District gets new feedback on privatization

Five years into the nation's largest experiment in school privatization, the Philadelphia School District yesterday was advised - for the second time in a month - that it may be time to scale back, or at least to modify the approach.

The Accountability Review Council, an independent body monitoring school improvement in Philadelphia, yesterday agreed there was "little evidence" that the academic gains made by the six companies running 41 city schools warranted the continuation of additional funding being paid to the managers. The companies, including the for-profit Edison Schools Inc., have gotten $90 million over the last five years.

But the council did not recommend a wholesale cut of the managers.

Instead, it called for the School Reform Commission to make decisions on a school-by-school basis. The commission, it said, should remove private managers that have persistently performed below the district's average rate of test-score improvement.

"We feel that the SRC needs to go back, look at the resources that have been put into these particular schools, and determine whether they lived up to expectations," said James E. Lyons, council chairman and president of California State University.

The Rand Corp. and Research for Action made similar assertions in an analysis released in late January. The researchers found that the schools managed by outside groups as a whole improved only about the same rate as district schools, despite the additional funding.

"One might have expected to see academic outcomes far greater than [in] those [schools] that did not get the resources," Lyons said.

Edison manages 20 schools, the largest number. Others - including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Victory Schools, Foundations Inc. and Universal Companies - manage several schools each. The groups are called educational management organizations, or EMOs.

The council did not specify which schools should be removed, or which managers.

Lyons said it was up to the SRC, not the accountability council, to review the contracts and conduct the analyses.

The accountability council, which last year operated on an $82,000 budget funded by the district, was established as part of the agreement that created the reform commission as the district's governing body under its state takeover in 2001.

Commission Chairman James Nevels said he expected the district would continue with private management of some schools.

"The diverse-provider model is something we see as being beneficial," he said. "That will likely continue regardless of how we proceed on individual providers."

The district's staff is expected to release early next month a more detailed review of the managers, looking at areas such as safety, attendance and parental satisfaction. Nevels said the commission would not be ready to decide on the fate of the managers next month.

"That would be far too hasty," he said, noting that the commission also is awaiting input from public hearings next week.

He wasn't sure when a decision would be made, but it would have to come before the managers' five-year contracts expire this summer.

"The good news is children are learning," Nevels said. "Let's figure out why and redeploy assets and resources to those areas that do well."

Former Pennsylvania Education Secretary Charles Zogby, who helped lead the charge in support of privatization, said he had not seen the council report, but remained disheartened by the earlier report by Rand and Research for Action.

The managers took on the lowest-performing schools in the city and achieved significant gains, he said.

"This is, like, bizarre. Have people just totally lost their senses in the context of which we were operating? These are schools that never produced any gains," Zogby said. "For many, there is a belief that no matter what the evidence, they don't believe in the approach."

District Chief Executive Paul G. Vallas defended both the studies.

"Both reports are very thorough," he said. "Some schools have thrived under the private management, while other schools have not. Performance should determine action."

He said he was not sure how many schools or managers would be retained.

Vallas emphasized that the report found that student achievement in Philadelphia overall has improved significantly. The council noted that more than half of the district's schools, including charters, made adequate yearly progress in 2006 under the federal No Child Left Behind law, compared with 9 percent in 2002.

"The EMOs overall saw healthy growth in their test scores," he added.