Jolley's first slide shows that more Philadelphia schools are making the Adequate Yearly Progress standard that is required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act with an increase districtwide in proficiency in grades five and eight. High school, including the graduation rate, is still a big problem.
Now she is getting into the instructional management system, which is an unexciting name but has an important function.The system is made up of a core curriculum -- which may itself be responsible for academic gains made -- benchmark assessments, SchoolNet, and something else I didn't catch before she moved on to the next slide.
We're eating up a pie chart now that shows who has been managing the schools since the takeover in 2002-2003. The leading types of school mangement are the 212 traditional, district-run schools and 56 charter schools. The other management models are used in far fewer schools.
Jolley now has a blue line/red line graph. It's not representing American presidential politics, but how district-run schools have fared in reading and math academic achievement test scores compared to schools run by private educational managers. The biggest achiever was a management model call "restructured schools," run by the district, which gave intensive help to struggling schools.
Here's another factor, which might be more important to improving education than who manages the schools: teacher retention. Like other districts in the country, Philadelphia has a big problem. Of all the teachers who started with the district in 1999, only 30 percent were still with the district as of 2005. Plus, the most inexperienced teachers still were ending up in schools with the greatest challenges.
Jolley is now talking about the small high school movement, which Philadelphia CEO Paul Vallas has embraced. She notes, however, that in Philadelphia a small high school is deinfed as one with fewer than 700 students; nationally it's 400.
Finally, she is describing what she says is an equity problem in how the state funds education. She also is concerned about "public accountability in a privatized environement, and sustained focus on improviong instruction in low-performing schools." Onto Budget Man.
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