Turnaround's fair play
School Superintendent William Hite had one of those damned-if-you-do-damned-if you don't moments last week. Criticized for turning over low-performing public schools to charter providers, Hite took a new tack.
Correction: A quote in this editorial from Jerry Jordan was mistakenly attributed to the Public Education Notebook. The original source of Jordan's quote was NewsWorks/WHYY.
School Superintendent William Hite had one of those damned-if-you-do-damned-if you don't moments last week. Criticized for turning over low-performing public schools to charter providers, Hite took a new tack.
He designated four elementary schools, which are among the lowest performers in the district, as "Turnaround" schools. Those schools will get additional resources, such as smaller class sizes in the lower grades, and the direct attention of the district's turnaround staff to oversee improvement.
The plan calls for up to 50 percent of the teaching staff to be replaced. Under union contracts, the teachers and other staff who leave the schools will be entitled to jobs elsewhere in the district.
About $7.3 million additional money will go to the four schools.
Hite said he kept the schools as district-run in part because of the criticism he has gotten for turning to nonprofit charters to take over these low performers.
Hite deserves praise for the plans. It invests scarce resources in the schools that need it most. So who could complain about a school getting more resources and personnel, as long as the time, effort and money invested makes a difference?
Jerry Jordan, for one. The head of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers said Hite's action would "destabilize" the four schools. As he told NewsWorks/WHYY: "It's the old 'We under-resource the school, we blame the school for not having high performance, and we then get rid of the school or ... staff.' "
Jordan is wrong about that. In good times and bad, these schools have remained poor performers.
Jordan's sentiments were echoed by the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, a group of former teachers and principals. The alliance said that it was important for children to feel that school is "safe and stable." Making such changes (notably staff changes) would add to the "trauma many students already live with."
We must wonder about the alliance's definition of "safe and stable." There is the E.W. Rhodes School in Allegheny West, where 99 percent of the students perform below the state minimum standard for mathematics. At the S. Weir Mitchell School in Kingsessing, only one out of three student in grades K-2 are reading at grade level. At the Munoz-Marin School in North Philadelphia 85 percent of the students fall below the state's minimum standard for reading.
During the first four months of this school year, the Roosevelt School in East Germantown reported 51 serious incidents, including nine assaults on students, employees, or teachers; two incidents of forced oral sex; one indecent assault; and six incidents involving fights in the school, two resulting in injuries. This is a K-8 elementary school.
Finally, all four schools have experienced a decline in academic performance over the last three years, as measured by standardized tests.
This is "stable" only in the same way a patient in a coma could be called "stable."
Jordan, the union, and the alliance are against using outside operators to do turnarounds, calling them costly and unreliable. Now, they are opposing the district's in-house turnaround effort. Their plan looks like a twisted variation of the old saying, "Don't just do something, stand there."
