Sadie Alexander’s daughter is ‘heartbroken’ at the state of the Philly school named for her mother

Sadie T.M. Alexander was a trailblazer — the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in economics, and the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and to pass the Pennsylvania bar. She sat on a U.S. Civil Rights commission at President Harry S. Truman’s invitation.

And in 2001, she became the namesake of a new school: the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School, a public school in West Philadelphia. The family was proud to have their relative’s legacy associated with the mission of what came to be known as Penn Alexander: providing a rich education at a Philadelphia neighborhood public school.

But a daughter of Sadie T.M. Alexander is now “heartbroken” at the state of the school, she said. It’s not because of academics, said Rae Minter-Alexander — the school has won two National Blue Ribbons from the U.S. Department of Education and boasts a robust catalog of offerings. (Penn gives the school an extra $1,330 per student.)

Instead, it’s the school’s demographics: After opening in 2002 with a student body that was 57% Black, today just 13% of students are Black. Currently, half of Penn Alexander students come from economically disadvantaged families; districtwide, that figure is 72%.

“My mother was a civil rights advocate, sat on the first civil rights committee that President Truman put together, and fought for the lives and the ability of people who were marginalized to have access to the larger frills of society,” said Alexander-Minter. Her mother would not approve of the relative lack of access to Penn Alexander for Black students and other marginalized groups, she said.

“It’s enough to break my heart,” Alexander-Minter said. “It isn’t what my mother what would want. It isn’t what the family wants.”

Penn Alexander, at 42nd and Spruce, is a neighborhood school — the children who attend are dictated by who lives inside the “catchment,” or attendance zone.

And when the school was envisioned in the 1990s as a way to revitalize the neighborhood surrounding Penn, to entice faculty and staff to live close to their place of employment, officials thought carefully about how to draw those boundaries.

Some West Philadelphia residents “feared that the lines would be drawn to maximize the potential for white students at the expense of minority students,” a 2001 Daily News story said. But the district, Penn, and community groups worked together at the time to set the boundaries in a way that attempted to ease crowding but not disrupt diversity at nearby schools. (The catchment is bound by Sansom Street to the north, 40th Street to Woodlawn to 42nd to the east, and 46th to Pine and 47th to the west. The south border from Baltimore Avenue to 42nd Street zigzags around St. Joseph’s University City campus.)

But over the years, the neighborhood has changed, in large part because of the Penn Alexander effect. People who have the means to send their children to one of the city’s best schools pay a premium to buy there. House prices tripled in the catchment between 1998 and 2011, rising by $100,000 or more. (By way of comparison, they doubled in University City as a whole during that time.)

Demand for Penn Alexander is so high that for years, parents pitched tents and camped outside the school for days leading up to kindergarten registration. The district ended that practice in 2013, moving to a lottery system if there were more prospective students than seats.

Penn Alexander’s success “changed the demographics of the catchment area from which the young people were to be selected because of — really I hate to say it — unintentional redlining,” Alexander-Minter said.

These days the school makeup is 45% white, 27% Asian, 13% Black, 10% multiracial, and 5% Latino, in a district that is 45% Black, 26% Latino, 15% white, 10% Asian and 4% multiracial.

Alexander-Minter said both Penn and the school district knew, or should have known, that creating Penn Alexander would shift the neighborhood’s demographics, making it more white and affluent with fewer Black and working-class families, and that it’s incumbent on officials within both institutions to fix that.

» READ MORE: Penn to invest nearly $5M over 5 years in another West Philly school

Penn Alexander isn’t the only Philadelphia school the university supports; it has provided in- and after-school programming at a number of West Philadelphia schools for years. And in 2022, officials announced a partnership similar to Penn Alexander’s with the Henry C. Lea Elementary, at 47th and Locust.

The aim of the $816,500 annual deal is to improve instruction and the behavioral climate at Lea, and to eventually replicate and scale up the model.

Lea’s demographics are more representative of the city and district: 65% of its students are Black, 13% white, 12% Asian and 6% Latino and 5% multiracial. Seventy-four percent of its students come from economically disadvantaged families.

When the Lea partnership was announced, there was some pushback from parents and community members worried about gentrification. Some advocates have long called for Penn, which as a nonprofit does not pay taxes, to support the district as a whole, by contributing payment in lieu of taxes (PILOTS). Penn has not embraced that position, though in 2020, it did pledge $100 million over 10 years to remediate environmental problems school systemwide.

» READ MORE: Penn to donate $100 million to Philadelphia School District to help with asbestos, lead abatement

Penn and district officials pledged to take steps to make sure that Lea maintains its diversity. In school board documents, the goal for the Lea partnership includes “enhancing appreciation for racial, ethnic, economic, and other forms of diversity among students, teachers and staff.”

Moira Baylson, a Penn spokesperson, underscored the Lea commitment and districtwide environmental spending.

“Penn is committed to enriching our neighborhood and improving the educational outcomes of children in Philadelphia through collaborations with the school district that include financial support, partnership schools, and educational programs that reach over 200 schools city-wide,” Baylson said.

Alexander-Minter, who has spoken at school graduations and proudly associated with Penn Alexander in the past, began to voice her concerns to officials this year.

In the winter, she traveled to Philadelphia from her home in New York for a meeting with school and district officials, who canceled the meeting when Alexander-Minter told them she was bringing a lawyer and other representatives.

Monique Braxton, a district spokesperson, said officials deeply respect the legacy and contributions of Alexander-Minter’s parents, and that they remain “committed to centering the needs of all of our students and providing them with equal access to a high-quality education wherever they live.”

As the school system “continues to evolve in our work toward equity, we will do so in partnership with city departments, universities, and advocacy organizations,” Braxton said.

She said the issues Alexander-Minter raises will be addressed as part of ongoing work to create a facilities master plan and to “provide welcoming and supportive schools and enriching and well-rounded school experiences.”

Still, the meeting has not been rescheduled.

Alexander-Minter remains displeased by the district’s cancellation but also still hopes to work with the district. She believes the catchment should be broadened to admit a more demographically representative student body. Or, she added, the district could agree to offer a “set aside” program to admit Black students from outside the catchment area.

“I will not allow my mother’s name to be sullied by the mired situation now present at the Penn Alexander School,” Alexander-Minter wrote in a February letter to district and university officials. “Having my mother’s name, and, by extension, my father’s name attached to a segregated school is abhorrent and inconsistent with the history of my parents and their forbearers.”

Sadie T.M. Alexander worked with her law-partner husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, to fight for Black people to have access to hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters in Philadelphia and to desegregate schools in the Pennsylvania suburbs in the 1930s.

The lawyers had experienced racial discrimination themselves at Penn because Black students were not allowed to eat in the university dining hall. “My mother was able to bring lunch each day for them to eat on the steps of Houston Hall,” Alexander-Minter said.

While Penn Alexander is whiter and wealthier than the city average, it won its two federal Blue Ribbons for closing achievement gaps between Black and white students. At the same time, it is more ethnically diverse than many other Philadelphia public schools, some of which are 99% Black.

And though Alexander-Minter thinks her mother would lament the school’s current situation, the school still fully embraces its namesake: A 6-foot-high portrait of Alexander occupies a wall in the building’s atrium. Students learn about Alexander’s legacy and celebrate her birthday in January.

Inquirer staff writer Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.