Phila. school officials vote to settle desegregation suit

Philadelphia school officials voted yesterday to settle a 40-year-old school desegregation suit that could end court supervision over the city's public schools.

The School Reform Commission unanimously voted to settle the case by pledging to improve educational opportunities to schools that are "racially isolated" by adding programs, equipment and better teachers.

"If these commitments are carried out with fidelity, they should go a long way toward aligning resources with needs in Philadelphia schools and reducing the academic achievement disparities between minority and white students in the district," Michael Churchill, chief counsel of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia.

Churchill represented ASPIRA, a community group that later joined the lawsuit after the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission filed a complaint against the district in 1970 in an effort to end what they called de facto segregation.

Superintendent Arlene Ackerman beamed after the vote and later called the issues of equity in education "the new civil rights issue" for this era.

The consent agreement approved yesterday must be signed by Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith-Ribner, who has set a hearing on the case next Monday.

When the case began, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission sought to end racial disparities in schools by busing in students to achieve a more balanced racial composition. But over time, the district became only 13 percent white and the commission conceded that ending the physical segregation in most schools through busing was impossible.

The commission and ASPIRA have been monitoring school inequities since the lawsuit was filed and would periodically go before the court to request changes in the way the district's resources were allocated.

The district pledged yesterday in a consent agreement - which cites a more than 20 percent achievement gap between white students and black and Latino students - to ensure that students in "racially isolated schools" are given the same educational opportunities as students in mostly white schools, Michael Hardiman, chief counsel of the Human Relations Commission, said yesterday.

The agreement says the district will change how it staffs and provides resources to the system's lowest performing schools, mostly in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.

A major change would allow low-performing schools to fill teacher vacancies through "full-site selection" by fiscal year 2010-2011. That process enables a panel consisting of the principal, teachers and parents to interview and hire their own teachers.

Site selection has been a sticking point in ongoing contract negotiations with the city's teachers union.

Under the existing contract, which expires Aug. 31, half the district's teachers are hired through site selection. The other half are hired based on seniority, which education advocates say has led to the best teachers' choosing schools with the least problems.

Yesterday, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said that the union's lawyers would review the agreement.

Jordan could not say whether the PFT would file any legal action at next Monday's hearing on the consent agreement. But he said that hiring, teacher pay and other measures reached in the agreement must be negotiated in contract talks, not imposed by court order.

Ackerman seemed especially pleased that the agreement would give her "leverage" in contract talks and with implementing her five-year strategic plan known as Imagine 2014, which called for measures similar to the agreement.

"We don't have another 20 years to negotiate doing the right thing for children," who have been "systematically locked out of opportunities for a quality education," Ackerman said. "Now I can [negotiate] with leverage. It's a great place to be."

But Jordan said that the union has called for smaller class sizes, more counselors and other goals outlined in the superintendent's plan for years.

Some provisions in yesterday's agreement are:

* Teacher evaluations with professional developments beginning in the 2009-10 school year.

* Reducing "resource gaps" in low-performing schools by paying teachers more money to work in low-performing schools beginning in 2010-2011.

* Reducing resource gaps at low performing schools by comparing actual teacher costs in school budgets. *