the thousands of schools in the country - and the hundreds in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit - only 54 were deemed persistently dangerous.
Of those 54, 27 are in Philadelphia.
Yes, kids. In the entire nation, more than half of the dangerous schools are in Philadelphia.
In fact, in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, only Philadelphia and the Chester Upland School District had persistently dangerous schools. None for Pittsburgh or Erie, thank you very much.
Kids, you have to pity poor school CEO Paul Vallas. Sadly, he really believed in honesty and playing fairly. He really wanted to confront school violence in an realistic, hard nosed way. He actually followed the Pennsylvania Department of Education's guidelines for determining what is a persistently dangerous school: for a school whose enrollment is 250 or less, at least five dangerous incidents; for a school whose enrollment is between 251 to 1,000, a number of dangerous incidents that represents at least 2 percent of the school's enrollment; and for a school whose enrollment is more than 1,000, 20 or more dangerous incidents.
Now, Vallas has to worry that everyone thinks that only Philadelphia has dangerous schools. Before you know it, everyone will want to move to the safe schools, like the ones in Minnesota where none of the schools were listed as dangerous, even though a high school freshman last week shot and killed one student and injured another.
So let that be a lesson, kids. It's not the misguided boys and girls with knives and guns that make a school dangerous.
It's the truth. *
