From the WSJ Opinion Archives
OUTSIDE THE BOX
City of Brotherly Education
If Philadelphia officials really love their students, they'll embrace school privatization.
Next week Philadelphia's children will be returning to what may be the worst school system in America. But what distinguishes this failed public school systems from others is that two years ago state officials decided to replace the ineffective school board with a School Reform Commission, appointed by the state and given a mandate for serious reform.
Philadelphia's statistics give a telling picture of how bad the schools have gotten: 50% of the kids who begin school in the first grade drop out before they graduate. Fifty-eight percent of its students fail reading and math; 80% score less than proficient. Only 13% of high school juniors are able to read and understand a newspaper. Less than 10% of African-American students scored at or above basic proficiency in math. "The real tragedy is the longer kids are in school, the worse they do. In fact, the eight grade reading scores are no better than the third grade reading scores," says Paul G. Vallas, the new school Superintendent in Philadelphia.
Former Gov. Tom Ridge began the reform process, and Gov. Mark Schweiker has carried it forward. The first step was to create the School Reform Commission with the authority to change the system. The commission started with a plan to cut 325 positions from the district's administrative staff. The next step was, of course, more money. Gov. Schweiker persuaded the Pennsylvania legislature to provide an additional $83 million and the city appropriated another $45 million for Philadelphia schools.
In his month and a half on the job Superintendent Vallas has proposed the construction of nine new high schools, he wants smaller schools--800 to 1,000 students instead of the giant 3,000 student high schools that exist now--the addition of summer school for 75,000 kids and an extended school day for 50,000 of the poorer performing students. It is a good beginning, but mostly standard stuff from the educational establishment playbook.
But the other reforms the Commission and Mr. Vallas are implementing are the stuff of real change, and hold out the hope for a system that will improve the education and the ability of students to function in the real world after graduation.
The most important (and controversial) was turning management of the 45 worst schools in the city, with some 25,000 students, over to seven private companies and universities. Edison, the best public school management company in the country, will run 20 of them; Temple and the University of Pennsylvania another eight. These schools will get extra dollars from the state's $83 million to run their restructured programs.
Another 33 poorly performing schools will be reconstituted with a different teaching staff and curriculum. So the worst quarter of the schools in the city will have a different program and better managers when school opens on Sept. 5. Six more charter schools will open their doors too, bringing that total to 45. There is even a proposal by one of the private school managers to turn a middle school into two single sex schools in the same building. In the politically-correct education establishment, you can't get more radical than that.
And a new testing system will be implemented in October. For the first time all students in grades two to 11 will be tested twice next year to see how they are progressing. There was even some talk, although it hasn't come to pass, of giving two different diplomas to graduating seniors, one indicating successful completion of high school, the other will add a seal of excellence if the student has done well on the annual tests.
Of course the whole dysfunctional Philadelphia school system has not been changed or fixed. Unfortunately, under pressure from the failed public school establishment and the teachers union the School Reform Commission watered down Gov. Ridge's original reform plan that would have transformed the entire Philadelphia school system into a privately managed one. Of the 246 schools in the city, 177 are failing schools as defined by the federal education reform bill signed into law by President Bush. But only 70 of these are getting new management and strengthened curricula under the reform plan. Nevertheless, all this still adds up to the most comprehensive public school reform effort in the country.
The question is: Will it work? It may, but remember that all the substantive reforms were fought by the education establishment and the mayor's administration. The City's two members on the Education Reform Commission opposed the private managers; so did the teachers' union, the NAACP and a city religious group whose spokesman screamed that the whole reform idea was "a terrorist attack on our children's education." As Gov. Ridge said last summer, there are groups who "prefer publicly operated schools that fail children to privately operated schools that serve them well." When it comes to destroying reform initiatives these people never give up.
Three years from now, when test scores are up at the 70 schools operating under the new plan and dropout numbers down, will the foes of reform tear the better system down? When more kids are testing above basic proficiency in math and reading and with the privately managed schools outperforming those run by the city, will they still demand a less successful, "fairer" system? Will they use their political power to end the progress that has been made?
They probably will; Mayor Street has already predicted "that Edison isn't going to survive"--which means he will make sure it doesn't survive--so that "the poster child for privatized, profit-making education is going to be out of the picture." Reversal of the reforms is always a risk; but for the moment Philadelphia is soon to welcome students into a better education system that will help them get the opportunities they've been cheated out of for so long.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.
