The Philadelphia Experiment

ANDRE LAMBERTSON/CORBIS SABA FOR TIME
SHAKING THINGS UP: From Edison, Blakney learned a new, academic use for Macarena

Marla Blakney's fifth-grade classroom is the front line in the nation's largest experiment in privately run public schools. And on a muggy fall morning in Room 308 at Harrity Elementary School, the troops are doing the Macarena. Arms crossing, hips swiveling, 24 Philadelphia schoolchildren are shouting a mantra "Wisdom! Justice! Courage! ..." that is supposed to create the lively but respectful classroom environment that can elude even good teachers. And to their skeptical teacher's amusement, it seems to be working. "When Edison taught us this, I thought, 'This is so corny. My kids won't go for it,'" says Blakney, whose building was taken over this fall by the for-profit company Edison Schools. "But it's a new year. I'm giving it a try."

Like Blakney, other teachers as well as students and administrators in Philadelphia's worst-performing elementary and middle schools have been forced to undertake some radical changes this year after a reform panel awarded control of 45 failing schools in the city to seven independent operators. The outside contractors include Edison, based in New York City and the largest of the companies that manage public schools as a business; Victory Schools, a much smaller New York City firm with schools in that city aswell as in Baltimore, Md.; and the Chancellor Beacon Academies of Coconut Grove, Fla., which operates charter schools and private day schools around the country. Two nonprofit organizations were also given schools to run, and both Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania will provide extensive services atothers. In addition, the panel hired Paul Vallas,who oversaw major reforms in Chicago's schools, as its new district ceo. Butmosteyes, in Philadelphia and around the nation, are focused on the for-profit companies that ambitiously, and controversially, aim to improve failing public schools while rewarding private investors.

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How well Philadelphia's children fare in these real-life laboratories will ultimately touch public schools in every corner of the U.S., offering examples to emulate or mistakes to avoid. As the experiment begins, TIME is following three individuals with a direct stake in the outcome: fifth-grade teacher Blakney, elementary-school principal Anita Duke andseventh-grade student Shaliah Denmark. All three will experience what happens when private hands buy the books, train the teachers and set the priorities. Each has her own degree of optimism about the promised reforms. TIME will return to them later in the school year for a report card on how those changes and their feelings about them have progressed.

The Teacher
Marla Blakney is a pragmatist. "the bottom line is, if my children are improving, go ahead and make a dollar," says the former accountant, 33, who is in her fifth year of teaching at Harrity, a poverty-plagued but homey school in the southwest section of the city, where the principal opens the day ringing a handbell in the asphalt schoolyard. Edison, the company running Blakney's school, is under intense pressure to produce both higher reading scores and stronger fiscal results. The largest and most experienced of the for-profit firms, with 150 schools in 24 states and the District of Columbia, Edison is in near total financial disarray. Its stock, selling as high as $36 a share in early 2001, may be delisted by NASDAQ if it doesn't rise above $1. And because of wrangling with the district over contract terms, it has yet toreceive the first of itsfour $3 million payments to run 20 Philadelphia schools.

Like its for-profit competitors, Edison is ideologically opposed by the teachers' union as well as by some community groups and parents, simply because it wants to make money from public-school students. This has already affected the experiment. For instance, while Edison was allowed to put in place its 90-min.-a-day reading curriculum called Success for All, which relies on testing every eight weeks, and to group its teachers into small, multigrade communities within its schools, some of the company's favorite ideas a longer school day and year, for example won't be used in Philadelphia because teachers were opposed to them and budgets were tight. The company also ran into trouble when it cut some of the support staff who helped with discipline and administrative tasks. The district restored a handful of those administrative employees after discipline problems erupted at Edison's middle schools during the first few days of school.

But a look inside Blakney's classroom reveals why some Philadelphia teachers are willing to give the embattled company and its sometimes hokey methods a chance. In addition to the Macarena sessions, Blakney has found success with other Edison techniques, like regularly using the company's vocabulary--"I like the active listening I'm seeing at this table"--to reinforce good behavior. Blakney says she has more opportunity to master her curriculum and exchange ideas with other teachers since Edison increased time for teacher training from a period a week to one every other day. And instead of requiring her to balance her reading lessons between the stars and the stragglers in her class, Edison groups children from different classrooms by their ability to read and then establishes a rotation, so Blakney and her fellow teachers can work with youngsters who are on the same level.