Violent city schools are result of a lack of strong leadership

Jack Wagner

is Pennsylvania's auditor general

Many specific ideas and suggestions have been put forth to address violence in the School District of Philadelphia; however, nothing is more important than leadership. There is a failure of leadership in the district and the state Department of Education, and parents and children are paying a terrific price.

How bad is the violence?

Philly public schools accounted for 9 percent of the state's enrollment of 1.7 million students - and 46 percent of all classroom assaults on students and staff, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education's 2008-09 annual school safety reports. All 19 schools classified by the state as persistently dangerous are in Philadelphia. In fact, for the last five years, the only schools deemed persistently dangerous are in Philadelphia.

According to Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, about 10,000 district students a day are truant. The executive director of the National School Safety Center indicated in a statement on the organization's website that one out of 12 young people who stay away from school do so because of fear. I believe this percentage is higher in Philadelphia, as indicated by the proliferation of charter and cyber schools.

Of all the problems plaguing Pennsylvania's largest school district - old buildings, broken budgets, dated textbooks - violence is No. 1. No child can realize his or her full academic potential without a safe and nurturing learning environment.

Violence has been an issue in the district for many years; that's why state legislators took the initiative in 2000 to create an independent safe-schools advocate to tackle growing concerns about school violence in Philadelphia. Around the same time, the state took the dramatic step of removing the school board and placing control of the district in the hands of a School Reform Commission, whose members were appointed by the governor and the mayor.

My office highlighted the state Department of Education's hands-off approach to violence in Pennsylvania schools in a 2008 performance audit. We found that the department had failed to verify the violence statistics it received from schools, to issue a school-safety annual report in a timely manner, and to create an Office of Safe Schools, as required by state law. Leadership related to safety in schools has been lacking from state government for far too long.