Pickett+Middle+School,+Philadelphia

'turned around' by Mastery Charter Schools in 2007. $1 million was used to fix up the building and in the first year of turnaround, according to Mass Insight report, seventh test scores shot up from 7% in English in 2007 to 54% in 2008, while math went from 9% in 2007 to 52% in 2008. But we don't know much about those new 7th graders since we don't know what their 6th grade scores were since they were all new to the school that first turnaround year.

More instructive is how the eighth graders did in the first turnaround year since they were, at least in theory, the 7th graders who had gotten 7% English and 9% math the year before. Those 8th graders did improve to 48% for English in 2008 and 44% in math in 2008. There was sizable attrition from the 7th graders in 2007 to the 8th graders in 2008. There were 122 7th graders in 2007 but only 98 8th graders in 2008. Also, we can't be sure that they didn't lose more than just the 24 students (which is 20%) They could have lost more and replaced them with other, higher performing, students.

Pennsylvania web data system is awful.

State data at http://paayp.emetric.net/School/Overview/c51/4/7961

For 2010-2011 school year 7th grade scores are 44% in reading and 67% in math.

In this article http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/02/22/mastery-charter-restarts-philadelphias-struggling-smedley-pub/

they are accused of excessive test prep and with booting low performing kids. One statistic on their report card that supports this is their 8th grade science grade which was just 16% in 2011 vs. 58% for the state.