The Philadelphia Experiment

By Rebecca Winters

Marla Blakney's fifth-grade classroom is the front line in the nation's largest experiment in privately run public schools. And on a muggy fall morning in Room 308 at Harrity Elementary School, the troops are doing the Macarena. Arms crossing, hips swiveling, 24 Philadelphia schoolchildren are shouting a mantra--"Wisdom! Justice! Courage!..."--that is supposed to create the lively but respectful classroom environment that can elude even good teachers. And to their skeptical teacher's amusement, it seems to be working. "When Edison taught us this, I thought, 'This is so corny. My kids won't go for it,'" says Blakney, whose building was taken over this fall by the for-profit company Edison Schools. "But it's a new year. I'm giving it a try."

Like Blakney, other teachers as well as students and administrators in Philadelphia's worst-performing elementary and middle schools have been forced to undertake some radical changes this year after a reform panel awarded control of 45 failing schools in the city to seven independent operators. The outside contractors include Edison, based in New York City and the largest of the companies that manage public schools as a business; Victory Schools, a much smaller New York City firm with schools in that city aswell as in Baltimore, Md.; and the Chancellor Beacon Academies of Coconut Grove, Fla., which operates charter schools and private day schools around the country. Two nonprofit organizations were also given schools to run, and both Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania will provide extensive services atothers. In addition, the panel hired Paul Vallas,who oversaw major reforms in Chicago's schools, as its new district CEO. Butmosteyes, in Philadelphia and around the nation, are focused on the for-profit companies that ambitiously, and controversially, aim to improve failing public schools while rewarding private investors.

How well Philadelphia's children fare in these real-life laboratories will ultimately touch public schools in every corner of the U.S., offering examples to emulate or mistakes to avoid. As the experiment begins, TIME is following three individuals with a direct stake in the outcome: fifth-grade teacher Blakney, elementary-school principal Anita Duke andseventh-grade student Shaliah Denmark. All three will experience what happens when private hands buy the books, train the teachers and set the priorities. Each has her own degree of optimism about the promised reforms. TIME will return to them later in the school year for a report card on how those changes--and their feelings about them--have progressed.

THE TEACHER

Marla Blakney is a pragmatist. "The bottom line is, if my children are improving, go ahead and make a dollar," says the former accountant, 33, who is in her fifth year of teaching at Harrity, a poverty-plagued but homey school in the southwest section of the city, where the principal opens the day ringing a handbell in the asphalt schoolyard. Edison, the company running Blakney's school, is under intense pressure to produce both higher reading scores and stronger fiscal results. The largest and most experienced of the for-profit firms, with 150 schools in 24 states and the District of Columbia, Edison is in near total financial disarray. Its stock, selling as high as $36 a share in early 2001, may be delisted by NASDAQ if it doesn't rise above $1. And because of wrangling with the district over contract terms, it has yet toreceive the first of itsfour $3 million payments to run 20 Philadelphia schools.

Like its for-profit competitors, Edison is ideologically opposed by the teachers' union as well as by some community groups and parents, simply because it wants to make money from public-school students. This has already affected the experiment. For instance, while Edison was allowed to put in place its 90-min.-a-day reading curriculum called Success for All, which relies on testing every eight weeks, and to group its teachers into small, multigrade communities within its schools, some of the company's favorite ideas--a longer school day and year, for example--won't be used in Philadelphia because teachers were opposed to them and budgets were tight. The company also ran into trouble when it cut some of the support staff who helped with discipline and administrative tasks. The district restored a handful of those administrative employees after discipline problems erupted at Edison's middle schools during the first few days of school.

But a look inside Blakney's classroom reveals why some Philadelphia teachers are willing to give the embattled company and its sometimes hokey methods a chance. In addition to the Macarena sessions, Blakney has found success with other Edison techniques, like regularly using the company's vocabulary--"I like the active listening I'm seeing at this table"--to reinforce good behavior. Blakney says she has more opportunity to master her curriculum and exchange ideas with other teachers since Edison increased time for teacher training from a period a week to one every other day. And instead of requiring her to balance her reading lessons between the stars and the stragglers in her class, Edison groups children from different classrooms by their ability to read and then establishes a rotation, so Blakney and her fellow teachers can work with youngsters who are on the same level.

Blakney isn't completely won over, however, and she watches the company's stock price with a nervous eye, wondering, "If Edison has to go, do we get to keep what they've given us? The materials, the techniques, the code of conduct?" She says she will give the company three years to turn around test scores at Harrity, but this spring she will get an early sense of whether things are moving in the right direction when her students take the Pennsylvania state exams. In the meantime, "if we're able to sustain what we've started, I'll be pleased," Blakney says. "You come in all gung ho. The trick is remembering to do the Macarena, and everything else, when you're tired."

THE PRINCIPAL

It's the 10th day of school at Wright Elementary in North Philadelphia, and principal Anita Duke is drilling her kindergarten teachers. "Somebody comes into your room from Victory and says, 'Your LPs aren't close.' What are your LPs?"

"Lesson plans?" ventures one of the teachers.

"No," Duke responds. "LPs are low performers, and the Victory people are going to want to see them [sitting] in the front of the room. You need to know this stuff."

Duke's teachers are reluctantly learning the language and demands of their new boss, Victory Schools, and Duke is the translator. Last fall, after nearly 30 years in Philadelphia public schools, five of those years as principal of Wright, Duke, a relentless optimist, learned that her students' test scores placed Wright on the list of failing schools due for massive reform. "The hardest part was swallowing my pride, seeing my school on that list and admitting that I need some help," says Duke.

After researching Victory online and going out to dinner with its representatives, Duke became persuaded that the company was staffed by "people of integrity" with experience in urban schools and that it deserved a chance. She decided to become the firm's "head cheerleader" at Wright and bring around her sometimes dubious staff.

Victory uses a heavily structured teaching method that, for reading, relies on a script and a combination of phonics and literature. New teachers seem to appreciate the Victory model, but veterans like fourth-grade teacher Raynette Perry are more skeptical. Perry has seen several waves of reform since she began teaching at Wright 24 years ago, and she isn't convinced privatization will do a better job of overcoming the social problems ofthe children there. Poverty defines thesurrounding neighborhood of boarded buildings and emptylots; thewhole school gets free lunch and breakfast. OfVictory's curriculum, Perry says, "It's the same stuff we've always been teaching. One and one is always going to be two. But tell me what to do when my kids come in tired, without proper clothes, hungry. Fix that." Victory regional director Lynn Spampinato concedes that "we can't change society," but says, "we also can't use that as an excuse to lower the standards for kids. With an intensive academic program likeours, you give kids a better shot."

The biggest change since Victory's arrival, says Perry, is in the school's once easy going principal. Duke, 52, is an administrator who spends her weekends painting the library walls and her nights poring over special-education paperwork, who patiently fields an early-morning parent phone call about the weather, saying, "It's nice out, but she might need a jacket." Before the take-over, says Perry, "She was a total softy. Not anymore." Whereas last year Duke often accepted excuses fortardiness or fighting, now she quickly doles out suspensions to troublemakers in the school's upper grades. The toughened-up principal sees herself as enforcer of Victory's policies, demanding lesson plans on time, pushing teachers to employ the new methods and cracking down on faculty absences and lateness. "I had the bar toolow," says Duke. "Sometimes you just get worn down by dealing with the same problem over and over again, and it helps to have someone else say, 'That is not acceptable.' And you think, 'You're right, it's not.'"

THE STUDENT

While policymakers and administrators will view success in Philadelphia largely in terms of scores, the families in the schools will grade it by their own standards. Tanya Denmark, who is sending her third child through Shoemaker Middle School in West Philadelphia, regularly attends parent meetings, often checks in with teachers and enforces strict rules at home about homework and uniforms. With her daughter Shaliah, 12, about to enter seventh grade, Denmark closely followed news reports on Chancellor Beacon Academies, the private company designated to take over her neighborhood school. Shaliah had been attending a charter school that Denmark says turned her off with its use of uncertified teachers and its "arrogant leadership." But Denmark, who works for a mortgage firm, was impressed by what she heard about Chancellor Beacon's success in other states: last year Florida's education department awarded the company's schools in that grade an A or B rating, based on their performances on state tests. So Denmark decided to give Shoemaker another try.

Like Edison, Chancellor Beacon has less flexibility in the five schools it operates in Philadelphia than it had in previous projects: it must work with unions, a district bureaucracy and students who weren't specially recruited for its schools. But unlike the other two for-profit companies, Chancellor Beacon has been slow to roll out changes, instead beginning the year by studying the problem through teacher surveys, classroom visits and student test scores. In coming weeks the company plans to convene a parent round table, introduce new math and reading curricula and step up training for teachers. "There are things here that are working and things thataren't, and we're taking time to figure that out,"says Sam Howard, director of school operations for Chancellor Beacon.

The hope, of course, is that Chancellor Beacon's efforts will translate into academic gains for Shaliah, a bubbly Bs-and-Cs student, as well as for the Shoemaker pupils performing below grade level, whom Chancellor Beacon plans to target aggressively with personalized assignments and weekly monitoring of classwork and homework. The Denmarks like this cautious approach but also have some immediate concerns. Mom Tanya wants new textbooks; the ones Shaliah has are torn and marked up, and she's stillwaiting for a science book. Denmark would also like to see the discipline code strictly enforced in the sprawling, sometimes rowdy, four-story building. Shaliah says that what is important to her this year is having "teachers who know how to make learning fun. Whatever they do, they've gotta get that right." With state tests looming and a whole country watching, that's a taller order than it sounds.