Jul 15, 2002 By Martha Raffaele Associated Press Writer 3 min read

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – When Pennsylvania’s public schools reopen for the 2002-2003 academic year, many that are struggling under considerable pressure from the state to improve will find the federal government is raising the stakes even higher. Nearly 260 Pennsylvania schools have made the U.S. Education Department’s list of 8,600 schools nationwide that must give their students the opportunity to attend better schools in their districts – and in some cases, offer tutoring services as well – under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act signed by President Bush in January.

That mandate could prove especially challenging for Philadelphia’s troubled system, which is pursuing massive reforms under a state takeover plan agreed to in December by Gov. Mark S. Schweiker and Mayor John F. Street.

The federal school improvement list includes 178 Philadelphia schools, accounting for 70 percent of the Pennsylvania schools singled out as “low performing,” based on either Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test scores or local assessment test results.

The district has always provided other options for parents dissatisfied with their neighborhood schools, including transfers to other schools, spokesman Paul Hanson said. But with 68 percent of the district’s schools making the federal list – with a combined enrollment of 135,000 students – the mandate to provide transfer opportunities this fall creates a troublesome equation.

“You’re talking about potentially transferring 68 percent of our students into 32 percent of our schools. But the law only says we have to do this with the space that’s available. It doesn’t require us to overcrowd our remaining schools,” Hanson said.

School officials are also privately concerned that the list will further complicate matters for the School Reform Commission. Critics have suggested that its efforts to revamp 70 schools and turn over at least 45 low-performing schools to outside groups and private companies including Edison Schools Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit manager of public schools, are too ambitious.

And it’s still unclear exactly how the state Education Department will ensure that the schools follow through with the mandate. Officials there are awaiting more specifics from Washington on how to carry out the new federal law, spokeswoman Gretchen Toner said.

In any event, school districts throughout Pennsylvania will no doubt find it overwhelming to comply with another layer of government mandates, said Tim Allwein, a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

“There’s just so much to that law. You’ve got to figure out how it works with existing state law, and we also want to make sure that the school buildings that are on the improvement list are the right ones,” he said.

Already, state education policies enacted throughout the administrations of Schweiker and former Gov. Tom Ridge either reward or sanction school districts according to their PSSA scores.

Critics say that the state already puts too much emphasis on PSSA scores. That emphasis will be even greater under the federal law, they say.

“It seems to be symptomatic of what we like to call ‘test’-tosterone – the idea that you can identify failing schools by low test scores, which doesn’t take into account that students can have low test scores for a variety of reasons,” said Wythe Keever, spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

For instance, low scores can reflect the failure of parents to reinforce at home lessons taught in classrooms, he said.

“We believe that we have to help improve the communities as well as the schools. The teachers and school staff are continually being targeted by policymakers, being labeled as substandard or failing, and we think it’s shortsighted,” Keever said.

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Martha Raffaele covers education for The Associated Press in Harrisburg.