City of Brotherly Love - and woeful test scores
Sigh. Another article about the state of schools in my "adopted hometown" of Philadelphia, and as usual, it ain't pretty.
OF 500 SCHOOL districts in Pennsylvania, only a handful scored lower than Philadelphia in math and in reading over the last five years...When did the scores begin to drop? Would more money have made a difference? With the legislature eyeing property-tax reform, getting the answers right is more important than ever. The city's scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests actually rose slightly relative to the rest of the state in the early 1990s, peaking in 1993-94, then declining slowly but steadily for the rest of the decade by 3 to 4 percent.
And who's to blame for this state of affairs? Not the state of Pennsylvania:
Trying to blaming the state is understandable, but the evidence indicates that Philadelphia's educational woes were of its own making during the mid-to late-'90s. The decline started right after Mayor Ed Rendell's handpicked school superintendent, David Hornbeck, took over.
After accounting for inflation, Philadelphia's per-pupil expenditures did indeed fall 9 percent over the 1990s, but the relative drop in test scores was even greater. To get some perspective, Philadelphia's spending is now about at the national average...Child poverty is a serious problem in Philadelphia, but it was improving during the late '90s, so it cannot explain the declining test scores.
The inefficiencies in Philadelphia's school system were striking. During the 1990s, our best estimates indicate that even an additional $1,000 increase per pupil would have raised average test scores of around 1,100 by less than one point...Whether the new educational system imposed on city schools this year will work won't be known for at least a few years, but clearly the city was not doing its job. The money spent under the old regime essentially disappeared without a trace...Philadelphia had been unique in the state for the complete power that the city had over its school system, so escaping blame for what happened during the 1990s is not easy.
I don't have a child in the Philadelphia school system, nor do I work with K-12 testing, so I know only what I read in the papers (and what my readers send me). And no one - not reporters, not teachers, and not parents - seems to feel optimistic about the situation improving anytime soon.