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for more than 40 years. After leaving the Philadelphia schools I went on to Trenton, NJ, to be superintendent for eight years, than came back to Philadelphia to teach educational leadership at the University of Pennsylvania. My heart and my commitment to improving urban public schools have always been centered in Philadelphia. I came here in 1970 to be part of what was then the most significant urban school reform effort in the country. Mark Shedd was the pacesetting superintendent and former mayor, Richardson Dilworth, led a school board committed to experimentation. The recently authorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provided substantial “alternative program ” funding. Since then I’ve seen the School District go through all sorts of transformations, from patronage mill to instrument for desegregation. For the past 20 years I’ve observed a succession of superintendent “saviors ” imported from other parts of the U.S. come to Philadelphia with the latest recipe for salvation. And now I am watching the sell-off of what remains of the District to charter school and for-profit hustlers who claim to have discovered the grail of urban school improvement. Last Spring the District was caught-up in a contentious battle over proposed school closings, but that battle diverted energy from the larger question – is Philadelphia headed in a direction that makes sense, one that will ensure that children are better served than they have been? Philadelphia is operating in a federal policy environment that dates back to the Clinton and then Bush administrations. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), passed by Congress in 2001, stipulated performance standards for all public schools and a set of sanctions fo