A Brief Review of PSAP's Position Paper 'One City, Two Systems of Schools'

A position paper released on December 5, 2014 by the Philadelphia School Advocacy Partners (PSAP), the advocacy arm of the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), calls for an "aggressive expansion of schools that are achieving results for low-income and minority students" (p. 2). The document describes what it terms "high-impact" schools and "underperforming" schools. The author(s) states: "For poor and minority students in Philadelphia, there really are two kinds of schools: those that work and those that don't...variation in outcomes is not dependent on school type, student income levels, or other out-of-school factors (p. 2)." Research for Action (RFA) found a number of issues with the claims made by PSAP. Specifically: (1) PSAP argued that the populations served by the two groups of schools are essentially identical, but omits discussion of several important differences between the groups--primarily in the special education population and in the grade levels served; (2) PSAP made questionable decisions about which schools to include in their "underperforming" sample and failed to detail their rationale for doing so; and (3) RFA was not able to reconstruct PSAP's calculations of the percentage of students who are eligible for free lunch. This document argues that the data presented by PSAP are not nearly sufficient to support their sweeping conclusions.