Although I was happy to read the Costing-Out Study produced for the PA State Board of Education, we all know that the legislature will not magically fix all of the District's fiscal problems now. And in Nutter's education plan, getting more state money is just one of many strategies to improve the District. Well, below are my top two recommendations. I hope we can use this as a jumping off point but of course, I welcome feedback. It is as "real world actionable" as my knowledge permitted. And let me know if anyone wants to know my sourcing. The one nice thing about Philadelphia is there doesn't seem to be a shortage of research on our schools and their problems.

Read on!

Background
The School District of Philadelphia, despite the influx of state funding and a rise in Adequate Yearly Progress scores, is still in a precarious position both financially and academically. In the fall of 2006, a surprise deficit of $73 million surfaced, which was eventually reduced to $23.8 million by the end of the fiscal year with emergency cutbacks and state funding (Woodall, July 2007; Masch, 2007, p.23). Yet, the estimated deficit for the 2006-2007 school year is $37 million and the projected deficit for 2007-2008 is $191.6 million without corrective changes in the budget (Masch, 2007, p.23). Academically, only 166 out of 291 schools met AYP standards in 2007 and on the PSSAs, just 38% of students scored advanced or proficient in reading and 41% in math (Masch, 2007, p.8). In spite of these dismal numbers, both of these testing figures represent significant gains from five years ago.

Although we do not want to impede this progress, it is necessary for the District to become more fiscally responsible and stable. Without secure funding for programs and departments, potentially any part of the District can suddenly have its funding cut in order to reign in overall spending. This uncertainty and surprise impedes District-wide functioning, the success and longevity of educational initiatives, and ultimately, the students’ ability to learn. Therefore, the reforms recommended below attempt to both minimize impact on the budget while improving the quality of education.

Recommendation 1: Appoint members to the School Reform Commission that will end the contracts of Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). As the Mayor has no direct power over the District, the designation and relationship he maintains with his two appointees to the SRC is the first and best way to influence decisions on education.

An overwhelming group of studies report that EMOs have increased student achievement at the same rates as District-managed schools despite their additional funding of $450 to $881 per pupil (Christman, Gold, & Herold, 2006, p.8):

Effects on Middle Grades’ Mathematics Achievement of Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) and New K-8 Schools (Mac Iver & Mac Iver 2006)
• Tracking 5th and 8th grade PSSA math scores for three student cohorts who graduated 8th grade between 2003-2005, achievement gains for students in EMO-managed schools were comparable or less than those for students in District-managed schools with comparably high poverty rates.

State Takeover, School Restructuring, Private Management, and Student Achievement in Philadelphia (Gill et. al, 2007)
• “In sum, with four years of data, we find little evidence in terms of academic outcomes that would support the additional resources for the private managers.” (p.41)
• Across 2002-2006, there were no statistically significant effects, positive or negative, in PSSA/Terranova reading or math scores in EMOs or the District-managed “Sweet Sixteen” and comparable gains when compared to “untreated” schools in the rest of the District (p.xiii, 34). Of individual EMOs, only Temple University and Victory showed significant and substantial negative effects, recorded in math and reading for the fourth year and in math across four years, respectively (p.55).
• District-managed Restructured schools were the only ones that had significantly positive effects, recorded in reading in the first year and in math in all three years of implementation as well as a year of substantial, although marginally statistically significant, maintenance of math gains after the Office of Restructured Schools was disbanded and the additional resources for the schools were terminated (p.xiii).

The Status of 2005-2006 Academic Performance in the School District of Philadelphia (Lyons et al., 2007, p.5-6)
• PSSA Math (school level): Across 2002-2006, EMOs increased 19.6 percentage points while District-managed schools gained 23 percentage points. The change from 2005-2006 was 1.8 percentage points for EMOs and 5.1 percentage points for District-managed.
• PSSA Reading (school level): Across 2002-2006, EMOs gained 11.9 percentage points but District-managed schools’ scores increased 14.5 percentage points. The change from 2005-2006 was an increase of 0.8 points for EMOs and 2.4 percentage points for District-managed.

Aggregating most of this information and including some of its own qualitative data gathered from principals, teachers, and parents, The Office of Accountability, Assessment, and Intervention (OAAI) in its report to the SRC recommended to not renew any EMOs’ contracts on June 30, 2007 or only renew those at schools which met AYP in 2005-2006 (Bonner et al., 2007, p.51). Instead, the SRC followed a proposal of Gregory Thornton, the Chief Academic Officer, and extended contracts for all EMOs for another year but reduced their extra funding to only $500 per student (Woodall, June 2007).

This outcome presents an opportunity six months into the Nutter Administration to terminate the EMOs, which would save the District $9.9 million per year with the latest contract stipulations (Staff Recommendations, 2007). Not just a budgetary saver, it would also be a symbolic step towards regaining control of the District from the State, something Mr. Nutter said he wanted to do during the primary campaign (Snyder, 2007). Taking responsibility for the District’s worst-performing schools and presiding over continuing progress would be a big public relations boost in the city as well as evidence to take before the State. To ensure academic progress occurs, the schools transitioning from EMOs should remain under special supervision in their own region, operated like the Office of Restructured Schools.

Recommendation 2: Negotiate the new contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to use site-based selection across all schools and in turn hold principals accountable. This is the Mayor’s second greatest tool to affect change in the District.

Since 2000, PFT contracts with the District have been increasingly moving towards full-site selection, where the interviewing and hiring of teachers is done by the principal of the school. The traditional process involves Human Resources approving candidates and those new teachers choosing assignments after all other District employees have filled vacancies based on a seniority system. Currently, schools are either designated as full-site selection or partial site selection. To become a full-site selection school, either two-thirds of the faculty must approve the initiative by ballot or, as negotiated in the 2004 contract, schools must be designated as “hard to fill” (Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, 2004, p.69). All remaining District schools are partial site selection, where all new hires are site-selected and every other vacancy is filled by site selection. For the 2007 hiring process, 74 schools have full site-selection, 59 of which were determined by faculty vote (Useem, 2007, p.12). While 70% of vacancies were filled by site selection in 2005-2006, this procedure needs to be brought the rest of the way to scale, which will be achieved very slowly if it continues school by school. The benefits of full site-selection are delineated below:

Experienced teachers will be distributed more evenly across schools.
• With traditional hiring, teachers with the most seniority fill positions in the schools with the highest tests scores (Farley, 2004). This often leads to the least experienced teachers staffing the highest poverty schools, those that need qualified teachers the most (Neild, Useem, Travers, & Lesnick 2003, p.18).
• “Teachers at the very lowest poverty elementary and middle schools have, on average, about twice the experience of those at the very highest poverty schools” (Useem, 2007, p.30) and student achievement tends to be lower with teachers that have three or fewer years of experience (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2007).
• The effectiveness of the mentoring program for new teachers jointly administered by the District and the PFT will improve with more experienced colleagues providing insight and support (PFT, 2004, p.18).

Schools will have greater say and success in meeting their needs.
• Per the PFT contract, a Staff Selection Committee is convened consisting of the principal, assistant principal (when applicable), two teachers, and a parent from the Home and School Association to jointly establish criteria, interview, and recommend a candidate to the principal to hire (Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, 2004, p.68). This involvement of the school community allows more oversight over hiring than the traditional process in HR.
• Teachers who go through site-selection have better knowledge of the position and school than during traditional hiring, where they blindly choose a location after being approved. HR believed this led to better matches and the large decrease in “no shows” among new teachers at the start of the 2006 school year (Useem, 2007, p.17).

One streamlined hiring system would be more efficient and less confusing for principals and applicants.
• Useem et al. (2007, p.19) call the hiring process, despite its recent changes, still “mind-numbingly complex and slow.”
• A series of consecutive time periods when the position is open to teachers with different levels of seniority means that some positions are not filled until the last week of August when the pressure is high (Useem et al., 2007, p.20). Consolidating application windows due to full site selection will ensure that the best applicants will not have already been hired at other districts, administrators will have time to contemplate hiring decisions, and hired teachers will have adequate time to prepare for the start of the school year.
• Principals and candidates alike have been confused by which jobs were to be filled by site selection versus traditional hiring, which even led to principals incorrectly offering jobs that had to be withdrawn (Useem et al., 2007, p.17, 19).

With this greater autonomy in hiring, the principal must be prepared to live up to the process and be held accountable. A clear evaluation system should be created for principals’ performance in recruitment and retention, something PFT has been advocating, and could possibly be used as a bargaining chip to achieve full site selection, although should be implemented anyway (Useem et al., 2007, p.24). Assessment would be overseen by Regional Superintendents and in the schools with the highest turnover, affect the principals’ budget by increasing their discretionary expenditures by a figure of about $1500.

As for assessment criteria, principals would be required to attend District job fairs and actively seek out teachers (Useem et al., 2007, p.17) and retain certain percentages after one year, two years, etc. For teachers hired in 2004-2005, 81.1% returned to the District for a second year while 67.9% returned to the same school (Useem et al., 2007, p.22). In order for the lowest performing schools to have more experienced teachers, there should be more emphasis on the school return-rate than the District return-rate. Goals will be set according to the starting retention rate at each school and increase every year. Qualitative data should also be collected: surveys should be distributed to teacher applicants for information on the principal’s hiring process as well as year-end assessments by teachers, including those leaving. As the principal is the leader of the school, he sets the expectations for the faculty from day one and creates an environment for success.

In Putting Children First: The Nutter Plan for Public Education, one of the initiatives is to “improve programs to retain good teachers” (Nutter, 2007, p. 8). However in order to retain good teachers, the District must first attract them and these simple reforms—streamlining the hiring process, allowing candidates to apply for all vacancies, and involving and maintaining the principal in the teachers’ careers from the beginning—will contribute to a better pool of applicants.

Conclusion
Although the Mayor has no direct power over the School District of Philadelphia, the two reforms detailed above are within his authority and as closely affect education policy as possible. This was the first criteria in determining action. Due to the unstable finances of the District, it was also determined that reforms that would have a substantial effect across the schools for low or no cost would also be prioritized. While neither are flashy, outside-the-box ideas, they demonstrate that the Mayor is committed to the District’s overall health, both financially and academically.