Hornbeck's Reform Plan Under Siege in Phila.

By Mark Walsh

Philadelphia schools Superintendent David W. Hornbeck is fighting an uphill battle for a comprehensive education-reform plan that lately has run into new obstacles almost weekly.

In the past month alone, one of the city's two daily newspapers gave his efforts an F, a court-appointed desegregation-monitoring committee rejected a critical element of his reform blueprint, and city politicians said they could find no additional money for the plan.

"We've sort of gotten ourselves tied up in knots in this city," said Gail Tomlinson, the executive director of the Citizens Committee for Public Education in...