District race for special admission schools is like a high school ‘Hunger Games’

In 2019, I wrote about the disingenuous Find Your Fit campaign and the School District of Philadelphia’s failure to address the city’s vast educational inequalities. Five years later, not much has changed. District leadership continues to hide behind catchy branding, neglect real problems, and fail its students.

The Find Your Fit campaign is back. On Sept. 13, the annual race for special admission schools began, with eighth graders fighting to escape their struggling neighborhood schools for one of the coveted spots.

For context, special admission schools were originally introduced in Philadelphia in the 1960s to encourage voluntary desegregation by drawing families to specialized schools. What was once a well-intentioned desegregation tool is now marketed as an exciting school choice system — a far cry from the equitable access to education promised by Brown v. Board of Education.

Instead, for generations, the selection process has upheld a chasm between traditional neighborhood and special admission schools. Endorsing a system that intentionally bifurcates students is a clear violation of the law of the land. Since 1954, the Brown ruling has affirmed that education must be “made available to all on equal terms.” These two Philadelphia school types are on anything but equal terms.

The school district continues to reward the privileged while punishing the vulnerable.

While the district busies itself with rebranding, the inequalities between schools like Julia R. Masterman and Strawberry Mansion remain glaring.

Masterman has a national reputation for excellence, boasting a 99% graduation rate and 89% college matriculation rate. These results are hardly surprising since the school’s selection criteria require students to have already scored in the 80th percentile on state assessments. The district proudly celebrates its success as a beacon of Philadelphia schools.

Meanwhile, Strawberry Mansion, just two miles from Masterman, has garnered national attention, but not the type that attracts families. Just over a decade ago, ABC journalist Diane Sawyer visited Strawberry Mansion with a film crew to investigate what had been designated one of the nation’s most dangerous schools.

Indeed, there has been progress worth noting. Violence and discipline have been on the decline in Philadelphia schools. After years of ramping up the school-to-prison pipeline — where harsh disciplinary measures such as suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions push students into the criminal justice system — the district has facilitated a significant decline. This shift can be attributed to Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel’s Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program, which redirects students to social services rather than punitive measures. However, while violence and disciplinary issues have subsided, academic performance remains a concern.

For Strawberry Mansion, this has meant a modest uptick in the graduation rate to 66% and college matriculation to 19% in 2023. These figures still lag behind district and national averages and markedly behind Masterman’s results. And even though school violence has decreased, Strawberry Mansion students continue to struggle in the face of relentless neighborhood violence.

Racial inequities are just as stark as the academic ones. At Strawberry Mansion, 92% of students identify as Black, 3% Hispanic, and 2% white. The racial makeup of Masterman is 40% white, 27% Asian, 17% Black, and 8% Hispanic. In fact, the Black student population at Masterman has dropped by 26% over the last decade. Even with calls for a more equitable system, the district offers little more than lip service to equity.

The gap between Masterman and Strawberry Mansion is representative of other special admission and neighborhood schools, even when students share the same building.

» READ MORE: End the Philly School District’s unfortunate history of prioritizing the privileged | Opinion

In 2019, my piece criticized the chaotic relocation of Science Leadership Academy, a special admission school, to the neighborhood school, Benjamin Franklin High. Asbestos, dust, and noise displaced over 1,000 students for five months. The district’s own inspector general later admitted to a series of “critical missteps” that were largely ignored as they unfolded and led to the hospitalization of adults and children, among other incidents.

Now that students cohabitate in the same building, disparities in racial makeup and academic outcomes are impossible to ignore. To add insult to injury, Science Leadership Academy and Ben Franklin students are physically divided by a wall of glass at lunch, so the disparities are on full display.

Separating students by educational resources is one thing, but not allowing them to eat lunch together hearkens back to the antebellum era.

» READ MORE: The Ben Franklin and SLA asbestos crisis is a symptom of a bigger disease | Opinion

Here’s what the School District of Philadelphia has accomplished: more rebranding. Special admission schools are now “criteria-based,” and neighborhood schools are “catchment.” New name, same problems. Just like promoting Find Your Fit, relabeling schools is far easier than repairing and reforming crumbling and faltering institutions. Branding work, after all, is so much easier.

This spring, students, often ones with greater resources, will be rewarded with acceptances to enriching criteria-based schools. The rejected and remaining students, disproportionately with greater needs, will be funneled into struggling catchment schools.

The district claims its new processes will “better account for student preference.” But for students and families, this is no relief. Even the majority of students, over 54%, want the selection process removed altogether.

Officials in other cities are not comfortable with this level of failure. In Chicago, leaders are courageous enough to take on real challenges. Earlier this year, the Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution to reduce the city’s reliance on school choice, which forces families to compete for resources like Philadelphia’s.

While there is much work to do, Chicago’s leaders have at least begun to acknowledge that such systems harm neighborhood schools, particularly in communities that racist policies and disinvestment have long neglected. They’ve committed to prioritizing neighborhood schools, ensuring they are fully resourced, and addressing the inequities that continue to harm students of color and low-income families. Acknowledgment and action are far more palatable than complacency and catchphrases.

While Chicago begins dismantling the inequitable system, Philadelphia is doubling down on its broken model, forcing students into a competition they can’t win.

The school district continues to reward the privileged while punishing the vulnerable.

The Find Your Fit campaign is an attempt to gloss over this fundamental failure. It’s abhorrent that we still treat quality education as something that must be earned or competed for when it is a civil right that should be afforded to every child in this city.

The district’s leaders should stop pretending that rebranding is the same as progress and start investing in the neighborhood schools they’ve neglected for so long. We should applaud initiatives like former Mayor Jim Kenney’s pre-K expansion and the future ambitions of current Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s year-round school. But every accomplishment will be tainted until the very structure of separate and unequal schools is addressed. No child in this city should be forced to leave their neighborhood just to get a decent education.

Philadelphia deserves leaders who don’t hide behind slogans. Until we have them, let’s at least call this what it is: The Hunger Games.

AJ Ernst worked as a teacher and administrator in Philadelphia for 13 years and has his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where he studied school discipline.