Philly school superintendent says district schools suffer from a ‘crisis of confidence’

Six months into his stint as Philadelphia’s superintendent, Tony B. Watlington Sr. said he is firmly fixed on one point.

“Our goal in 2023 is to position the School District of Philadelphia to be the fastest-improving large, urban district in the country,” Watlington said, echoing a point he has made in news conferences and speeches, getting-to-know-you meetings, and school visits since he came to the city in June.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Inquirer’s editorial board Tuesday, Watlington underscored that idea. He said the school system — one of the nation’s largest — will measure that goal by scrutinizing National Assessment of Educational Progress scores; the district’s four-year graduation rate, which currently stands at 70%; and its dropout rate, which stands at about 11% to 14%, according to internal projections.

Watlington spent the first several months of his tenure on a “listening and learning” tour and is now working with several groups to produce a strategic plan that will guide the district’s academic priorities for the next several years. But he was surprised, he said Tuesday, to hear a sizable portion of people surveyed say the school system did “nothing” well.

“It’s a district that has improved its finances significantly — a national model, I would say,” Watlington said. For people to say nothing was going well made him believe “that we absolutely have a crisis of confidence in terms of how people feel about this eighth-largest school district in the country. We want to be very intentional about addressing this crisis of confidence. There are a lot of things that this district does do well, and we have to do a better job of telling our story.”

Still, there are areas in need of significant improvement — including the district’s literacy rate, he noted. Citywide, just 36% of district students meet state standards in reading.

A report produced by Watlington’s transition team said the district “lacks a clear theory of action on how it expects to raise student achievement. When initiatives are launched, they rarely go to scale as they come from separate departments in the central office and simply layer on initiative after initiative.”

The superintendent was clear Tuesday: That will not happen going forward. The district will only invest in proven strategies, and implement them cohesively. It will stop investing in things that have not shown results.

“The districts that have led the way tend to focus on the science of reading training,” Watlington said. He pointed to Mississippi as a national model of this theory.

Third-grade reading scores have been flat for a decade, Watlington said.

“We can significantly improve that,” he said.

Specific strategies are forthcoming, with the strategic plan expected to be presented to the school board in May. But a focus on student and teacher attendance has already begun — students and teachers have to be in school regularly for there to be any growth, the superintendent said.

“We need to get our arms around that, and how we make sure that students and teachers have no less than 90% attendance every month,” said Watlington.

Though Watlington said he did not want students or staff to come to school if they are ill, some teachers have raised red flags about a district policy that can subject staff to potential disciplinary action for using their contractually guaranteed sick time nonconsecutively.

Watlington said the “occurrence” policy — which requires disciplinary action after teachers take three nonconsecutive sick or family illness days and recommends suspension or possible termination after nine nonconsecutive days — could be revised.

“Yes, we’re looking at all of the above,” Watlington said. “We’re engaging the teachers in the strategic plan project team; teachers are at the table as a part of that work. We’ll take the time to study the extent to which existing policies and procedures are working.”

Officials are working to better understand student attendance trends, Watlington said. He said schools know that absences can occur not just because students are sick, but often because they have complicated home lives or safety concerns. Helping disrupt attendance trends “may require additional resources,” the superintendent said. “There may be families that we need to provide more social workers, truancy officials, etc.”

Teacher attendance is better understood.

“We need to keep the teachers healthy. We know that teachers need to feel like they’re supported. We know that they need to have high morale and feel like the district is their partner,” Watlington said.

Watlington also stressed the district is prioritizing safety in its schools. “I think we absolutely have a city violence problem,” he said, noting that he still believes “most of our schools are safe havens for our children.”

Staff at a number of district schools, including Dobbins High, have said that behavior and safety problems persist. These educators and school employees said their ability to mitigate these problems has been hampered by district policies that have de-emphasized out-of-school suspensions and other behavioral consequences without replacing them with meaningful strategies and adequate staff to encourage a positive climate. The superintendent pushed back against that theory Tuesday.

“The data says that the majority of the students in the School District of Philadelphia are not committing offenses that will warrant an out-of-school suspension,” Watlington said. “What we have is a group of children in some schools who are expressing some inappropriate, egregious bad behaviors. When it’s appropriate to suspend children from schools, we will absolutely do it.”

Watlington also said he has had conversations with Gov. Tom Wolf and Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro about the district’s need for more money.

“It is not Tony Watlington’s opinion, it is a fact; the School District of Philadelphia is a historically underfunded school district,” Watlington said. “Equity means that some children need more, and we at least need to be funded at the level that other, more wealthy children get funded at.”