Grading The Philadelphia Experiment

By Rebecca Winters/Philadelphia

Schoolkids aren't the only ones in Philadelphia praying for a good report card this month. Last fall, with most of the city's students testing well below state averages in reading and math, Philadelphia's assertive new schools chief, Paul Vallas, handed over control of 45 of the city's worst schools to seven private operators, including nonprofit organizations, universities and, most controversially, three for-profit companies. Now that the school year is ending, everyone is looking to see how the newcomers have done. Vallas has already given privatization a qualified endorsement by reaching agreements with six of the seven managers on contract terms for next year. This week a critical batch of test scores will provide the first hard data on how students have fared under privatization, a wrenching process that involved new principals, teaching methods, rules and expectations.

As with most education reforms, it will take years before researchers can declare this one a success or a failure. But throughout the school year, TIME has followed three individuals who have been at the center of this ambitious experiment: fifth-grade teacher Marla Blakney, seventh-grade student Shaliah Denmark and elementary school principal Anita Duke. All three spent the past nine months in Philadelphia public schools that had been taken over by for-profit operators. Their experiences tell a more nuanced story than the one predicted by privatization's cheerleaders and critics when TIME first wrote about them and their schools last fall.

The Teacher

When Edison Schools, the New York City--based company that is the largest of the for-profit firms, was awarded 20 Philadelphia schools to manage last spring, student protesters waved signs that read I AM NOT FOR SALE! SAY NO TO PRIVATIZATION! But by the time an Edison team arrived at Harrity Elementary School in the poverty-ravaged southwestern part of the city last September, the staff was ready to try anything. "It couldn't have gotten any worse," says Marla Blakney, a raspy-voiced fifth-year teacher who has an exceptionally warm rapport with her students. "We were so sick of failing."

In the first month of school, Edison introduced new math and reading programs, reduced the size of reading classes, eliminated some nonteaching staff, added more time for teacher training and brought in a computerized monthly testing program. "They were so much in our faces in the beginning," says Blakney, a former accountant. "I have never worked so hard in my life, including in the corporate world." As her school's math coordinator, Blakney was charged with mastering the challenging new math curriculum and teaching it to her colleagues. She also ran the math club and served on the school's leadership team, which makes instructional and discipline decisions. Like all the other teachers at the Edison schools, she was trained in new techniques--the use of cheers, chants and catchphrases like "three-inch voices"--designed to help keep a class orderly without resorting to drill-sergeant discipline.

Not all of Edison's reforms have stuck. Blakney was enthusiastic about the company's innovations last fall, but her use of the chants and cheers waned over the months, and by midyear the extra hours she was spending out of the classroom for training seemed excessive. "I'd rather be with my kids," she says. But Edison's mandated monthly testing of her students has become Blakney's favorite new instructional tool, because it allows her to efficiently track her class's learning. Whipping out her laptop, she shows a visitor the scores her students have achieved and how they stack up against those of the school's total student body: all at Harrity are making progress, but Blakney's pupils are improving just a hair faster. Kid by kid, Blakney can look at any mathematical concept she's trying to teach--adding fractions with different denominators, for example--and see who understands it and who needs more help. "I can tailor my teaching accordingly," she says. "And I can show the kids. Children want to know 'How am I doing?'"

If her students and the others at Harrity do well on the year-end tests--and Blakney thinks they will--she will give much of the credit to the school's new principal, Johnetta Smith, whom Edison chose for her success in the similarly beleaguered Washington system. The Harrity staff calls Smith "the lady with roller skates" for her seeming ability to be everywhere in the building at once. Blakney says she likes the fact that Philly schools chief Vallas will let Edison keep all 20 of its schools. "I have taken Vallas' lead," she says. "So far he's standing by Edison, and so am I."

The Student

Shaliah Denmark wore a pressed blue uniform to her first few weeks of seventh grade at Shoemaker Middle School, an imposing five-story fortress in down-at-the-heels West Philadelphia. At 12, Shaliah was starting middle school with low reading scores and a habit of chatting too much in class. But ebullient and with a sweet smile, she talked last fall of hoping to make the honor roll, of liking math. At home she trailed her mother Tanya around the kitchen, reading from homework assignments as Tanya cooked dinner. By this spring, however, the seventh-grader had ditched the uniform--"Wearing the same color every day wasn't doing it for me anymore"--was earning mostly Ds and had been suspended twice for fighting. The principal eventually taped Tanya's phone number under her computer keyboard because they talked so often. Tanya says her daughter was targeted by a rough group of girls and suffered beatings, teasing and having a juice carton full of urine tossed at her. "I fear for her life in that school," the worried mother says.

Tanya had taken Shaliah out of a charter school and moved her to Shoemaker last fall, pleased that Chancellor Beacon Academies, a Florida-based for-profit company, was taking over the school. She had reason to be optimistic: Chancellor Beacon charter schools in Florida and New York had performed above the state and national norms. In Philadelphia, however, Chancellor Beacon became the only management company fired by the district. According to Philly schools chief Vallas, the company failed to "create a presence" and didn't provide teacher training, shrink class size or offer after-school programs--all goals of the reform board that awarded the contracts. Contesting those claims, Chancellor Beacon points to more than $1.5 million in textbooks it purchased, hours of training it offered and in-depth studies it conducted on its five schools.

People at Shoemaker remember their experience differently. "We were open to change this year," says principal Gayle Daniels. "It just never came. We needed people who were going to roll up their sleeves and get dirty." Instead, Daniels says the company's leaders never held a full staff meeting until May, far too late to make an impact. Although the company set up its Philadelphia offices in their building, Shoemaker teachers say Chancellor Beacon seemed corporate and inaccessible. "I don't see them at all. It was a waste of money," says Glorybelle Marcial, Shaliah's science teacher.

The Denmarks have not decided whether Shaliah will return to

Shoemaker in the fall. Still, for all her daughter's troubles, Tanya is somewhat sympathetic to the challenges Chancellor Beacon faced. "The district expected them to do in months what it hasn't been able to do for decades," she says.

The Principal

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.