PSS Community

Why I Chose Westfield Friends: 2010-03-14 School Selection Report

Date Submitted: 3/14/2010 What school did you decide on? Westfield Friends Calendar year your child entered/will enter: 2009-2010 Grade your child entered/will enter: Pre-K What neighborhood are you in?: Center City What schools did you consider? We considered TPS, Friends Select, Frankford Friends, and Moorestown Friends. We also looked at St. Peter’s, but did not seriously consider it. What factors...

PSS Community

Announcing School Selection Reports

Thanks to contributions from Philly School Search readers, we are starting to collect school selection reports on our blog.  The first reports will be published later today.  You can see all school selection reports by choosing the “School Selections” category or narrow the group of posts by choosing a school tag.  For example, choose the “Westfield Friends” tag to see all posts...

PSS Community

Open Houses Next Week!

If you are in the thick of a school search, you want to stay on top of when schools are offering open houses.  JS Jenks is having a prospective parent tea and Abington Friends is having an open house. Look for those and other open houses on our new open house calendar. Both events want RSVPs, so check out the calendar ASAP for more...

PSS Community

New Domain, New Features on Philly School Search!

Due to the runaway success of this blog, we moved off of wordpress.com and onto our own new domain–phillyschoolsearch.com!  Why should you care?  Because moving to a hosted site allows us to offer lots of new features.  There are four great enhancements that we have already added and there are more to come! An interactive Philadelphia School map. Look up the schools in your neighborhood in an...

Len Lipkin

Make Every School a Charter?

Mary Beth Hertz (a.k.a. mbteach on Twitter) over on the Philly Teacher blog recently posted a very thought provoking article–A New Model for School Reform: Could it Work?. With all the talk of Charters and Renaissance schools lately, it was great to read such a well thought out and well articulated model of school reform. Her idea in a nutshell–do away with catchments and let every...

Len Lipkin

School Success Criteria Vol 2: Teachers

In yesterday’s post, the first of a series outlining what makes a school successful, I started the article by stating that I was unhappy that teachers are disproportionately punished for bad performance in schools. Newsweek’s cover story this week is titled “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers” tells the other side of the story–that teachers should be blamed when blame is due, What...

Len Lipkin

School Success Criteria Vol 1: Parents

In the news lately there has been a lot of talk of underperforming “Renaissance” schools who will forced to dismiss many of their teachers.  On the one hand, I applaud the attempt to shock our worst schools into improvement.  On the other hand, I am dismayed that the teachers are being disproportionately punished for the failures of their schools.  It occurred to me that so many factors...

Marta Rowh

Everyone gets on the waitlist: ICS #2

If you apply to Independence Charter School you will get a spot on the waitlist.   They pick every last name out of the box.  This year the waitlist was somewhere around 380 spots long.   Getting off the waitlist is another issue: 1-10 will likely get a spot, 10-20 still very promising, 20-30 is possible, after 30 is very unlikely.   I’m sure this varies from year to year.  I was told it’s...