A major school district in Philadelphia has been taken over, handed out and chopped up. The for-profit Edison schools opened in Philadelphia, just as Dallas had asked them to leave for a lack of measurable improvement in schools. Linda Darling-Hammond frames this article around what happened in Philadelphia because she feels that in some ways it…

On Friday, June 20, 2003, the "New York Times" reported that, "This was the year that school reform began in Philadelphia. The state has taken over the school system, which had been failing for years and brought in seven outside managers to run 45 of the lowest performing elementary and middle schools." In fact, this was the…

The author uses the "lifecourse" of one model--the community partnership plan--as a lens into school reform in Philadelphia, focusing particularly on the politics of school reform and Philadelphians' responses to privatization. The aim of the article is to show that education reform is not about the orderly implementation of a particular…