Behold the Blue Ribbons

Egg rolls for peace, anyone?

by Isaiah Thompson

If Philadelphia's schools superintendent can do to school violence what she's done with the press, hoorah! Utopia is just a few press releases away. Last week, Arlene Ackerman and Mayor Michael Nutter announced the formation of a "Blue Ribbon Commission" on school violence and — voila! — the Internet was a cornucopia of news about the panel and its noble goal (we mean it) of reducing this city's number of "persistently dangerous" schools from 20 to zero and improving safety in 26 other dangerous schools.

This news came at an opportune moment: Ackerman was recently named "top urban school leader" by the Council of Great City Schools — whose board she formerly chaired, natch — and, following the announcement of the aforementioned blue ribbon panel, we learned that Ackerman will be honored at a gala by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

It was all the right kind of news, too: forward-looking, full of promises and goals and bright visions of a near future. This new commission is collaborative, a partnership of community members, clergy and city and school officials. It's accountable, and will release regular reports and comes equipped with a subcommittee to check on progress on the ground, in the schools. It has four subcommittees, for crying out loud: Talk about thorough!

Had the media looked backward, however, the view wouldn't have been nearly so rosy. Had the press looked back just to this past February, they'd have seen — no! — basically the exact same story, from the last time Ackerman announced she would convene a panel to address school violence. That panel would begin its work in April, the Inquirer reported. (A District spokesman tells me that panel and the one announced last week are the same.) What's more, had reporters looked back further still, they'd have found Ackerman announcing yet another panel to address school violence following the attacks on Asian students at South Philadelphia High School — events already forgotten by the search engines. Last winter, you may recall, Ackerman formed a "Racial and Cultural Harmony" task force with no less than 80 members and 11 subcommittees (wow!), which was to deliver its own report — goals, recommendations, etc. — in April.

But it didn't. In May, the school's diversity chief — whose job was to lead the task force — resigned. When the report finally came out in September, it was five months past due and appeared to have been cobbled together — literally sentence by sentence — from a mishmash of recommendations that included such innovative racial-harmony plans as having students dress in native garb and introducing culturally diverse food to school lunch rooms. Egg rolls for peace, anyone?

Ackerman called that report "solid."

None of this is to say that there's anything simple about school violence, or that there shouldn't be a blue ribbon panel, or that its reports won't be useful. But, thus far, the most substantial results these various task forces and panels seem to have generated is good, good press.