An Education 'Dynamo' Recharges Philadelphia Schools

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page A03

PHILADELPHIA

Paul Vallas has been up since 3:30 a.m., when he awoke with heart palpitations. There has been a pepper spray incident at one of his schools. At another school, African American parents are demanding the dismissal of a principal for her alleged use of a racial slur.

It is a typically frazzled day in the frenetic life of the nerdish number cruncher-turned-charismatic educator, the former C-minus high school student who now specializes in fixing broken school systems.

Lanky and rumpled, the 50-year-old Vallas has a down-to-earth vision for the future of public education in America. "It's not rocket science," he insists. Balance the books. Demand high academic standards and strict accountability systems. Zero tolerance for troublemakers. Smaller class sizes. More after-school programs. Let a hundred experiments bloom. Replicate what works, and junk what doesn't.

The methods that Vallas has used to turn around schools first in Chicago and now in Philadelphia -- widely regarded as two of the most troubled districts in the nation -- have attracted nationwide attention. While critics complain that Vallas has tried to do too much too fast, he has won praise from both left and right."He has restored a belief in public schools," said Jerry Jordan, chief negotiator for the Philadelphia teachers union, which had a stormy relationship with Vallas's predecessors. "We have very open communication with him and members of his team."

"He's a dynamo," said former education secretary William J. Bennett, a leader of the back-to-basics school movement who once described Chicago schools as "the worst in the nation."

"He has shown that a superintendent can be a catalyst for change," Bennett said.

Formidable challenges confronted Vallas when he took over as chief executive of the Philadelphia school district in the summer of 2002. Philadelphia schools were considered so dysfunctional that they were taken over by the state the year before Vallas arrived. The city was in an uproar over a plan to privatize management of the school system in line with recommendations drawn up by a for-profit educational company, Edison Schools Inc.

In his first 18 months on the job, Vallas has succeeded in putting the privatization debate on the back burner. Private management companies are running 45 city schools, but they are just part of a broader educational mix that includes traditional public schools, restructured public schools, alternative schools, and schools that operate under a charter between the city and nonprofit organizations.

Vallas sees his role as ensuring a "level playing field" so that everyone can compete equally. Although Vallas is a registered Democrat who narrowly lost a long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination for governor of Illinois, his approach to school reform is non-ideological. He likes to quote a saying of Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping: It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

Philadelphia has a long tradition of mistrusting outsiders proffering advice: Favorite son Benjamin Franklin noted that visitors, like fish, "stink in three days." At the same time that he tries to win over the city with his ideas, Vallas also must deal with a never-ending succession of daily crises.

"I need an adult there right now," he shouts into the phone after the pepper spray incident. "It's a slow news day. This is not the storming of the Bastille, but that's the way the press is going to describe it."

Inundated by conflicting reports about who sprayed whom, Vallas considers rushing off to the school himself. He believes that an urban school superintendent must be "a larger-than-life figure" always visible to the community. But he is exhausted from lack of sleep and decides that his subordinates can handle the incident.

At breakfast the following morning, Vallas tells local business leaders that education reform is "the real national security challenge" facing the United States. Without an educated workforce, he says, the country will be unable to compete with the rest of the world.

Vallas, the son of a Greek restaurateur, was painfully shy as a child but is now known for his passionate, sometimes lengthy speeches. He tells the business leaders there is "no more important battleground" than inner-city schools. This is where the struggle for the "great unfinished business of civil rights" will be fought and where the American dream of equality of opportunity will be realized or denied.

Later that day, at a meeting of the state-appointed commission that now runs Philadelphia schools, parents troop to a microphone to complain about a long list of problems including school bullying, racism and the privatization controversy. Vallas promises to investigate every allegation and assures his listeners that the private companies will be judged by the same standards as the rest of the school system.

Vallas has fired one of the private management companies and rewarded a company that he thinks is doing a good job, Victory Schools Inc., with a contract to run an additional school. He says "the jury is still out" on Edison and has proposed slashing the bonuses paid to the company as part of its contract to run 20 of Philadelphia's lowest-performing schools.

The audience -- like Philadelphia itself -- seems torn between hope and skepticism. Bernard Johnson, who runs a nonprofit group called Healthy Families, calls the changes steps in the right direction but says "we are not anywhere close to where we need to be." School violence is still at an unacceptable level, he says, and more must be done to help disadvantaged minority students. He awards the new superintendent a token B, compared with a D for the previous administration.

According to Eva Gold, who is conducting a study of Philadelphia school revisions for Research for Action, a local think tank, many parents have adopted a "wait-and-see attitude" about Vallas. The new superintendent has shown that he is "good at reaching out to people." But questions have been raised about how long he will stay on the job and whether the latest round of school shake-ups is any different from past failures and disappointments.

sitting in his cluttered office, his long legs tucked up under his chin, Vallas exudes a sense of can-do optimism. After a turbulent five years in Chicago -- during which he eliminated huge budget deficits, ended the system of automatic student promotion and built 76 new schools -- he believes he knows what needs to be done to fix a broken school system. And he wants to do it all at once.

The vision, says Vallas, is "the easy part." The difficult part is doing it.

At the top of his to-do list is stabilizing the Philadelphia school district's chronically unstable finances, which he describes as the essential precondition for all other reforms. With the money he has saved from downsizing the district's headquarters, eliminating hundreds of nonessential positions and renegotiating purchase contracts, he has hired hundreds of new teachers and renovated some of the most decrepit schools in the district.

Step two is the improvement of academic standards through the introduction of a standardized curriculum, after-school programs and a more rigorous testing system. Initial data suggest that he has enjoyed some success. During his first year on the job, the percentage of Philadelphia students performing at or above the national average increased by 2.6 percent in reading, 7.1 percent in language arts and 9.2 percent in math. The restructured city schools showed significantly higher gains than the Edison schools.

Reports from "the battlefront" are also encouraging. Eileen Spagnola, principal of the Philip Kearney elementary school in central Philadelphia, says that 35 percent of her students are in the extended-day program initiated by Vallas. The 80-year-old school has been renovated and now has brighter lights, new bathrooms, new floors and a fresh coat of paint. She has a sense that "someone is listening" in the head office.

Vallas "recognizes how difficult it is to run a high school and gives us the resources we need to deal with difficult students," said Jose Lebrun, principal of the Thomas Edison High School in heavily Hispanic eastern Philadelphia. "He understands that you cannot teach children in the absence of a safe and secure environment."

Supporters worry that Vallas, who has a history of heart problems, is driving himself into the ground. In Philadelphia, as in Chicago, he is constantly on the move, visiting schools, handing out his cell phone number to students and teachers alike, and jotting down ideas in little green notebooks.

"He runs at a speed that very few people do, which is one of the ingredients of his success," said Gery Chico, who saw Vallas in action in Chicago as president of the city school board. "But I want him to take care of himself."