… because it’s 1:20 in the morning, and I just got off the phone with one of my teachers, because we were hashing out some of the issues for September. The faculty of SLA are as committed a group of teachers as I have ever seen (and, trust me, that’s high praise), and I don’t think they are going to let anything stand in the way of providing a truly innovating and inspiring educational model for our kids.

And since I’m blogging for the first time in days, I’ll continue. Here’s the problem. It shouldn’t be this hard to get a great school off the ground. Yes, of course, anything worth doing is going to be difficult, and yes, starting up is hard, and yes, innovation is damned hard. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

There has been a real excitement and outpouring of good will here in the School District of Philadelphia about SLA. People from every conceivable office have worked with us to try to get us what we need — I really have been blown away by the commitment of the city. And even with that, dealing with the constraints that are placed on urban school districts, both financially and politically, has meant getting to September 7th has taken a Herculean effort on the part of the teachers and the committed central office folks. (And yes, me too.) The behind-the-scenes folks at SDP who have been working all year to get the four new high schools open are exhausted, and I understand why.

If we are really to reform education in our cities, we need more money spent on our cities. We need to reform NCLB so that real reform can happen. We need to make it easier to get our best and brightest into our urban classrooms. And then we need to create structures that allow them to really teach and plan.

Until then, 1:20 am phone and email conversations are the only way we’re going to get it done. I’m lucky, I have a group of teachers who are on board for that. It’s my job to make sure that they don’t have to do it very often.