School Segregation in Philly
By: Asmaa Hussein
School segregation in Philadelphia is getting worse by the second. African-Americans and other children of color lack access to fair educational opportunities. The district keeps them from attaining living-wage jobs and keeps them in poverty. Most public schools in the district don’t offer students of color a chance at a successful life. The school district is setting them up for failure.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Philadelphia School District leaders worsened the isolation between African American and Caucasian students through the locations they chose to build the schools and how they assigned the teachers. This was the start of the segregation problem in Philadelphia schools. “Philly is a diverse city, and it's also a city of diverse neighborhoods, but most people live in neighborhoods with people that, for the most part, look like them,” said Ms. Moore-Almond, a previous district student and current E&S teacher. Another factor of the segregation is the powerful Catholic school system, which historically enrolled almost half of the city’s white students. In contrast, almost all African-Americans go to public schools.
This issue of school segregation in Philadelphia is only affecting a certain type of person. Philadelphia’s wealthy, mostly white students, attend the best schools and receive the best education that can be provided, while the poor students, who are mostly African-Americans or people of color, go to weaker, less funded schools that are set up to fail. The District continues to contend with an academic achievement gap between African-Americans, at a lower percentage, and white students, at a higher percentage. The School District continues to not do anything about this issue and in order for change to happen, we need them to do something. All of our children deserve a high-quality education, not just some of them.
People in Philadelphia have started to recognize this problem and have called for a state of emergency. In order to solve this problem, the district needs to strengthen its curriculum and efforts to provide environments that affirm cultural identities, and promote better academic outcomes and readiness beyond graduation. New members, like Joyce Wilkerson and Wayne Walker, were recently picked for the Philadelphia School Board, that understand this crisis and are committed to fixing it. The district has released a plan in July that outlined how stakeholders can improve high schools. But so far, we haven’t seen much of a change.
This is more than just an issue; this has turned into an emergency. If we don’t do anything now, the fate of our children’s educational future will be affected by this outcome. We must demand for equal access to high-quality education for all our children. We must demand fair treatment amongst all children, including children living in hellish conditions that make student achievement impossible.