It goes without saying that the small classroom I worked in was chaotic -- if ten of the twenty or so students assigned to the room, many of whom only came when dragged in by truant officers, showed up on a given day, it was miraculous. Even with a high staff-to-student ratio, our kids were so emotionally disturbed and prone to outburst that just keeping the furniture on the floor was sometimes the best we could manage. Sometimes violence erupted, and chairs or even desks went airborne before we could deescalate the situation. And sometimes, improbably and completely unpredictably, for a short period, the children would settle and -- for whatever reason that we weren't able to divine or systematize -- some small bit of learning would happen. But these street-raised kids were so far behind -- most of them functionally illiterate, many of them still needing to count on their fingers to do basic arithmetic -- that education was not just a hard sell, it was nearly impossible.

Philadelphia's school violence problem was documented over the course of the following year in what would become the Inquirer's Pulitzer-Prize-winning series, "Assault on Learning." The series captured pretty much everything I saw working at Bartram. Routine violence that staff were often unable to contain, that frequently was directed at them, created a terrifying environment for children and teachers alike that went far beyond the already crippling bullying epidemic that has plagued our schools, public and private, rich and poor. Working at Bartram, like the schools profiled in the Inquirer series, didn't feel like working in a school with a bullying problem. It felt like working inside an institution on the verge of collapse, held together by threads that could completely fall apart at any moment.

Bartram, luckily, has endured. In fact, it hasn't appeared on the state's list of persistently dangerous schools since 2007, suggesting that staff there have steadied the ship, despite a chronic lack of resources and being located in one of the poorest and roughest neighborhoods of an infamously poor and rough city. What's unfortunate is that all that hard work could be undone by fiscal austerity. In May, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission announced bone-deep staff cuts to the Philly school district.

Those with knowledge of the system are anticipating a double whammy to the chances of maintaining good order next year in many city schools. Twenty-three schools are closing, meaning that thousands of children will be uprooted and forced to make long commutes through unfamiliar neighborhoods to unfamiliar schools. There is a two-fold potential for violence here: first, in students spending longer periods of time outdoors commuting, especially after school when drug corners are up and running and older boys with guns have hit the streets; second, in the potential for conflict inside schools. Fears of high school gang wars may be overblown -- at first. That's only because Philadelphia's crime scene is notoriously disorganized, characterized by rag-tag teams of corner hustlers and stick-up artists who are rarely loyal to any superstructure beyond whatever block they happen to be repping at the moment. However, the potential does exist for larger criminal groups to begin organizing, as students with allegiances to closed schools in their neighborhoods are met by hostile students at the new school to which they've been sent. This is the greater worry: not that school closings will incite a gang war, since Philly as a general rule doesn't do gangs and hasn't since the 1970s, but that gangs will form in order to provide protection to swaths of uprooted students in generally hostile, unfamiliar territory.