Ackerman: Magnet proposal now dead, was a surprise

Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said yesterday that she did not support changing magnet-school admissions requirements to increase diversity, and declared the proposal dead.

"This is totally off the table," Ackerman said in an interview at her office. "Of all the things and priorities we have, this is not one of them."

Reacting to a story in yesterday's Inquirer about her staff's proposal to change selection and admission guidelines, she said she did not know her staff had developed the proposal until she got a call from the newspaper on Tuesday while in Washington on school business.

She then learned that staff members had scheduled a parents' meeting for last night to explain and get reaction to the proposal. She ordered that the meeting be canceled, she said.

"I'm still trying to figure out where it got miscommunicated, and I'm not trying to throw any of my staff members under the bus. But I have to say here, this action moved without my knowledge," Ackerman said.

"It would be hard to believe that we would get this far down the line and I wouldn't be involved. This is probably the first and only time that has happened, that something has gotten this far down the line and I wasn't informed and involved."

Citing concerns that magnet schools are not geographically and economically diverse enough, staff members developed a draft proposal that recommended taking admissions decisions away from principals and their committees, and selecting students for schools centrally, using a computerized system.

District officials suggested a 1,000-point system, 600 points of which would be based on test scores and grades, according to the draft distributed to high school principals. Other factors would include behavior and attendance, and, for the first time, 200 points for "diversity" as measured by a student's neighborhood or zip code and income level.

The proposal, which had been distributed to principals and had become known to some parent groups at magnet schools, elicited a strong backlash. Some parents and school leaders warned that such moves could drive more middle-class families out of the city, and feared that standards would be watered down.

Mayor Nutter's chief education adviser, Lori Shorr, said last night that she was glad to hear the proposal had been taken off the table, because such a change should not happen without extensive discussions and study. She said she had spoken yesterday to Ackerman, who told her also that there had been a staff miscommunication.

"We're aware that the magnet schools have a great reputation, and we want to ensure that those schools remain at the high standards that they are now," Shorr said.

Nutter, whose daughter attends Masterman, deferred comment to Shorr.

Ackerman acknowledged that she had asked staff members to look at the time line for admissions to the magnet schools so that families would be notified earlier in the process if their children were accepted. She also said she wanted to make sure students at all schools had enough information about how to apply to the magnet schools and citywide-admission schools.

She said she acted following a report from Research for Action, a Philadelphia think tank, that called into question the fairness of the admissions process.

Ackerman's chief of school operations, John Frangipani, said Wednesday that a plan would be rolled out in the coming weeks or months to address admissions and that the draft document was just a proposal for discussion. Frangipani signed the letter to parents dated March 12, inviting them to a meeting so staff members could "present the district's proposal for changes in the high school selection process."

As chief of operations, Frangipani, a former principal at Masterman, is a member of Ackerman's senior cabinet.

Ackerman said last night that no plan to alter guidelines would be forthcoming.

"If something's working, then it's working," she said. "I don't understand why you have to fix something that's working."

A School District spokesman said Frangipani was not available for comment. He did not return a message left at his home.

Asked about the demographics of the special-admission schools, Ackerman said she had no opinion: "I have not spent a lot of time looking at that data."

Schools should make efforts to ensure diversity, but she would not try to control that centrally, she said.

White, Asian, and female students, and those from more-affluent families, are overrepresented at magnets compared with overall district population, according to data compiled by Research for Action.

In 2007-08, blacks made up 65 percent of first-time ninth graders in public neighborhood high schools and 55 percent in magnet schools, while whites accounted for 11 percent of neighborhood school ninth graders and 23 percent of magnet students.

Five percent of ninth graders were Asian in neighborhood high schools and 13 percent in magnet schools. Latinos made up 19 percent of ninth graders at the neighborhoods and 8 percent at magnets.

Overall, blacks accounted for 64 percent of district ninth graders, whites 13 percent, Asians 6 percent, and Latinos 16 percent.

No numbers were available for all ninth graders in the city. But according to the most recent data, the city's overall population is nearly 39 percent white, 42.5 percent black, 5.5 percent Asian, and 11.3 percent Hispanic.

Some magnet-school parents and staff have argued that their populations are not much different from the city's.

At Central High, one of the top academic magnets, 32 percent of students are black, 29 percent Asian, 30 percent white, and 7 percent Latino.

At Masterman, the state's highest-performing school, 28 percent of students were black, 44 percent white.

Ackerman emphasized that she would not undertake any kind of monumental initiative, such as changing selection standards for the magnets, without extensive community input and research.

"This is one of those, I have to say, unfortunate instances where I think people had the right intentions but misinformation about what I wanted as superintendent. Somewhere, the miscommunication happened within my administration, and for that I am sorry."