Closing the Teacher Quality Gap in Philadelphia: New Hope and Old Hurdles

This study of teacher staffing issues in the School District of Philadelphia, the third in a series, outlines the degree to which the district has succeeded in upgrading teachers' professional credentials, recruiting and retaining them, and equitably distributing experienced and credentialed teachers across all types of schools. Since the passage of NCLB and the state's takeover of the district in 2001, the district has succeeded in improving the certification rates of its teachers, especially new teachers, and in drastically cutting the number of emergency-certified teachers and classroom vacancies. It has also improved new teacher retention and has modernized and decentralized its hiring process. At the same time, it has not been able to change the pattern of having the least qualified teachers in schools serving the highest percentages of poor and minority students nor its poor long-term rate of teacher retention. The district is also challenged to speed up and simplify its hiring and school placement process and to hire more minority teachers

From the Margins to the Center of School Reform: A Look at the Work of Local Education Funds in Seventeen Communities

This report begins to describe the core and emerging areas of LEFs' work, their ways of working and the conditions under which they work. The seventeen organizations studied in this report were selected from among the 43 LEFs in the Network, to reflect the range in their size and geographic distribution

Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom

Quality teaching matters - particularly for low-income, inner-city students who perform below grade level. But these students are often taught by the least-qualified and least-experienced teachers. Philadelphia schools will not be able to improve student performance dramatically without more teachers who have the skills, experience, and rich content knowledge needed to help every student achieve high standards.Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom examines the current status of teacher quality in the city and what the School District of Philadelphia is now doing to ensure that all classrooms have highly trained, motivated, and knowledgeable teachers ready to boost the achievement of the district's 188,000 students.For the first time, thanks to information provided by the School District of Philadelphia, researchers have been able to identify what we know about the qualifications, experience, and school assignment patterns of Philadelphia's 11,700-member teaching force. The study was conducted by a group of scholars who have launched Learning from Philadelphia's School Reform, a three-year research project designed to measure and help the public understand the impact of the 2001 state takeover of the Philadelphia schools, the school management partnerships undertaken with external for-profit and non-profit organizations, and the reforms initiated by the state and city-appointed School Reform Commission (SRC) members and School District of Philadelphia CEO Paul Vallas.Led by Research for Action (RFA), a Philadelphia non-profit, the research team includes investigators from the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and the Wharton School, the Philadelphia Education Fund, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and other organization

Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #25

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.The Talent Development Middle School model is a comprehensive school-changedesign aimed at raising the academic proficiency of all children in schools where large proportions of children are at risk of failure. Thirty-one teachers in two Philadelphia public middle schools where the model has been piloted evaluated the implementation of training and curricular components of the model in six focus groups covering major subject areas (math, science, and Reading and English Language Arts [RELA]). Respondents were asked to appraise the helpfulness of the professional development training and materials in supporting their own teaching proficiency and the achievement level of their students, as well as obstacles they faced, their prediction of future use in the school, their evaluation of their students’ capacity to meet the standards of the curriculum, and their sense of whether they made a difference.Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education (R-117-D4005

Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #25

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.The Talent Development Middle School model is a comprehensive school-changedesign aimed at raising the academic proficiency of all children in schools where large proportions of children are at risk of failure. Thirty-one teachers in two Philadelphia public middle schools where the model has been piloted evaluated the implementation of training and curricular components of the model in six focus groups covering major subject areas (math, science, and Reading and English Language Arts [RELA]). Respondents were asked to appraise the helpfulness of the professional development training and materials in supporting their own teaching proficiency and the achievement level of their students, as well as obstacles they faced, their prediction of future use in the school, their evaluation of their students’ capacity to meet the standards of the curriculum, and their sense of whether they made a difference.Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education (R-117-D4005