Jolley Bruce Christman, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
December 2001
n early 1995, the School Board of Philadelphia adopted a systemic reform plan called Children Achieving to improve the city's troubled public schools. "Powerful Ideas, Modest Gains" is one of several reports issued by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania that evaluates the successes and failures of the city's reform effort. The core beliefs driving the reform program were: 1) results matter, 2) all students can achieve at high levels, and 3) low expectations of students breed persistent underachievement. Children Achieving sought change through content standards (the knowledge and skills all students were to know); an accountability system based on annual student assessments; and decentralization (smaller schools and classes). Philadelphia's school board and then-Superintendent David Hornbeck, backed by a five-year $50 million Annenberg Challenge grant (matched by $100 million in city funds), aimed to demonstrate through a comprehensive one-size-fits-all reform that every student could achieve proficiency in mathematics, reading, and science by 2008. "Powerful Ideas, Modest Gains" provides a mid-term review of the impact of those reforms on the city's middle schools. As the title suggests, powerful ideas and political forces have driven the reform effort, but the results have thus far fallen short: "Reforms produced modest gains for middle grades students in reading and science and made limited headway in addressing the abysmally low achievement of students in mathematics." As things currently stand, it seems doubtful that a majority of students will achieve proficiency in the three core subjects by 2008. There have been a number of obstacles to effective implementation of Philadelphia's reform plan, but a few deserve special mention. Despite the fact that a large percentage of the teachers, at least at the middle school level, bought into the reform agenda, there was a persistent feeling that discipline problems interfered with the effort to boost student performance. Even with smaller classes and schools, teachers still complained they spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with disruptive students. The reform efforts at the middle-school level were also stymied by a high teacher turnover rate and an almost pathological focus on teaching test-taking skills rather than subject matter. Finally, the apparent advantages of small learning communities were not used to improve student learning, but were largely seen as a way to address the social needs of students. For anyone who supports, or is working to help make successful, the No Child Left Behind Act, or to create small schools, the Philadelphia experience should be studied closely. To access a PDF version of this report, surf to http://www.cpre.org/Publications/children05.pdf. For related reports on Children Achieving, see http://www.cpre.org/Publications/Publications_Research.htm. For earlier Gadfly reviews of Children Achieving reports, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=89#1335.
