Sunday, September 28, 2003

By Jane Elizabeth, Post-Gazette Education Writer

As a longtime chairman of the state House Education Committee, Ron Cowell knows a few things about school officials.

	David Matter, left, co-chairman of the commission, confers with Mayor Tom Murphy. (Tony Tye, Post-Gazette) On the Net The full report, "Keeping the Promise: The Case for Reform in the Pittsburgh Public Schools," is available on the Education Commission Web site in .pdf format. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, available as a free download from Adobe

He knows that, right about now, some board members and administrators are reading the damning report released last week by Mayor Tom Murphy's commission on Pittsburgh schools and thinking, "Thank God, that's not me."

But he also believes that, eventually, they'll realize something else about the report.

It is about them.

Fifty-four percent of Pittsburgh Public Schools students can't read at grade level, the report says.

But in the Aliquippa School District, 67 percent don't read at grade level.

In Pittsburgh, the "achievement gap" between black and white students is criticized by the mayor's commission.

But about 200 schools across Pennsylvania are in danger of federal sanctions solely because minority groups scored poorly on statewide tests.

The Pittsburgh school board's "discord" and "bitter dissension" cripple its work, the commission said.

But the Avonworth School District, to name one other district, has a notoriously divisive board, marked by demands for each other's resignations and three superintendents in seven years.

When it comes to tension between school boards and administrators, "Pittsburgh doesn't have the corner on that market," Quaker Valley Superintendent Jerry Longo said.

"There's probably not a school district in the state where you don't have some philosophical differences between the school board and the superintendent," added Timothy Allwein, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

The 144-page report released Monday, along with its shorter but more scathing summary report, was the result of 13 months of work by a 37-member commission appointed by Murphy. Besides blasting the school board, test scores and inefficient spending, the commission takes issue with high teacher salaries and an unusually large rainy-day fund the city district has squirreled away.

If Pittsburgh's 93-school district is failing, the fallout naturally would be more conspicuous than in the region's other districts, some of which have as few as three schools.

Still, many state and regional business and education leaders believe that Pittsburgh's school problems shouldn't be a concern of only those whose children ride the city's school buses.

"You have to have your head in the sand not to appreciate [that] what's happening in Pittsburgh Public Schools is happening in other places," said Steven Zylstra, president and chief executive officer of the Pittsburgh Technology Council and Catalyst Connection, which are trade and economic development associations.

He pointed to a "disturbing" study released by the council last year that reported that 43 percent of all high school seniors in southwestern Pennsylvania read so poorly that they could be limited to jobs that pay less than $20,000 a year. About 10 percent couldn't read well enough to qualify for even low-skilled, near-minimum-wage jobs.

The Career Readiness study also reported that only 9 percent of high school seniors in the nine-county area had the skills that would allow them to go on and become successful in professional occupations such as teaching or accounting.

"When companies look to move into an area, they look at not just the city but the region overall," said Ronnie L. Bryant, president and chief operating officer of the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, the region's major economic development and marketing organization.

But the schools in the most visible cities do have an impact on outsiders' perceptions of the state, local leaders said. And school districts in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg all have troubles of varying notoriety.

Harrisburg schools are a perennial on the state's low-performing schools list, and Philadelphia's famously failing school district has been taken over by the state.

"If you have a school district that does not have the numbers, if you will, a school district that's struggling," Bryant said, "it has an impact on everyone."

Longo recalled that when popular Superintendent Richard Wallace ran Pittsburgh's schools from 1980 until 1992, "All of us looked good across the nation because of his leadership and the many innovative things he did. ... Whenever people talk positively or negatively about the Pittsburgh school system, we all win or lose."

"As Pittsburgh goes, there go the rest of us," said George Wilson, assistant superintendent in Mt. Lebanon School District. "A strong urban district is important."

Superintendents in other districts, Wilson said, "have quite a bit of interest in how Pittsburgh is handling issues that are issues of all school districts."

Cowell, who was in the state House from 1975 to 1998 and now is president of The Education Policy and Leadership Center in Harrisburg, said those issues included figuring out how much money should be in the district's reserve fund, providing training not only for teachers but also for school board members, closing the racial achievement gap, dealing with the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind law and deciding how to hold school officials accountable for successes and failures.

If and how the city deals with its bickering board also will be scrutinized.

"The mayor's commission report has shone the spotlight on governance issues, and we can all learn from this," said Donna Durno, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, which provides programs and services to the county's 42 suburban school districts.

Longo, who heads one of the county's highest-achieving school districts, said, "To be honest, I think [Pittsburgh is] still the cream of the urban school districts. ... They're excellent schools."

But, he added, "Could they be better if the top [administrators and board members] were working in tandem?"

Urban school districts are a sort of incubator for "best practices" where problems common to all districts are addressed and solved, Allwein said.

"If the urban districts can't do it," he said, "then we scratch our heads and say, 'What do we do now?' "

E-mail this story   Print this story