Official tries to reform schools

Acting Vice Provost for University Life Valerie Swain-Cade McCoullum will serve on a panel next week to produce a reform blueprint for Philadelphia's public schools and to set up a new standard for urban education nationwide. McCoullum, who was appointed this month to serve on the panel by Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith, will work with six other nationally distinguished experts on public education. Because she has tried to make her life's work "the improvement of urban eduction," McCoullum said she feels "like someone has given me one of the biggest gifts of my life." Although the agenda for the first panel meeting on April 8 has yet to be set, McCoullum said she hopes to discuss plans to make the resources in all Philadelphia public schools "equitable." McCoullum added that as a child growing up in the Germantown section of the city, she had first-hand experience with an uneven distribution of resources at public schools. The all-black Emlen Elementary School in Germantown where McCoullum started kindergarten in 1957 had less athletic and laboratory equipment than the almost all-white Masterman Program for Gifted and Talented Students at 17th and Spring Garden streets, which she attended as an adolescent. "What was devastating to me was the differential facilities and what I perceived as disparate programming," McCoullum said. Although she said she was "able to flourish" at Masterman because of the quality of the resources, McCoullum said she "always felt nurtured by the all-black teachers" at Emlen. Despite the fact that McCoullum was one of the only people from her neighborhood in her generation to go on to college, she said all of her peers had "the potential to succeed." "I know how kids start -- they all have the potential to not only succeed, but to flourish," she said. "We must do this right for the kids [in today's urban public schools.]" University spokesperson Barbara Beck said that McCoullum -- the only Philadelphian to serve on the panel -- was chosen because she is an "exemplary leader" who is "not like any other administrator at the University of Pennsylvania that you'll ever meet." "She'll make your head spin," Beck said. "She empowers people to do their job." Some of the other panelists include Alvarado Anthony, a former chancellor of New York public schools, James Dixon, an education expert from St. Louis, and Teresa Rosegrant, an associate professor from George Mason University.