Group is rethinking education from sixth grade on

A planning process targets persistently grim outcomes in the upper grades.

by Dale Mezzacappa

After nearly two decades of bumpy and disconnected efforts at high school reform – from the establishment of small learning communities in the 1990s to the creation of dozens of new schools under Paul Vallas – Philadelphia is now embarked on a comprehensive planning effort that advocates and officials hope will finally get it right.

It is called the Secondary Education Blueprint, and it is bringing together outside stakeholders with District policymakers, as well as some principals, teachers, and students. They are charged with thinking through what it will take to improve graduation rates and academic attainment in the upper grades, and making recommendations for wholesale change.

A large planning group, coordinated by Philadelphia Education Fund (PEF), has been at work since the fall of 2006, shortly after a Project U-Turn report detailed the stubbornly grim numbers: only half of students graduating on time, 11th grade math and reading proficiency numbers in the teens, alarming attrition between freshman and sophomore years, and graduates unable to read well enough to get jobs.

They are putting together a five-year plan that will rethink education from the sixth grade on, devising ways to catch students before they go off track and then redesigning what high school education looks like.

Despite the fits and starts of the past – and the whirlwind of activity under Vallas – there has never been a “unifying vision” for change, said Candace Bell, education program officer at the William Penn Foundation, which is helping to fund the effort.

“Philadelphia has a 35-year history of high school reform, but what you need to do in the 21st century is different from what you needed to do 35 years ago,” said Cassandra Jones, interim chief academic officer.

Jones and Albert Bichner, the deputy chief academic officer, emphasized that the process is meant to be collaborative.

“A lot of this is to get partnerships,” Bichner said. “This is not something to be handed down from a think tank, but a process involving the community, parents and students. That’s the biggest difference I see” from what went on in the past, he said.

Orientations, transitions

For the coming school year, the group will be asking the School Reform Commission to fund several major initiatives, many of them focused on identifying the most at-risk ninth graders and keeping them on track. They include a five-day summer orientation academy for incoming freshmen and separate orientation sessions for their parents. Planners also want money for a pilot project in ten high schools and their feeders to develop academic transition plans for students most likely to drop out. Studies have shown these students can be identified with near certainty as early as sixth grade by looking at attendance, behavior and reading and math failure rates.

Paul Adorno, the secondary education planning director at PEF, said that they chose to focus on ninth grade because that is “the most sensitive time for kids, a key time to keep them from dropping out.”

Another initiative would more closely track the progress of each student towards graduation, making sure they are taking the right courses and accumulating the right credits. Planners discovered that at many schools, counseling is so overstrained that students are not being rostered into the courses they need to graduate.