A Lesson Learned for Ed. Reformers: "Chester-Upland and Harrisburg Have Failed Miserably"

By Elizabeth Scheinberg

With the sun setting on the Pennylvania Empowerment Law (June 30, 2010), Harrisburg's Model of Mayoral Control has come under close scrutiny and with it the State Appointed Board of Control governing the Chester-Upland School District. Both have failed to spur any major improvements in the districts they govern, the same charge against the elected the school boards they replaced. After 10 years, Harrisburg's newly-elected mayor has signaled her preference for the district to return to local elected control, but the legislative debate will decide the ultimate fate of the students in these districts.

The following story ran in the Patriot News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), Friday, October 30 2009. You can read the article in its entirity at: http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices-regional/13380756-1.html

It was an experiment, the first of its kind in Pennsylvania.

Piccola, R-Dauphin County, saw it as the tough love needed to repair what he and others saw as a broken educational system. At the time, 89 percent of city students were scoring below grade level. Today, 68 percent of Harrisburg's students are below grade level.

That's an improvement, but not as much as Piccola and state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak would like. The school district rivals Chester-Upland School District in Delaware County as the state's worst performer.

The state's empowerment law (granting mayoral control of city schools) expires on June 30, 2010.

In Harrisburg, if the law is not renewed, the city schools would revert to the control of the nine-member elected school board.

However, Piccola doesn't favor that situation and said he doesn't see how the district can avoid moving control to a state-appointed board of control, which would not report to the mayor.

"I don't see how you get a district that would just remain in place and go back to the existing school board," he said. "... You need immediate intervention. The district is clearly not on the right track."

However, state Rep. Ron Buxton, D-Harrisburg, points out that a state-appointed board of control has been governing Chester-Upland for the past 10 years and that has not resulted in an instantaneous academic turnaround there. He seems inclined to allow the Harrisburg district to revert back to the elected school board.

"I think that the citizens of the city have focused on this transition occurring, particularly since the current governance situation has not produced better test scores," Buxton said. "And from what I'm hearing in the community, they appear to be prepared to govern the Harrisburg School District again."

Neither Buxton nor Piccola endorses continuing with the mayoral control.

The 2000 Education Empowerment Act placed the empowerment label on a district if it had 50 percent or more of its students scoring in the bottom or "below basic," category on the math and reading Pennsylvania System of School Assessments in the most recent two school years. That resulted in new powers and extra money to help raise test scores.

Then, in 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind Act came along. It introduced "adequate yearly progress," or AYP, as a measuring stick to determine districts' progress toward a goal of 100 percent math and reading proficiency.

Piccola suggests AYP should be the basis in the new law for determining which districts should be labeled as empowerment districts.

"We would take appropriate actions depending upon how far below AYP they have fallen," he said. "Chester-Upland and Harrisburg appear to be the ones that have just failed miserably." ...

Harrisburg schools Superintendent Gerald Kohn also believes the district is ready to be handed back to the elected board.

When he arrived in the district, he said, "I was surprised at how much needed to be done, but in the past 8 1/2 years, we accomplished more than I thought possible."

This past year, more than three-quarters of students demonstrated more than a year's growth based on state test scores, Kohn said. In addition, college acceptances of graduates is up and two initiatives that are part of the reforms he ushered in -- SciTech High and the district's preschool program -- are gaining national attention...

Zahorchak and the legislators note Harrisburg has achieved some successes under Mayor Stephen R. Reed -- it has upgraded its buildings and athletic facilities, opened a model science and technology high school, and expanded its early childhood education offerings.

But still looming is the large percentage of students scoring in the bottom performance category, or "below basic," on the state math and reading tests. Fewer than half of the students, or 47 percent, taking the state math and reading tests fell in this category in 2008-09. That is far better than the 68 percent 10 years before, but not good enough, they say.

In 2000, Buxton voted against taking control of Harrisburg schools away from the elected board. He said one of the main problems with mayoral control since then has been "the inability of a superintendent to have to report to the general public regarding the activities of the school district, but rather he had one superior" -- the mayor.