School Reform in Philadelphia: A Comparison of Student Achievement at Privately-Managed Schools with Student Achievement in Other District Schools

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. According to the legislation, restructuring may entail the transformation of the school into a charter school, the shift of management to a private entity (either for-profit or non-profit), or a number of other options. 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. Since the schools assigned to the privately-managed entities were the lowest performing in the district, they were asked, especially, to reduce the percentage of students performing below the basic level. 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? The Philadelphia reforms do not provide an ideal test for answering these questions. Too many restrictions were placed on the private managers, who were not given a representative sample of schools to oversee. Instead, they were assigned the lowest-performing schools in the district. But if definitive answers cannot be given, some information can be gleaned from student test-score performance available for the period covering the four years since the reforms were instituted. Using publicly available evidence concerning student test-score performance between 2002 and 2006, I tracked the performance of two cohorts of 5 th graders for three years to see whether, by 8 th 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 …