by Tom MacDonald, WHYY News

A new report gives high marks to schools managed by for-profit companies in Philadelphia, and much lower grades to schools run by non-profit agencies.  WHYY’s Tom MacDonald reports.

As part of a school district reform effort in 2002, two for-profit management companies took over 25 of the worst performing Philadelphia public schools and 16 schools were given to non-profit entities.  Professor Paul Peterson of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government says students in the schools run by for-profit companies did much better on standardized tests.

Peterson: “For-profit providers kids are learning probably 60 percent of a years worth of learning more every year so that’s like more than a half a years worth of learning every year, and the negative effects of the non-profits are also very large, in that range.”

Professor Peterson says the difference amounts to a one-year gap between the for-profits and the non-profits, with the students of the district schools falling in-between on standardized tests.  He says students at schools run by for-profit companies did better than students at district-managed schools in math, and outscored their peers in schools run by non-profit agencies in both math and science.

Peterson: “The hope was by giving them to private providers they would do better, and it actually turned out that way over the last six years that was going on but when assigned to the non-profits, it had the opposite effect.”

He says that may be because the for-profits had experience running schools, while the non-profits didn’t.

Peterson: “I think the private providers who were the for-profits were more experienced, they had been running schools in the past, the non-profits were local institutions, but they hadn’t had a lot of experience running schools.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman says the school district will hold all agencies managing its schools accountable to their performance-based contracts.

More information

Use this link for a .pdf version of the full study.

According to the Inquirer coverage of this story, “the report was partially funded by Edison Schools Inc., one of five management firms in Philadelphia.”

Past news about studies comparing for-profit to non-profit school management

Washington Post: Study Disputes Philadelphia School Changes (February 2, 2007)
“Philadelphia students who attended public schools managed by private operators fared no better academically than other students over the past four years, an analysis by Rand Corp. and Research for Action shows.”

Your Feedback Wanted

This is where we could use a little crowdsourcing help.  Take a look at the report using the link above and give us your take on the results of this study.  We’ve now seen studies that support both sides of the debate over the effect of for-profit management of public schools.  Why do you think these studies come to such wildly different conclusions?  Does the truth lie in the middle?

Also, do you have kids at a public school run by a for-profit company?  What has your experience with the school been?  Does it appear to be functioning well and giving your child the education he or she needs for the future?  Of course, such responses are not statistical measures of the success of these schools but they provide interesting examples that helps give everyone a more complete picture of what’s going on.

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