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Straight Talk About a Report on Achievement at Philadelphia Schools |
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RAND: A Feb. 1 report by our organizations examined student achievement in privately managed and district-managed public schools in Philadelphia. Proponents and opponents of the city's five-year-old experiment in the private management of public schools interpreted the report very differently. Our report examined academic achievement measured by reading and math test scores among students attending Philadelphia public schools. Some news accounts suggested --- inaccurately --- that our report indicated privately managed schools had fallen behind districtwide achievement trends. In fact, students at schools managed by private operators kept pace with --- but did not exceed --- the gains of students in the rest of the district in the past four years, when achievement levels districtwide rose substantially. Defenders of the private managers suggested --- inaccurately --- that our report was unduly negative about them because we had not accounted for the fact that the private managers were given many of the lowest-achieving schools in Philadelphia to operate. Instead, it was designed to contribute to a public discussion on how Philadelphia can learn from the experience of having some schools operated by the school district and others run by private operators as a model of school reform. Are the privately managed schools (or the other schools that received additional resources) producing benefits that are not measured by reading and math scores?
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