Restructuring Philadelphia's neighborhood high schools: A conversation with Constance Clayton and Michelle Fine

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1994 by Schwartz, Robert

In 1988, the School District of Philadelphia established a separate, nonprofit organization whose purpose was to lead the rethinking and restructuring of the city's 22 neighborhood high schools. Launched with an $8.3 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and led by Janis Somerville, a senior planner on the district superintendent's staff, and Michelle Fine, then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Schools Collaborative took as its principal mission the development of multiple, autonomous charters within the neighborhood high schools. Designed and led by interdisciplinary teacher teams, charters are small schools serving 200 to 400 heterogeneous students in grades 9 through 12, organized to meet the academic and social needs of students.

Because Philadelphia pioneered the development of career academies in high schools beginning in the late 1960s, the school-within-a-school concept was already well established when the Collaborative began its planning in 1988. Implementation of small schools has grown rapidly under the Collaborative's leadership, however, to the point where in 1993 over 20,000 students from than 50% of the city's comprehensive high school enrollment) are participating in charters.

The interview presented below took place on June 21, 1993, at the end of a difficult school year in Philadelphia. The district was confronted with a $60 million budget deficit, a recalcitrant teachers union, and a massive turnover in high school principals due to a state-funded early retirement program.

Constance Clayton, Philadelphia's superintendent of schools, has spent her entire career in Philadelphia. A product of the city's public schools, she began as a fourth grade teacher in 1955, worked her way up through the ranks, and assumed the superintendency in 1982. She is generally credited with having restored fiscal health, educational purpose, and public confidence to an ailing system during her tenure as superintendent.

Michelle Fine, a professor of psychology at the Graduate Center at City University of New York, has been the senior consultant to the Collaborative since 1988. She has written widely on race, gender, and the politics of school reform, and is the editor of a forthcoming volume of ethnographic essays drawn from the work of the Collaborative.

The interview begins with Mr. Schwartz asking Superintendent Clayton and Professor Fine to describe the origins of the Collaborative and the decision to focus on restructuring the city's neighborhood high schools:

CLAYTON: Several things gave rise to the development of the Collaborative. First, when I became superintendent in 1982 and looked at the entire system and especially at the grade organization, I recognized that one major strength of ours was in early childhood education. Because this had been my area of responsibility, I knew where we were and how much we had done. We really were in the vanguard nationally in terms of number of students served, diversity of program offerings, degree of parental participation, etc. In elementary education, we also felt we were making progress, especially with those students who had begun in our early childhood programs. But as I began to look at our secondary schools, especially the neighborhood high schools, I saw lots of problems, and I did not see evidence of progress. I did not see achievement. I saw lethargy and sameness and undue stability of faculty and administrators, people who had been in the same buildings 25 and 30 years. I saw good programs-career academies, special motivation programs for at-risk students--but I did not see them being replicated, despite their demonstrated success. I knew we couldn't work on all three levels of the system simultaneously. Since we had already made major progress in early childhood, I decided to focus on the other end of the grade continuum and to see if we couldn't make a difference in the high schools. I thought if there was an opportunity to zero in on any grade organization, it ought to be high schools because those are kids who are most visible publicly in the community. I was tired of reading national data about high school graduates who couldn't read, couldn't fill out an application. I'd begun to build relationships in the corporate community and to garner their trust and their support for public education in Philadelphia, and I knew they cared deeply about the quality of their future work force. I must tell you that there were many who thought I was crazy to take on the high schools, that it was already too late. But since my position is I don't write off any child for any reason, it seemed imperative that we zero in on the high schools. That's why I informally went to Pew, met with staff people, and with Tan Somerville's help--Jan was already on staff to help us with strategic planning--we prepared a concept paper describing our possible vision of change in the high schools. That's how the initiative began.

FINE: I was teaching at Penn when the Collaborative began. Although I had not done prior work in the Philadelphia schools, as far back as 1981 I did some work at a small alternative high school in the South Bronx [in New York City]. I had collected some data in the fall and then found out that 30% of the kids hadn't waited for me to do the posttest in June. They had dropped out of school. When we looked at who was dropping out, we found that the dropouts had the same academic levels as the kids who stayed in school but had a lot more questions about the relationship between staying in school and the economy, about racism. Dropouts were much less depressed than the kids who had stayed in school. I then started writing and worrying about who's dropping out, and spent a year in a comprehensive neighborhood high school in New York. I soon noticed that more kids were leaving than staying. When I came back to Penn, Jan, and Ralph Smith, then chief of staff [in the school district], said to me, "OK, so you're really good at being critical of schools. Can you be creative and help change them?" And I must say today that it's much easier to be critical than to be creative. You can sit at home in your apartment and be critical. You have to be creative with people. And so at that moment I got really interested in what it would mean to take whole schools and try to change them, to understand not just what it means to help kids beat the odds but what it would mean to change the odds.