Keeping it in the neighborhood

Renaissance Schools brought local families back while holding on to current students.

by Benjamin Herold

Photo: Benjamin Herold

After a positive experience at Universal-Bluford last year, Katrina Dear (right) was excited for her daughter Kristina Holder to begin her 6th grade at the Renaissance charter this September.

For the Notebook’s October print edition on school turnarounds, we took a comprehensive look at the city's initial group of seven Renaissance charter schools.This article looks at the extent to which the schools remained neighorhood schools . You can also read more about test score gains at the schools.

On her daughter's first day of 5th grade last year, Katrina Dear was nervous.

Since her chatty little girl was in kindergarten, Dear had sent her to a charter school with strong academics, a structured environment, and motivated families.

But after learning that the charter planned to hold her daughter back for the 2010-11 school year, Dear transferred her into the public school in her West Philadelphia neighborhood, Guion S. Bluford Elementary.

Dear knew about Bluford's troubled reputation. She also knew that Bluford was now a "Renaissance charter" managed by Universal Companies.

Dear liked that the school was now a charter, but worried about the requirement that it serve all neighborhood students. Most traditional charters enroll students via citywide admissions lotteries, which savvy and involved parents are more likely to know about.

Outside Universal-Bluford that first day, Dear saw a parent loudly curse out a child – a familiar neighborhood scene, but something she almost never saw at her daughter's former school.

It gave her pause.

"The old element was still there," said Dear. "Universal couldn't kick out the bad kids. They still had to work with those parents."

That scene illustrates both the challenge and the opportunity of Philadelphia's experiment with converting low-performing public schools to charters.

In 2010, as part of her Renaissance Schools initiative, then-superintendent Arlene Ackerman handed over seven of the city's toughest public elementary and middle schools to outside managers. This spring, she turned over six more, including three neighborhood high schools.

The hope was that new managers could transform failing schools like Bluford into safe, high-performing options for some of the city's most underserved communities.

The fear, however, was that the managers would push out the hardest-to-serve kids and prevent the enrollment of other challenging students – an accusation often leveled against charter operators.

Dear's experience at Universal-Bluford highlights the District's early success in ensuring that its Renaissance charters function as neighborhood schools.

A comprehensive review of student enrollment and retention data by the Notebook found that in their first year, the city's first seven Renaissance charters helped draw hundreds of families back into neighborhood schools.

In most cases, the schools' new managers – ASPIRA of Pennsylvania, Mastery Charter Schools, Scholar Academies, and Universal – also retained the same students at higher rates than when the schools were traditional public schools.

While setting stringent rules in other areas, the U.S. Department of Education's push for school turnarounds doesn't include a mandate that specific percentages of neighborhood students must be served or retained.

Philadelphia, however, has aggressively declared that its Renaissance charters will serve the same kids.

"It's a critical part of the Renaissance initiative that these be neighborhood schools," said Thomas Darden, the District's deputy chief for strategic programs.

David Lapp, an attorney with the Education Law Center, seconds that notion.

"We're changing the way we've done public education in Philadelphia," said Lapp. "When you do that, you want to make sure you're improving the system for everybody, not just students who behave well or don't have disabilities or speak English proficiently."

To address such concerns, the District required that the Renaissance operators serve the students who attended the school previously, prioritize enrolling students from the neighborhood, and adopt the District's student code of conduct.