What the mayor can do for the schools

The next mayor faces a master class in management when it comes to the schools. Schools are extremely important to young families -- that is, voters -- and yet, Philadelphia's mayor doesn't directly control the school district now. It's under state control.

Instead, the mayor must do what he can about this vital part of city life through influence and his two representatives to the five-member School Reform Commission.

Despite the difficulty, the Cross-City Campaign for School Reform says there are at least eight initiatives that the next mayor could start, encourage or spread that would help improve our schools. Click on the links to read more about each.

1) "be a champion and advocate for a new state system of funding" that evens out well-funded districts and poorly funded ones. (Statewide, there's a $10,000 per child difference between what the best-funded districts get to educate kids and what the worst-funded districts get.

2) "set a clear expectation that city services, including public schools, will be of comparable quality in every neighborhood in Philadelphia." That is, no more pockets of excellence next to pockets of despair.

3) "creating a pool of money that hard-to-staff schools could use" to provide incentives for teacher hiring and use his leverage to add incentives to teacher contracts during renegotiations.

4) Push "for the public scrutiny and evaluation of all external providers of educational services" -- that would be Edison Schools, Community Education Partners and so on.

5) "Working with the School District and City Council members, initiate a process whereby every school and its surrounding community creates a school safety plan."

6) Support the development of small community-centered schools in as many communities as possible, beginning with Kensington, Olney, and West Philadelphia High Schools. 

7) Force city agencies that serve kids to cooperate, so they are talking about issues including truancy, after-school care and child welfare.

8) And work with the drop-out prevention ideas offered Philadelphia Youth Transitions Collaborative and Project U-Turn, ensuring that city agencies have the resources they need and are held accountable for serving these young people.