Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse.
Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse met Tuesday with acting state Secretary of Education Carolyn Dumaresq, having what the mayor described as a “positive and productive” two-hour conversation with the secretary and two Department of Education consultants working closely on the state recovery plan for the Harrisburg School District.
Karl Singleton, the mayor’s senior advisor for education and youth, also attended the meeting.
According to the mayor, during the meeting Dumaresq and her consultants went “line by line” through the new performance standards in Veno’s recovery plan. Papenfuse had previously critiqued those standards as having lowered the bar from the original plan’s benchmarks. He said he still stands by that judgment after Tuesday’s meeting, though he also said the conversation had an overall “positive” tone and that he believed it was a very important first step in an ongoing discussion about the district. Papenfuse also expressed his appreciation for the meeting, saying the secretary was “very generous with her time.”
The modified academic benchmarks in Veno’s amended plan, made public at a school board meeting in late April, take their lead from a new state system of “school performance profiles,” which were adopted in the fall and provide a more in-depth look at the academic quality of Pennsylvania schools and districts.
On Thursday, Papenfuse said he had a “philosophical disagreement” with the new measures, which rely on assessments of annual growth in addition to students’ raw test scores. Harrisburg schools, though they typically score poorly on standardized tests, score better on the growth measures. The district’s overall growth score in mathematics, for example, is reported as 100 percent on its performance profile, meaning district students, on average, are making or exceeding a year’s worth of progress in one year of schooling.
The mayor expressed doubts about the merits of the growth measures in assessing the quality of Harrisburg’s schools, saying that “improvement is not the same as success.”
Papenfuse also said he still has questions about what will happen to the district if it doesn’t meet the benchmarks in the amended plan. The original plan explained that, if district schools didn’t meet the academic targets laid out through 2016, Veno and the state would be authorized to “take the necessary steps to transfer District-educated students to schools under external management.”
The amended plan appears to incorporate this language. But, Papenfuse said, when he asked Dumaresq about the consequences of missing Veno’s benchmarks, she told him she wasn’t sure. The mayor said he was “very surprised” she did not have an answer, though he did say she promised to provide one soon. Repeated inquiries last week by TheBurg to the Department of Education’s press office and to Veno about this same question have not received replies.
On April 3, following a private February meeting with Veno, state Sen. Rob Teplitz and state Rep. Patty Kim, Papenfuse had publicly called for Veno’s resignation. He remains committed to this request, he said Thursday, saying he believes Harrisburg needs a “new recovery officer with expertise in urban education reform.” As of this writing, Veno had not responded to calls.
This story has been updated with an additional quote from Papenfuse about school assessments.
