On the record with Lori Shorr, the mayor's chief education officer

Lori Shorr is Mayor Nutter's chief education officer and fills the newly created city post of director of the Office of the Public School Family and Child Advocate. She is a member of Nutter's cabinet, charged with shepherding the mayor's ambitious effort to halve the school dropout rate over the next five to seven years, double the number of adults with college degrees within the next decade, and improve adult literacy.

Prior to this appointment, Shorr tackled some of the same issues at the Philadelphia Youth Network, where she was vice president of policy and planning, and as a special assistant to state Secretary of Education Gerald Zahorchak, where she analyzed state policies designed to increase high school graduation rates and college attendance. Prior to that, she directed the Office of School and Community Partnerships at Temple and did research on educational issues including literacy and the alignment of curricula among schools and grade levels.

Shorr spoke to the Notebook's contributing editor Dale Mezzacappa.

How are you and the Nutter administration going to tackle the dropout crisis?

There's not a system right now for dropouts to come back into the school district. They're starting to put one together; in fact, I'm going to call [interim CEO] Tom Brady as soon as I can to thank him. He's dedicated space on the first floor of 440 [N. Broad St.] for a "re-engagement center."

Right now, kids [who want to come back] make a phone call, and somebody at 440 tells them to go back to the school he or she dropped out of because only their home school has the ability to look at their credit accrual. Without credit accrual you can't place kids in a roster. But credit accrual isn't going to tell you whether the kid reads at a third-grade level or tenth-grade level. Knowing that is the difference between failure and success in an educational placement.

At the re-engagement center, we're going to do an academic evaluation of the kid. We're working on the staffing now and with [the School District's Office of] Curriculum and Instruction to come up with the best assessments.

Will the re-engagement center coordinate other information on students?

Data is one of my top priorities, not just better data on each child within the School District but across our agencies: how can we share data about kids, if not on a student level, in an aggregate form so that we can start serving kids better. So as geeky and as wonky as data alignment is, it's a huge part of what we're going to have to do - because dropouts are kids who go in and out of all sorts of systems.

So the re-engagement center will also have people from social service agencies. A third of the kids who drop out are in our agency systems, so we need to have the ability to know what systems they're in and what supports they have.

So to build a system for kids to get back to school, the re-engagement center is a big piece, the data is a big piece, and then the other big piece is creating additional slots in various types of educational options for kids. These are the accelerated schools and the Educational Options (EOPS) program. What happens at the re-engagement center will help find the right option for that kid.

These are tangible goals around alternative programs. What about prevention?