Diverse providers for big city school districts? Portfolio management models? What's that all about? Well, to be frank it's really a complex topic but stay with us. Charters are a big part of this discussion. Let's start with Philadelphia as an illustration of how all this gobbledygook works in practice. Philadelphia's public schools have been in serious trouble for the last two decades. They are chronically under financed and increasingly populated with minority children of poverty. In the late 1990s faced with yet another shortfall of state funds for the beleaguered school district, superintendent David Hornbeck, a former Presbyterian minister and a man of vision and principle took to the pulpits in North Philadelphia to denounce Republican Governor Tom Ridge's administration in Harrisburg as racist. That was Hornbeck's farewell performance. He left town in a huff in the summer of 2000. In 2001 following events of 9/11, Ridge went to Washington to become George Bush the youngest first secretary of homeland security. Dr. John: In 2001 the Republican dominated Pennsylvania legislature took control of the Philadelphia schools in the so-called friendly takeover and replaced the school board with the School Reform Commission with three commissioners appointed by the governor, two by the mayor. In 2002 the School Reform Commission hired Paul Vallas, formerly the CEO of The Chicago school district as CEO of Philadelphia's schools. Following a turn of the millennium trend in education policy making, Vallas introduced a diverse provider model in the school district of Philadelphia. The plan included for profit and nonprofit outside providers for 46 low performing schools. These organizations with one exception would operate the schools that were contracted to them. Teachers would retain collective bargaining rights through their memberships in the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. All of the contract providers with the exception of Edison adopted the school district's instructional program. The five for profit providers were, educational management organizations, EMOs, the largest of which was Edison Schools, the brainchild of the corporate media mogul Chris Whittle. Big business was now in the business of urban education. The five nonprofits included two universities. Temple University, which undertook to manage a group of North Philadelphia schools and the University of Pennsylvania, which provided contracted services to several schools in West Philadelphia. Vallas intent on proving that traditional city schools could be restructured to outperform the diverse provider schools, created an office of restructured schools which managed 21 low performing schools. Comparative data for a three year period showed that the schools managed by Vallas's office of restructured schools outperformed the diverse provider schools. By the 2010s, the term portfolio management model or PMM came into vogue to describe the kind of system Vallas was building in Philadelphia. New York City and Chicago were also experimenting with portfolio management. In theory, PMM provides a portfolio of choices for parents and students. Autonomous district schools, contract schools like Edison Inc and charter schools. In practice we're seeing fewer and fewer contract schools and more and more charter schools in big city portfolios. The evolution of the New York City school district toward a portfolio management system in the past decade is far too complex with too many turning points under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg for us to explain here. For that story we'll refer you to a very good book edited by the education policy scholars Katrina Bulkley, Jeffrey Henig and Henry Levin called Between Public and Private: Politics, Governance, and the New Portfolio Models for Urban School Reform published in 2010. Again, the title is between public and private. Chicago illustrates the PMM trend in a less complicated form than New York. Here's what happened briefly put in Chicago over the past 25 years. We follow the analysis presented in between public and private. Chicago has experienced three major waves of school reform since 1988. That year the Illinois state legislature authorized the decentralization of the Chicago city schools through the mechanism of local school councils called LSCs. A variant of community control though less radical than Brooklyn's Ocean Hill Brownsville experiment 1967/68. Each of Chicago's 550 schools elected an 11 member LSC, the majority of whose members were parents. The council's prerogatives included the school improvement plan, hiring and firing the principal and the school's discretionary budgets including its title one funds. The pragmatic accord that made these governing councils possible included a coterie of left and right leaning groups and organizations among them the powerful Commercial Club of Chicago- a progressive newspaper catalyst. Chicago authoritatively followed the progress of the 1988 reforms. A group of researchers at the University of Chicago and other higher education institutions formed the consortium on Chicago school based school research to evaluate the reforms. They found that the local school councils and the strategy of bottom up reform worked well in some schools but not well in many others. Wave two of Chicago school reform began in 1995 following a national trend of disruption in American politics. Recall that conservative Republicans took control of the US Congress in 1995. The backlash against the Clinton administration played out in Illinois as well with Republicans controlling the legislature. Disillusioned with the pace of education reform in Chicago, business leaders in the Commercial Club of Chicago lobbied the legislature to institute mayoral control of the city schools. A law was passed to that effect in 1995. Mayor Richard M. Daley, a conservative Democrat subsequently appointed a five member school reform board and he appointed Paul Vallas as budget director and CEO of the Chicago city schools. A business executive now in charge of the nation's third largest school district. Consistent with the national climate of opinion that favored standards and accountability as drivers of education reform, Vallas installed a system of standards and accountability in the Chicago schools. He put hundreds of schools on probation on the basis of low test scores and curb the authority of their local school councils. Citywide the power of the LSCs was further diminished by the reform board's requirement that all LSC members receive school district approved training. In 1996 the Illinois legislature passed the state's first charter school law. A law authorized only 15 charter schools for Chicago. To supplement the limited number of charters available to Chicago, Vallas head on the idea of contract schools which he would import later to Philadelphia. He also heads the charter law by encouraging the 14 pioneer charter schools to replicate themselves on multiple campuses, in effect, creating charter networks. Illinois increased the city's allotment of charters to 30 by 2003, to 45 by 2009. Wave three of Chicago School Reform began with Mayor Daley's appointment of Arne Duncan, Vallas' former chief of staff as CEO of the Chicago public schools in the summer of 2001. Duncan's hand was strengthened by the No Child Left Behind Act which took effect in January 2002. Large areas of Chicago's south and west sides still had badly failing schools after 15 years of reform efforts. Duncan vowed to close bad schools and replace them with new good schools. Duncan supported the development of charter schools, contract schools and full service community schools. With Gates Foundation support, he converted several large high schools to 12 small ones. With more philanthropic support he started building small high schools to replace dysfunctional large schools. Unfortunately, this experiment did not result in improved student achievement. In 2003 Duncan then launched the Renaissance 2010 initiative which adopted a portfolio management approach. Failing schools would be reformed on an individual basis or closed if they were beyond the pale of reform. Satisfactory schools were to be free of central office interventions. Duncan and his staff identified 139 autonomous schools, about a quarter of the city schools. The remaining three fourths needed vast improvement. Duncan adopted a strategy called school turnaround. He replaced the principals in some of the failing schools and gave the new principals the option to replace all of the teachers if necessary and charge them to develop an acceptable school improvement plan. Some schools would have to be closed. School closures were a volatile, hotly contested issue. Parents persistently chose to have their children attend neighborhood schools regardless of how bad they were. Chicago public schools policy held that a school could be closed because of low enrollment or persistent academic failure. By 2004 the district had closed about 24 schools. Thereafter it halted the closings. By 2010/11, 34 high schools and 47 elementary schools were eligible for closing on academic grounds, yet they remained open. The major component of Renaissance 2010 was new schools. Charter schools were the major vehicle for new school development. While the Illinois legislature ended Duncan's strategy adopted from his predecessor Paul Vallas of continuing to replicate the city's 14 pioneer charters on multiple campuses, it allowed those 14 charters to continue replicating, in effect, allowing them to create small school districts and enroll substantial numbers of students. In 2009 the legislature raised the city's charter sitting to 70. Though each new charter is limited to a single campus. A second category of new schools were nonprofit contract schools, all of them managed by local organizations. These schools have increasingly opted to become charter schools. The final category is performance schools, theme based, innovative academic schools that are part of the district's regular operations. After the national elections in 2008, Duncan left Chicago to head the Department of Education in the Obama administration where these approaches shaped federal policy and strategy. Get- what was known about Chicago's efforts at reforming its school portfolio. In June 2009, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a collection of senior leaders in the city formed in the late 19th century, issued an assessment of the Chicago public schools entitled, still left behind. Contrary to the news propagated by the district of rising student achievement scores, the report chided rising scores resulted from changed tests and not increases in real achievement. As Duncan planned a federal push on reforms similar to those he had led in Chicago, the committee concluded that the district had "no credible source of information on student achievement." From their analysis, "real student performance appears to have gone up a little in Chicago elementary schools during the past few years and even those gains then dissipated high school, in some, most students in Chicago public schools continue to fail."
