June 2004 — Applications
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
School District of Philadelphia Uses Web-Based System to Increase Student Achievement
Last fall, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige noted in a speech that high school education is "an unrecognized educational crisis in this country." This statement is reaffirmed by a 2003 Manhattan Institute study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which found that only 70% of U.S. high school students graduate. Many students also graduate high school with profound skill gaps in math and English - with a recent USA TODAY article reporting that 53% of U.S. college students take at least one remedial course. Even more challenging is the fact that with federal legislation raising the stakes for student performance, teachers are required to fit more into their already crowded curricula.
In the School District of Philadelphia, we face the same challenges on a large scale. As the seventh largest district in the United States, we serve more than 56,000 students throughout 55 high schools. Our system includes neighborhood schools as well as several magnet, vocational and alternative schools. In 2002, we conducted an evaluation of our high schools to better understand the scope and nature of the critical issues in our system. The results were startling: Average high school attendance from September through December 2002 was 83.6%, with ninth grade having the lowest attendance rate at 80.6%. In addition, the promotion rate from ninth to 10th grade for all schools was 52.8%, with that rate dropping down to 45.6% specifically at the neighborhood high schools. With no standard curriculum and more than 1,000 different courses being taught throughout our schools, there was no curricular consistency for our highly mobile students as they moved between schools.
The Initiative
The evidence clearly showed that our high schools were in need of innovative solutions to improve the foundation for student success. However, rather than just implementing another wave of short-lived reform, we wanted to create initiatives that would become internalized and hold sustainable and valuable change throughout our district. Hence, we created the Secondary Education Movement - our plan for high school improvement - together with a detailed strategic plan to outline our vision and ensure that we could measure our progress toward very specific goals.
The mission of the Secondary Education Movement (www.philsch.k12.pa.us/offices/sem) is to equip and support district teachers, administrators and staff in their efforts to provide every student with a rich, challenging, diversified and relevant curriculum in a clean, safe, state-of-the-art facility. Furthermore, our goal is to ensure that every graduate be prepared for postsecondary education, including technical or vocational training, so that he or she will emerge as a productive citizen ready for meaningful participation in society. Our plan focused on six key objectives:
- Creating a core curriculum consistent across all schools;
- Improving the physical and intellectual learning environment of our schools;
- Increasing the range of learning options for students;
- Providing academic and counseling support for teachers and students;
- Modernizing high school administration and organization; and
