State Takeover School Restructuring Private Management And Student Achievement In Philadelphia

Author : Paul E. Peterson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (16 download)

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Download or read book School Reform in Philadelphia written by Paul E. Peterson and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) asks that states "restructure" schools that fail for six years running to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward full proficiency on the part of all students by the year 2014. Although restructuring efforts by most states have been modest, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 2002, directed the School District of Philadelphia to undertake substantial restructuring of its 66 lowest performing schools under the overall direction of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (SRC). The schools were contracted out to for-profit management organizations, to non-profit organizations, or assigned to be restructured by a newly created Office of Restructured Schools (ORS), a special office within the school district itself. The policy intervention in Philadelphia raises questions of general interest: Can private managers lift the percentage of students performing up to a basic level of proficiency as well or better than schools managed by a school district?; Can they increase the percentage of students performing at state-defined proficiency levels?; Does the competition stimulated by contracting out some schools to private management raise performance district-wide?; Are the benefits of the reform effort worth the costs? Using publicly available evidence concerning student test-score performance between 2002 and 2006, the author tracked the performance of two cohorts of 5th graders for three years to see whether, by 8th grade, those attending at elementary and middle schools under private management learned more than students at 8 ORS schools and more than students in the district as a whole, as indicated by their performance on the Pennsylvania State System of Assessment (PSSA), a high-stakes test used for accountability purposes under NCLB. The author found that the private providers were especially effective at increasing the percentage of students performing at or above the basic level, and were as effective as other schools in the district at bringing 5th grade students up to fully proficient levels of performance by 8th grade, despite the fact that student test scores were initially performing at significantly lower levels. (Contains 14 endnotes and 3 tables.) [This report was published by the Program for Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University, and was sponsored in part by Edison Schools.].