Phila. School District plan would dismantle central office, close schools (BLOG)

The realities are ugly, leaders said Tuesday - the Philadelphia School District is nearly insolvent, lags behind most other urban district...

The realities are ugly, leaders said Tuesday - the Philadelphia School District is nearly insolvent, lags behind most other urban districts in academics, and loses students to charters because parents believe it does not keep their children safe.
"What we do know through lots of history and evidence and practice is that the current structure doesn't work," School Reform Commission Chairman Pedro Ramos said. "It's not fiscally sustainable and it doesn't produce high-quality schools for all kids."
So, at the SRC's direction, Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen on Tuesday announced a plan that would essentially blow up the district and start with a new structure.
The plan - subject to public comment and SRC approval - would close 40 schools next year and 64 by 2017, move thousands more students to charters, and dismantle the central office in favor of "achievement networks" that would compete to run groups of 25 schools and would sign performance-based contracts.
Knudsen, in a news conference, avoided references to the "Philadelphia School District."
"We are now looking at a much broader definition of education in the city that includes not only district schools but other schools as well," he said.
Mayor Nutter hailed the plan, which he said would push control over education down to the school level.
"If we don't take significant action, the system will collapse," the mayor said at a separate news conference. "If you care about kids and if you care about education, if you care about the future of this city, that's what we need to all grow up and deal with."
Teachers union president Jerry Jordan decried the radical restructuring as the SRC divesting itself of many of the core responsibilities of public education. He called it a "cynical, right-wing, market-driven" blueprint.
"This is totally dismantling the system," Jordan said. "It's a business plan crafted to privatize the services within the School District."

'Archaic'

Forget the command-and-control district structure. It's archaic and it doesn't work, officials said.
Instead of orders coming from a large central office that runs 249 schools, much of the power would be concentrated in the new achievement networks.
Those would represent "a breaking-apart of the district," Knudsen said. They would be "a group of people who choose to do business with the SRC and the central office to run" from 20 to 25 schools organized either by geography or by some other theme.
Successful principals or district staff could apply to run an achievement network. So could charter organizations, or universities, or a combination of those groups.
Principals would answer to the achievement networks, although they would remain district employees. The achievement networks would have contracts with the SRC, and would have to meet performance goals or risk being replaced.
The achievement network structure "creates an entrepreneurial approach, a flexibility, a nimbleness, a willingness to experiment," Knudsen said.
The current academic divisions - formerly called regions, clusters, and districts - will be gone as of this summer. Pilot achievement networks will be in place this fall, with a formal rollout in 2014.
Schools would have much more autonomy, with the ability to choose their own curriculums.
Though there is some precedent for this kind of work - officials pointed to the decentralization in New York City public schools - Ramos noted that what Philadelphia is proposing "is different from what many other places are doing."
The central office, already half the size it was a year ago, will shrink further, from over 1,000 employees a few years ago to about 200 in the new model.
The central office will keep responsibility for things like compliance, finance, accountability, strategic planning, and government relations.
A shared-services department will handle things like special education and food services. Schools not managed by the district could purchase these services, too.

A new direction

When district, city, and charter officials signed the Great Schools Compact late last year, they signaled the direction Philadelphia public education was going in - closing seats in low-performing schools, and expanding high-performing ones.

Read More HERE