In poll after poll, parents tell us that they care about academic achievement, but that they also want schools to help instill good values. And since children are adept at drawing lessons from adults’ behavior as well as from their words, it’s always nice when teachers conduct themselves with decorum and sensitivity. Which begs the question, how many parents would want their children to emulate the teachers who disrupted last week’s meeting of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission—the district’s governing body? For that matter, how many of these teachers would want their students to behave this way in class?


All the shouting, incidentally, was over the Reform Commission’s decision to require teachers to contribute for the first time to their health insurance premiums. For what it’s worth, Philadelphia was one of only two districts in the state that had not yet required this.