Glass-half-empty analysis misses the point.

Charles B. Zogby

is a former secretary of education for Pennsylvania and now is a senior executive with the education company K12 Inc.

I have read the Research for Action study of Philadelphia's public-school reforms, and the resulting defense of same from its authors. The study and its defense completely miss the most important point.

The RFA study of school reforms in Philadelphia reads like an autopsy. In so structuring it, the authors glossed over what should have been their most fundamental finding: In the five years since state and local officials worked together to create the School Reform Commission, academic performance in Philadelphia's public schools literally has catapulted upward. After decades of stagnation, learning success rates in the last five years have doubled, tripled and, in some cases, quadrupled.

What was once unimaginable is now routine: Philadelphia regularly is mentioned in national education circles as the nation's No. 1 urban education-turnaround story. Indeed, just days before the downbeat RFA study, the national Center for Education Reform issued another report hailing Philadelphia's extraordinary progress. That study received no headlines. But the RFA "autopsy" was Page One.

The truth is this: The RFA study is an autopsy on a patient who has been resuscitated. The patient - Philadelphia's public school system - is prospering academically as never before in its modern history. Still challenged, to be sure. But prospering as never before.

The School Reform Commission, led by Chairman Jim Nevels and CEO Paul Vallas, has fully embraced the fundamental new dynamics implemented five years ago. Performance has shot upward as a result.

Vigorous forensic analyses still are valuable. And further adjustments can and should be made. Indeed, that is one of the virtues of the move to private managers of public schools. With private managers, if they don't perform, you can make changes. The SRC already has done so, dismissing private managers who have not delivered results.

But let's not lose sight of the center of the circle. The real story is the rejuvenation of Philadelphia's schools. The dissection of Philadelphia schools is a study of success, not failure. Such studies should be blueprints to guide expansion and growth and acceleration of the current path - not excuses to roll it back because it somehow is short of perfection.

The national education leaders I talk with scratch their heads at the glass-half-empty approach that some choose in scrutinizing Philadelphia's historic success, making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Or, more precisely, the very, very good. Take a look, for instance, at the facts around Edison Schools, which often is the focal point of the glass-half-empty analyses. When Edison was hired in 2002 by the SRC, it was handed 20 of what were universally agreed to have been the district's lowest-performing schools. In 2002, only

10 percent of children in those Philadelphia-Edison schools were proficient in reading. Think about that for a moment. That means nine of 10 children, most of them children of color, demonstrated little understanding of basic reading skills. The human implications of that catastrophic educational failure are staggering. And it had been going on for years and years and years - with millions of taxpayer dollars invested in solution after solution, none of which moved the needle more than incrementally.

Yet today, just five years after Edison was invited into the district, the percentage of children reading proficiently in Edison's schools has more than doubled. In math, the percentage of children performing at a proficient level has more than quadrupled.

Not coincidentally, the changes triggered five years ago created a favorable environment for Chairman Nevels, CEO Vallas and others to create district-wide improvement. As the Center for Education Reform accurately concluded, "The essential lesson that must not be lost in the review of data that inundate policy and media in-boxes is the fact that the district struggled for decades to improve, and spent millions to make piecemeal progress. But it was not until Philadelphia adopted a transformative solution, one that changed the entire system for the better, that all boats were lifted."

That should be the essential context for these conversations - context that inexplicably was absent from the RFA study.

Autopsies are invaluable, but if the patient actually is not just alive, but actually doing better than ever, that should be the very first finding.