Ryan Boyer wants change and better the Philadelphia school system. The quick response and teamwork used to fix the I-95 bridge collapse could be a successful model in how to approach a different issue: strengthening the city’s school systems.
From Broad and Liberty:
I’m in favor of doing anything we can to quickly help kids trapped in Philadelphia schools that consign them to a permanent underclass.
I am so frustrated by the lack of urgency when it comes to Philadelphia schools. Our laissez-faire attitude is sentencing generations of kids to lives deprived of opportunity. We know that failure to read proficiently by the end of third grade is linked to higher dropout rates and significantly lower lifetime earnings. And yet we accept that 72 percent of public school third graders in Philadelphia do not read at grade level.
We just have to fix this — and it’s not a one-person problem. It’s all of us. It’s like the I-95 collapse — if it’s a civic responsibility to fix a highway, it’s a civic responsibility to fix our schools.
