Each of the district's 289 schools soon will get marks for such things as school safety, student satisfaction and graduation rate. That's beyond the academic standards set by the state.

"We want to give parents and the community a broader view of schools and their performance," Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said yesterday, as the plan was laid out to the School Reform Commission and the public.

Some form of the system is used by districts in New York City, Chicago, Raleigh, N.C., and San Francisco, where Ackerman previously worked.

Ackerman, a former teacher and principal, has made focusing more on classrooms and "accountability for all adults" two key priorities since she took over the district in June.

Principals will receive the targets they must meet by the end of September. Their evaluations - and the evaluations of regional superintendents - will be tied to schools' performance on the report cards.

Schools will be graded for each target: a green light for target hit, a yellow light for a target missed but with growth, or a red light for a target missed and no improvement. Those that do well will be designated "best practices" schools and models for the district; those that perform poorly will receive extra support.

But, Ackerman said, "at some point, if a principal and a school [do not] meet their performance index, there has to be some kind of intervention."

The district will be looking at four areas - student achievement, things such as test scores and promotion rate; school operations, areas such as violent incidents and number of teacher vacancies filled; "constituent satisfaction," where teachers', parents' and students' satisfaction as conveyed through regular surveys will count; and a school-selected indicator, something each principal can choose, such as the percentage of students who pass the eighth-grade algebra exam or participate in the arts.

Schools can also receive extra credit for exceptional performance, and will get periodic check-ins and instructional help from regional staff.

Ackerman said the report card would give a fuller picture of what was going on inside schools than the public had now. Report cards will be made available to the public online, officials said.

Now, schools are deemed either passing or failing based solely on state test scores. Credit is not given for progress, and schools often fail based on the performance of just a few students.

Ackerman also hopes to get charter schools to buy into the system, though those institutions - public schools run by private boards - control most of their own data and can choose not to release it to the district. The schools operated by outside managers are included in the report-card plan.

She realizes principals may be anxious about new layers of accountability, Ackerman said, but she wants all district personnel to have quantifiable goals.

At yesterday's School Reform Commission meeting, officials also shelved a possible change to the district's transportation policy.

This spring, staff had proposed taking free SEPTA rides away from about 7,000 students who had received free bus passes. The new policy would have meant that students must live two miles away from their school - not 1.5 miles, the current rule - in order to get the passes.

Also on the table was an attendance requirement, with only students who show up 85 percent of the time or more receiving the free rides.

Parent outcry caused the commission to hold off on a decision initially, and over the summer, the district found a way to stick to its $2.3 billion budget and still not take anyone's ride away.

Michael Masch, the district's chief business officer, said a combination of money from SEPTA, state reimbursement, and the state's decision to let Philadelphia pay it back for special-education transportation in installments rather than all at once made the math work.

Masch warned that this might not be a long-term fix - that if the number of students who use the free bus-pass program increased dramatically, the district would again be looking at a deficit.

Most of those in the audience for the commission meeting had come for a different reason. About 75 art and music teachers showed up to protest the reassignment of Tessie Varthas and Virginia Lam, the district's lead art and music coaches. Their positions were cut in June when Ackerman eliminated all coach positions, saying the job was too nebulous.

The two effectively ran the art and music programs at the school level, writing curriculum, running professional development, and hiring teachers, supporters said, and without them, teaching and learning will suffer.

Music teacher Joyce Haraway shuffles between multiple schools in any given week and called Lam "our lifeline between educational needs and teaching students."

Keanan Carter, a student cellist at the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, said Lam helped him get a new cello and bow through a private donor. She got him into a summer music program.

He wasn't sure how much Lam earned, Carter said, but "it's got to be worth giving kids like me our dreams. Please don't take that chance away."

Ackerman said that the district was "called on the carpet" for using federal money to pay for administrators such as Lam and Varthas and not teacher salaries.

Administrators will need to run those departments, Ackerman said, but the jobs have not been completely sketched out.

"No final decisions have been made about what will be done or who will be in those positions," Ackerman said.

Sandra Dungee Glenn, chair of the commission, reiterated the commission's support of art and music in schools.

"We have heard very clearly the concern that the work we're doing at the school level is supported," she said. "This is a very serious area of our children's education."