IS OUR DEMOCRATS LEARNING? (via Charlie Herzog)

Grading the Philadelphia Experiment: Last fall, TIME reported on plans by for-profit firms to reform the city's schools. Here's how they did (REBECCA WINTERS, 6/23/03, TIME)

On a cloudless spring morning, among boarded-up row houses in North Philadelphia, the asphalt school yard at Wright Elementary is a blur of arriving children, many in uniforms getting a bit too tight and too short as the year draws to a close. Glasses propped on top of her head, hand on a child's shoulder, Wright's motherly principal, Anita Duke, rolls a rickety cart with a microphone and speaker into the yard for the morning announcements and starts another day. It's Duke's 29th year working in Philadelphia's public schools, her sixth at Wright, and it has been one of her best.

Despite her initial skepticism about Victory Schools, the New York City--based company assigned to manage Wright this year, Duke chose to give the firm a try, persuaded her wary staff to do the same and then hoped for the best. "We dumb-lucked out," she says. Of the three for-profits awarded contracts, Victory is the only one that has been given an additional school to run next year, and it also seems likely to manage some of the small high schools that Philadelphia schools chief Vallas would like to open in the next few years, replacing the district's massive, impersonal buildings.

Victory brought in stopwatches and scripts to teach reading, revolutionary rigidity for a school that had practiced a free-flowing literacy program that left lots of room for creativity. When some teachers fell behind the company's prescribed 20-lessons-a-month pace, Victory coaches visited their classrooms and co-taught lessons or gave demonstrations. While a backlash against such heavy-handed methods might have been expected, most of Wright's faculty instead express gratitude. Fourth-grade teacher Raynette Perry says, "I hate to admit it, but it works for my kids." Jacquelyn McPherson, Wright's guidance counselor and, as union representative, someone who could have led the revolt against such intrusion, says, "Finally! Teachers have wanted this kind of guidance for years!"

There have been some bumps along the way. The company's writing program calls for students to compose essays on core subjects in history and science, not just on personal experiences. But early in the year, Wright's teachers didn't have textbooks that incorporated the Pennsylvania state standards on which their students would be tested. Victory's staff worked with them to create three-ring binders of lessons on topics as diverse as ancient Rome and human-body cells. "Now we're no longer writing, 'I love my mom. The dog is big.' We're writing, 'There are many parts to a cell,'" Duke explains. "Educationally, it's more bang for your buck." Victory's quick response to the materials crunch was particularly heartening to the staff. "If the district were involved, that would have been an eight-month process," Duke says. "Victory went to Kinko's."

Victory also helped Duke reduce class size in lower grades from 24 in some rooms to 16, and it replaced interns who had performed administrative duties with three full-time teachers. In addition, the company brought high-quality training to Wright's faculty. Unlike many other school reformers, Victory didn't rely on what Duke calls "I train you today, you train her tomorrow" coaching on the cheap, but paid for 11 full-time coaches to work with its five schools.

Under its new contract with the district, Victory will get one more school and two more years to deliver gains. Lynn Spampinato, Victory's regional director in Philadelphia, plans to introduce a new math curriculum and expand the company's experiment in separating boys and girls in middle school. One thing she won't tinker with is Duke's leadership at Wright--a major force in the company's success there this year. "So often with school reform, if a principal isn't on board, you never accomplish a thing, no matter how good the plan is," Spampinato says. "By example, Anita showed her staff that change doesn't have to be so difficult. That was invaluable."

Schools chief Vallas learned some valuable lessons too. "The lesson is that we don't have to be ideological about school management," Vallas says. "It doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black, but whether the cat catches mice." Or raises scores.

It's 2003, but the Left still has to be convinced that the private sector would educate kids more efficiently than the public sector can and that discipline and responsibility are important tools that the former will bring to bear on the task? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2003 7:53 PM