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Still aiming for smaller high school feel, District shifts efforts
New academies emphasize school-to-work, consistent standards
by Beandrea Davis
School District officials have adopted a high school "academy" model with a school-to-work focus as their latest approach to creating smaller, more supportive and effective communities within large high schools.
This reform approach, which is now being implemented at neighborhood high schools citywide, groups students into small, career-themed communities within a school. Business partnerships give students workplace exposure in their field, connecting academics and the world beyond the classroom.
Career academies have existed in the District since 1969, most of them under the auspices of the nonprofit Philadelphia Academies, Inc.
Currently, there are 86 academies in the District at 22 high schools.
Previously, most high schools had been divided into several thematic "Small Learning Communities" or SLCs, which grouped the same set of students and teachers together from grades 9-12.
But now in most schools with academy programs, students begin high school in a "freshman academy" that operates on a "block schedule" with double periods of math and language arts and is aimed at easing the transition to high school. These students then move into a career academy for tenth to twelfth grades.
The move away from SLCs toward academies, after years of little progress in Philadelphia high schools, raises key questions for those who want to see these schools transformed.
What makes academies any different from SLCs? Will academies bring deep and meaningful structural change to these schools, or are they yet another overlay that fails to improve instruction or school culture?
SLCs vs. academies?
While SLCs were merely "theme-based by name," academies deliver a more focused and rigorous academic program, says Deputy Chief Academic Officer Creg Williams.
Each academy is built around a District-approved theme and is required to offer a set sequence of standard courses in a dedicated part of the building. The school must ensure that enough teachers are certified to teach specialized courses.
In contrast, some teachers played a significant role in defining the theme and shaping the curricular offerings of their SLCs, which could vary greatly from school to school.
Instituting academies citywide has posed difficulties. Academy leaders at several schools report they haven't received necessary resources such as textbooks and enough certified teachers.
"It's going to take us a year to really get it aligned properly," says Williams, who oversees high schools in the District. "Going through this initial pain and making the transition is going to help us over a longer period of time ensure a better quality of program."
Long history with SLCs
The District had been experimenting with ways to make large neighborhood high schools feel smaller and more cohesive for over a decade prior to the recent implementation of academies.
SLCs first operated during the late 1980s with backing from the Philadelphia Schools Collaborative, an organization that provided professional development support to teachers in their efforts to create SLCs.
Based on the principle that small size facilitates the creation of stronger, more effective learning environments, SLCs were seen as a way to engage teachers in creating curriculum while helping to build a professional teaching culture within schools.
Dina Portnoy, a long-time District English teacher, taught in an SLC with a math and science theme at University City High School.
"The Philadelphia Schools Collaborative really encouraged teachers to become engaged and creative and participants in the transformation of schools," says Portnoy.
Getting to know students and their families well is especially important given the sizable high school dropout rate, says former SLC coordinator Theresa Simmonds, a social studies teacher at University City.
For students at risk of dropping out, "what determines which way they're going to go is their relationship with their teachers," she says.
But it is widely known that the quality of SLCs varied greatly and that most SLCs, despite their small size, did not prepare students well academically.
Dropping SLCs
The District formally abandoned SLCs last year when the Secondary Education Office mandated that schools restructure any existing SLCs into academies.
This decision was made, "to really force schools and administrators to scrap what was and to start over from scratch with certain guidelines and standards in place," according to Rosalind Chivis, head of high school instructional support.
But some disillusioned educators say the District is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Louis Lessick, a former SLC coordinator at Olney High who has been with the District for 45 years, calls this mandate "a unilateral decision without any discussion with the SLC coordinators" about how to improve high school academic quality.
The poor implementation of SLCs overall in the District undermined a reform that had significant potential to improve student achievement, says researcher Richard Clark, who studied the Collaborative's efforts in Philadelphia for ten years.
The District's decision to mandate SLCs in every high school was partly responsible, maintains Clark. Seeing the move as simply another top-down reform, some teachers hastily formed SLCs and "just stopped at the name because there was pressure to create [them]."
School-based hiring of teachers would have helped ensure quality among SLCs, adds Portnoy
"Teachers really couldn't choose who they would work with, so that presented problems in terms of them being able to craft a community of shared values," she explains, adding that the District should have stuck with SLCs for a longer period of time.
Despite these challenges, however, SLCs did see some success.
Veteran English teacher Marsha Pincus co-founded the rigorous inquiry-based "Crossroads" SLC at Gratz High in 1991.
"What we were really good at was igniting the spark and creating an atmosphere where it wasn’t nerdy or selling out to be intellectual and do well in school," she observes.
SLC autonomy: out of reach
But ultimately these efforts to reduce high school size in Philadelphia fell short of the vision of creating small autonomous schools within a school.
New York City's 1990s small schools movement was largely based on many small schools with their own budgets and principals replacing large high schools.
Admirers of this model who looked to break up large high schools in Philadelphia, however, met with much resistance to affording SLCs this kind of power.
While some SLCs formed during the days of the Collaborative could determine students' rosters or choose their own textbooks, most had little discretionary spending and were at the mercy of principals' decisions and teacher assignments that were out of their control.
Even though she played a key role in shaping Crossroads' academic program, this lack of autonomy made the overall SLC experiment "a struggle" for Pincus, who saw a steady stream of principals come and go at Gratz.
Without real autonomy, "small learning communities tend not to work because the structural changes really don’t go far enough," says Lili Allen, program director with the Boston research and advocacy nonprofit Jobs for the Future. "Many high schools layer the SLCs on top of the existing organizational structure at the high school."
Simmonds said the way that schools are being told to implement the academy model reflects a larger trend in the way central administrators sometimes hand down reforms.
"There does not seem to be a real consideration of the people on the ground who have to implement a lot of this," she said.
Portnoy adds, "When you mandate one-size-fits-all and you don't offer the opportunity for people to really explore and create and envision for themselves, it's never going to be as good."