Edison Schools Chief Education Officer John Chubb today strongly refuted a report released by RAND and Research for Action (RFA), saying that the research belittles the historic significance of district-wide student achievement in Philadelphia public schools since 2002.  Chubb invited the report’s authors to publicly debate its findings, which draw negative conclusions that diminish the important accomplishments of the district and its private partners.   

“In recent years, the School District of Philadelphia has had the largest student achievement gains of any other big-city district in the country.  And Edison Schools is proud to be part of that dramatic turnaround,” said Chubb. “We and the other education service providers were hired to improve 45 Philadelphia schools as part of a district-wide initiative, and today those schools, and district schools as a whole, are dramatically better. The RFA report can’t put its finger on what may have caused this success after decades of failure, yet they are quick to dismiss the possibility that the District’s student achievement gains are due to the introduction of competition and the multiple provider model.  

“We must question methods that make serious and damning assumptions without underlying support for those claims.  I would like to extend an invitation to the report’s authors to visit one of our schools in the very near future and debate in an open forum these unsubstantiated findings.”

Edison Schools was hired in 2002 by the School Reform Commission (SRC) in Philadelphia to manage 20 of the district’s lowest-performing schools – by far the largest number of any of the non-district providers.  In 2002, only 10 percent of children in the Philadelphia-Edison schools were proficient in reading.  Today, that number is up 12 points, to 22 percent.  In math, only 7 percent of children were proficient in 2002.  Today that number is 31 percent. In other words, over four times more students are proficient in math today than four years ago. 

Chubb noted that these dramatic increases occurred at schools where proficiency rates in reading and math were as low as two percent.  

“The changes in Philadelphia’s schools are real and dramatic,” said Chubb. “Today, we see an environment that encourages positive, non-adversarial competition, where learning is occurring in nurturing, supportive and safer schools.  The district management, the SRC and the state legislature are to be commended for implementing a comprehensive change program that has worked so well.” 
 
Chubb noted that, just this week, a separate report from The Center for Education Reform (CER) found that Philadelphia’s multiple provider model is, in fact, working for Philadelphia students.  The CER report entitled The Philadelphia Story of 2007: Education Progress in the City of Brotherly Love says Philadelphia public schools have seen a “radical transformation” over the last five years.

“For the first time in modern history, educational achievement is on the rise in a meaningful way,” according to the CER report. “Such progress is attributable to the introduction of new and varied providers of education, something few traditional education researchers and observers are able to fully acknowledge.”

Chubb notes that while both reports demonstrate that student achievement is up dramatically across the board in Philadelphia, there are serious gaps in reasoning by the authors of the RFA report. “On the one hand, the report notes that ‘we cannot rule out the possibility that the assistance from private providers was an important part of the total reform effort in Philadelphia’ and highlights the potential that ‘the introduction of providers increased capacity for improvement.’ On the other hand, the authors cavalierly assert that ‘if the privately managed schools had remained under district management instead, it seems likely that the district could have replicated the gains of other schools that received no special interventions – getting results similar to those actually achieved by the private providers without expending additional resources.’”

Chubb says the CER report released earlier this week got it right, when they wrote, “All of Philadelphia’s public schools have clearly progressed.  But the essential lesson that must not be lost in the review of data that inundate policy and media in-boxes is the fact that the district struggled for decades to improve and spent millions to make piecemeal progress. But it was not until Philadelphia adopted a transformative solution, one that changed the entire system for the better, that all boats were lifted.”

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