I don’t quite understand this story: the Superintendent has declared that principals will be measured by how many children eat breakfast each morning.

So…we wake up every morning and cook breakfast for our kids and their school will be punished because they didn’t come to eat in the school cafeteria? I don’t understand. Is this something that downtown will use to blame principals when their school is under-performing?

(Sidebar: in some ways, this threat is indicative of how school reform proceeds in general: you can’t treat all of the kids in Philly as if they come from the same homes. There are definitely some families and kids who would benefit from being coerced into having breakfast at school. But there are also families who have structured their lives to spend as much time as possible with their kids and who have no intention of giving up the morning meal. You can’t treat all communities in the same way.)