I’ve been grappling with how to write about this… because there’s no good way. It’s really difficult to take part in the School 2.0 discussion right now as the School District of Philadelphia is dealing with such difficult issues. I’ve had a lot of the long-time SDP people tell me that this is the worst they’ve ever seen it.

And what worries me is that the promise of School 2.0 when combined with the realities of the funding issues facing our cities is that we run the risk of of making the gap between suburban and urban schools even worse. Right now, a MacBook program for 120 students will cost around $165,000 a year (I subtracted out the cost of the individual textbooks we don’t buy.) For a school with $20,000 in per pupil spending, it’s doable. For most city schools, it requires major grant funding to be able to do it.

Despite funding from sources like PA’s Classrooms for the Future, sustaining technological innovation in underfunded districts is a tough trick. My big hope is that SLA can really show that 1:1 programs are worth funding in our cities. My big fear is that the funding is not sustainable nor is it replicable. I feel very confident that SLA has done well enough, has justified the expense enough, that we will have laptop funding for the next few years, but more than ever, living through this budget crisis in Philly has convinced me how necessary it is to have a domestic version of the OLPC laptop that we can deploy in the US. If I could run a laptop for $400 per person (with no software licensing costs later on) instead of $1500, then the funding nut is a lot less difficult to crack.

But there’s more than just looking at technology… as I saw article after article in the Philly papers on the violence in our schools, I just was struck by how far away this ideal of School 2.0 can feel. Too many of our students in Philly are in facilities that are in need of repair. Too many of our students are in schools where the adults spend so much time trying to worry about keeping everyone safe that I can’t imagine having the ability to focus on instruction. (Ask yourself, how well could you teach if every time you saw someone go by the door, you were wondering someone was going to walk in and disrupt your class?)

Now, I must also say that I’ve been in a lot of schools in Philadelphia, and I’ve generally seen safe schools where the kids seemed pretty pleased to be there…. and high school attendance numbers certainly bear that out, because attendance is up from last year. But let’s also be clear — if teachers are getting attacked, if there is even one school where there are fires started on a regular basis, then we have some major problems. These schools have lost security guards and non-teaching assistants, and those key losses will affect your building. The district needs more money, badly.

The latest round (now several years old) of contract negotiations did result in a raise for teachers, although it still leaves Philly as one of the lower paying districts around, but to my knowledge the city and state did not kick in any extra money to cover the larger personnel costs. How can they leave our city underfunded? And how will school reform — the ideal of School 2.0 — take root if so many people in the district are just trying to protect their schools, not reform them?

And that’s the most insidious piece of the puzzle — and perhaps it is my main idea — if all schools and school administrators do is fight the battles around the budget, then we’ve lost the idea of innovation because the time just isn’t there for it.

I’ve met just about every senior level staffer in SDP. They are good people. I’ve been really impressed with Paul Vallas every time I’ve spoken with him. These are good people who care about kids. But until the politics of education funding are seriously challenged and reformed, then we dance on the edges, with most schools unable to make the changes necessary to reform their schools. In many of these schools, some kids have sensed that and are determined to undermine the very safety of the building. We can be disappointed — we should be. But we must find a way to take our frustation to the state. We have to put our children in front of the politicians so that they can ask one simple question — "Why won’t the state fund our schools?" We must do it standing behind Mr. Vallas in full-throated support, and we must make sure that we change the story in the media such that those who will not fund our schools are made to feel ashamed.