News in brief
District prepares to take "Corrective Action"
News in brief
District prepares to take "Corrective Action"
In 2003, 160 Philadelphia schools were labeled with the lowest possible status under the No Child Left Behind law - "Corrective Action II." Schools in that category, having failed to meet performance targets for five years in a row, were supposed to develop a plan, with parent and staff input, for management restructuring. This could mean taking steps like replacing the teaching staff, charter conversion, or privatization of management.
After test score gains last spring, the number of schools in Corrective Action II is down to 72 (all but two of those for the second year). And after a protracted silence about what restructuring plans were in the works at the District or state level, the School District has announced a new program affecting the 72 schools in Corrective Action II status.
These schools will be getting "supports and interventions" on four different levels, according to Chief Academic Officer Gregory Thornton. The first three levels are:
- support from regional offices,
- "focused interventions" from the District's central office, and
- "schoolwide assistance teams" that go out and meet directly with school staff.
Thornton explained that the fourth level, called "Corrective Action and Review," will involve major changes reserved for "schools that have not responded to these other interventions." The Corrective Action and Review initiative will be led by Deputy Chief Academic Officer Creg Williams, who now heads the District's high school office.
Plans will be developed by a team including central office administrators, other educators, union representatives, and District legal staff, Thornton said.
Noting that many of the Corrective Action II schools have been troubled for years, Thornton added, "We're not waiting for the state to tell us what to do with these schools. We have a moral obligation to the students at those schools." Of the 72 schools now in Corrective Action II, 29 were previously privatized or restructured in 2002 as part of the state takeover.
Seventy additional District schools are categorized as "Making Progress" but will be back in Corrective Action II status if they fail to meet performance targets in 2005.
More new buildings on the way, Vallas says
With the November groundbreaking for the School District's "High School of the Future," designed in conjunction with the Microsoft Corporation, School District CEO Paul Vallas pointed out that the District will break ground within the next year on several other new buildings.
The District is in the second year of a $2.4 billion construction program involving dozens of projects, and at a November press briefing, Vallas named six other projectswhere he anticipates construction will begin in 2005:
- A new building to replace Audenried High School in South Philadelphia
- A new building to replace Fels High School on the old John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital site in Northeast Philadelphia
- A new building to replace Lincoln High School, on the existing site in Northeast Philadelphia
- A "second Olney High School" that will allow the District to reduce school size in the existing Olney building
- A new Hunting Park elementary school, slated for G Street and Hunting Park Avenue
- A new building to replace the Willard School in Kensington.
Vallas said the District plans to overcome limitations on borrowing through "turnkey" agreements with companies that will acquire land, build schools, and make them available through a lease or purchase arrangement with the District. The Olney and Lincoln projects will use this arrangement, he said.
District website posts detailed school data
The School District is getting kudos for a long-awaited update of the section of its website that offers profiles of individual Philadelphia public schools.
The "school profiles" posted publicly in November represent the most comprehensive array of current and historical data about individual District schools that has ever been posted on the School District website. They include school safety statistics, standardized test scores, and figures on student enrollment, attendance, mobility, and racial composition.
Since before the state takeover of Philadelphia schools in 2001, school data had been hard to come by on the School District website. In recent months, school data profiles were posted and accessible to any employee with a password on the School District's computer network, but not to the public. District officials acknowledged that the Notebook's investigation of this situation played a role in making the profiles public more quickly.
"It took a little more time than we anticipated because we wanted to make sure that the website that was seen by the public didn't contain any confidential information and was laid out in a format that was easier to navigate," explained Cameron Kline, who oversees the site for the District's Office of Communications.
The site is still described as a "work in progress." For example, a school's "No Child Left Behind Report Card" is not with the other data in the school profile but rather is accessible via a link on the District's home page. District Chief Academic Officer Gregory Thornton said he looks forward to making the website "more user-friendly" and said that will be a priority in next year's District budget.
Profiles are not available for charter schools. To access the school profiles on the Web, go to www.phila.k12.pa.us/schools and click on the link for either "Elementary/Middle Schools" or "High Schools" to get a list of school names.