Advocates question termination of Talent Development program

by Sheila Simmons

A reform model whose effectiveness with low-performing high schools was highlighted in a recently released national study will no longer be funded by the School District after this year.

Designed by Johns Hopkins University, primarily around intensive intervention in the ninth grade, the Talent Development high school model managed to boost attendance, on-time promotion, graduation, and successful completion of algebra at Philadelphia high schools, according to the new research findings.

But because the model requires a $300 per-student added cost, according to District officials, it is being discontinued at five participating schools next fall. Just two high schools, Strawberry Mansion and Edison, will maintain the program in the coming school year, supported by funds from Johns Hopkins for one additional year only.

“If I had an unlimited budget, then I may want to go with Talent Development across the board,” Al Bichner, deputy chief academic officer, said. “But we’re trying to do reflective practice here. We’re trying to implement so many reforms currently in Philadelphia . . . . We have to apply funding wisely.”

But the financial argument is a hard swallow for some observers, especially in the aftermath of recent School Reform Commission vote to expand contracts for private firms to manage or support schools at an added cost as high as $750 per student.

“We look to support programs that are research-proven,” said Shelly Yanoff, director of Philadelphia Citizens for Children & Youth. “Here you had some success in some very difficult schools.”

In most of the District’s neighborhood high schools, test scores as well as promotion, attendance, and graduation rates stand at abominable levels.

A range of reform initiatives have demonstrated little impact on such schools. But earlier, encouraging studies on Talent Development were buttressed by the report released in late May by MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan social policy research organization that studied Talent Development and the accomplishments in its first five Philadelphia high schools.

MDRC studied results at Mansion, Edison, Gratz, Germantown, and Ben Franklin. The model operates in a total of seven Philadelphia high schools, having been put in place most recently at Kensington and South Philadelphia.

Talent Development provides double periods of math and English as part of a “block schedule” in which students take four subjects and can earn four full credits a semester. Special curricular materials help new students reach grade level in math and English. In later years of high school, students focus through specialized career academies.

Following ninth-graders as they advanced through the Talent Development schools, MDRC found improvements in a number of key areas, particularly promotions from the watershed ninth-grade year. The authors cited a “high level of confidence about Talent Development’s effectiveness -- essentially allowing researchers to conclude that changes in student engagement and performance are, indeed, due to Talent Development.”

Bichner explained that block-roster scheduling was the primary culprit for the program’s increased cost, requiring some 12 percent in added cost per school from the District for “more extensive staffing.”

“I know there’s some risk-taking we do by saving dollars for other areas,” Bichner acknowledged. He pointed to other priority high school reform efforts involving smaller schools, career and vocation programs, dual-enrollment, benchmark testing, and technology.

“I wish I had more of those dollars,” Bichner said, “so I could apply universally all the things we want to do and that we know would be beneficial to our kids.”

The District has one privately managed high school, Martin Luther King. Its manager, nonprofit Foundations, Inc., receives the same $750 extra funding per student as do private firms. In May, two additional elementary schools were assigned to for-profit Edison Schools Inc. at the same $750 per-student rate.

Teacher Keith Newman, a frequent critic of private management, wrote in a widely distributed e-mail, “Based on this price tag being more than twice as high as [the Talent Development model], we should expect amazing results. But what have we gotten?”

Yanoff concurred, noting that the Talent Development schools “are at least as troubled as the schools the private companies are getting to manage.” She added, “It doesn’t seem to be rational.”

The School District has also put nearly $2 million into hiring four firms – Kaplan, Princeton Review, ResulTech, and SchoolWorks – to serve as managers supporting the transition of 12 schools into small high schools. The firms were awarded contracts of $150,000 per school for services provided through June.

For these small high schools with student populations less than 500, each contract’s cost is more than $300 per student, the estimated cost of Talent Development.

Bichner was upbeat about the contributions of the small schools transition managers. Of Foundation, Inc. and its work at Martin Luther King, he said, “There’s a lot of encouragement there as well.”

He cited a recent article featuring King senior Malik Smith on his acceptance into two Ivy League colleges, and an increased focus on Advanced Placement courses as being indicative of progress at the school.

Many are hoping that given the new research findings, the District will reconsider its decision on Talent Development.

Those hoping for reconsideration include Carol Fixman, director of the Philadelphia Education Fund, which has staffed the program in Philadelphia.

“The MDRC report cites successes that are fantastic, that are wonderful,” she said. “It’s not a panacea. But if the model – as implemented thus far in these seven schools -- can show so much improvement, then it is something I would think the District would wish to continue.”

Another is Lois Powell Mondesire, principal at Strawberry Mansion, Talent Development’s longest-running participant: “I just hope when they look at the data, they will make decisions from that.”

MDRC report co-author James J. Kemple pointed out, “Talent Development was able to produce its effects in its first year of implementation, and replicate it again and again and again, and as subsequent cohorts came through schools.” The study examined years from 1998 to 2004.

“They increased the on-time (ninth-grade) promotion rates by about 8 percentage points,” Kemple noted. “That’s actually very large. It doesn’t sound large, but we don’t know of any other intervention that shows that improvement.”

“But even though attendance improved 5 to 7 percentage points, that applies to student attendance of only 78 or 79 percent. There’s still a long way to go,” Kemple admitted.

However, the findings do indicate that participating schools are beginning to expand the model’s intense ninth-grade focus into other years, and have begun to reap benefits from the ninth-grade-year progress, such as students’ ability to pass algebra, a major determinant of college acceptance.

Fixman said PEF had hoped for another year of District funding for Talent Development, with a goal of “institutionalizing” it in Philadelphia’s low-performing high schools.

And indeed, Bichner says the District is hoping to incorporate lessons and best practices from Talent Development into other high schools, particularly the intensive support in ninth grade.

For example, he’s ordered all high schools to make room in student scheduling for the Talent Development feature of “double doses” of math and English.

“We may not call it Talent Development,” Bichner said, “but high schools will be infused with a number of Talent Development features.”

Asked about any concern around the research’s assertion that the features of the model have only been proven to work as a unified package, Bichner admitted, “We do have some reservations.”

Kemple explains, “It really is intervention with multiple interlocking components. It is the combination of those components. We don’t know what happens if you take the model apart and what the result of doing one component from another, without the package,” would be.

Successful high school reform is still an elusive subject.

Kemple blamed it on a lack of “adequate involvement in building knowledge of what works for low-performing high schools and what doesn’t.”

“There is certainly a lot of research about what the nature of the problem is, and what the differences are between high-performing and low-performing schools,” he said. “But there’s been very little evidence about when you confront a low-performing school with systematic effects, what really happens.”

Kemple noted the existence of “a couple of other studies” not yet released, but stressed that among high school reform initiatives, “Talent Development really does stand out.”

And in terms of the finding funds for continuing Talent Development, Yanoff argues, “When you find something that’s working for ninth graders in Edison and Gratz and Mansion, we can’t afford not to do it.”

Contact Notebook staff writer Sheila Simmons at 215-951-0330 x156 or sheilas@thenotebook.org.