Philly School Advocacy Partners on Schools that Work and Those that Don’t

Public education advocates in New Jersey, from Derrell Bradford to Paul Tractenberg (bet you never thought you’d see those two in the same sentence), have pointed to our state’s dual education system, high-performing for wealthy students and low-performing for poor students. Beyond and within N.J., much ink, cyber and liquid, has been expended on whether poverty itself is the explanation for low-performance. Followers of Diane Ravitch et.al.  insist that efforts at ed reform, particularly school choice, are thinly-veiled canards for “privatization” by heinous hedge-fund managers because improving academic achievement among poor students is futile until we conquer poverty.

A new paper out from Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners (full disclosure: my son works there) turns this sentiment on its head. Philadelphia Public School District has “two kinds of schools: those that work [high-impact] and those that don’t [under-performing],” a microcosm of N.J.’s dual school system: Newark down the road from Millburn, Trenton just outside Princeton, Camden a hop from Cherry Hill.

PSAP explains that “this variation in outcomes,” drawn from Philadelphia School Performance Profile data, is not dependent on school type, student income levels, or other out-of-school factors. In fact, “there is a vast chasm between the performance of schools serving similar populations of students.”

High-impact and under-performing schools in Philly serve comparable proportions of minority, educationally-disadvantaged, and free and reduced lunch recipients. But students lucky enough to enroll in high-impact schools are “three times more likely to read and do math on grade level” and “one and a half times more likely to graduate.”

Parents know this. Currently, under-performing schools in Philadelphia enroll students well below capacity and high-impact schools are in high demand.  Both subgroups contain charter schools and traditional schools, although there’s a higher proportion of charters in the high-impact group.

But this is not about charters vs. traditionals or luddites vs. privatizers. It’s about giving children access to academic success. Camden Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard said it best:

Whether those schools are organized traditionally, or as public charter schools, or as some hybrid of the two is of little concern to anyone who needs them. Children are not thinking about how their school’s governance is organized; nor are parents who need a better option.

Anyway, read the whole paper.