A Philadelphia Story: Civic Engagement and Ambitious Systemwide Reform

Abstract

By drawing lessons from the rise and fall of Philadelphia's Achieving reform initiative, Ms. Christman offers the benefit of hindsight to other cities embarking on major school improvement efforts. The primary message she conveys is that the engagement of stakeholders from different sectors of the community is crucial to the success of a reform. BY ALMOST ANY measure, schools are failing the youths of our major cities. While every city boasts a handful of excellent schools, no urban district has taken success to scale. Many obstacles stand in the way of urban school improvement: inadequate funding, contentious city and state politics, the ingrained dynamics of educational bureaucracies, and school staff members who are underprepared to teach high concentrations of students disadvantaged by both poverty and racial discrimination. It is increasingly recognized that these challenges require more than a visionary leader with a comprehensive and plausible plan for improvement. The broad-based and sustained engagement of a city's institutions and citizenry is necessary. Strong -- a community's ability to act collectively and take public responsibility for solving shared problems -- couples public will with the focus and persistence necessary to guide reform through political storms, educational faddism, and changes in leadership. Clarence Stone, in his discussion of an 11-city study of school reform, defines as: the extent to which different sectors of the community -- business, parents, educators, state and local officeholders, nonprofits, and others -- act in concert around a matter of community-wide import. It involves mobilization, that is, bringing different sectors together, but also developing a shared plan of action. . . . To be lasting, civic capacity needs an institutional foundation for interaction among elites and a grass roots base through which ordinary citizens are engaged.1 Civic leaders and ordinary citizens can press for more radical educational improvement strategies than can district insiders and special interest groups, because the latter are more likely to cling to traditional approaches to reform, organization, and labor practices.2 Members of the community can provide the institutional memory necessary for policy coherence as professional educators come and go. They can monitor reform's progress and hold political and educational leaders accountable for following through on their commitments.3 They can serve as watchdogs and witnesses for those whose interests are often ignored -- low- and moderate-income students who are often members of racial, ethnic, or linguistic minority groups. But building resilient alliances across different sectors of a community is a daunting task, as stakeholders bring different and competing interests to their involvement in urban public education. During the 1990s, Philadelphians learned just how crucial public will is to a reform's success and just how difficult it is to build and sustain cross-sector coalitions in a city with a history of weak civic infrastructure. For six years, Philadelphia attempted the educational equivalent of landing a rocket on the moon -- without enough money for jet fuel and, as became apparent during the flight, with competing ideas about how to get there. The name of the systemwide reform was Children Achieving. The effort was more ambitious than any previous attempts at reform by a school district of its size but, by the time its leader resigned in frustration in 2000, the story had much in common with the tale of the ill-fated Icarus. Researchers at the organization Research for Action followed the complex story of civic engagement and school reform in Philadelphia between 1995 and 2000 as part of their evaluation -- conducted jointly with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) -- of the Achieving reform initiative. …