We are a diverse group of parents and community members in the Philadelphia School District who are deeply troubled by the District’s rushed and reckless implementation of the new high school selection process.  The lack of transparency from the District during the implementation of this new process and the frustration from impacted parents has been well documented.  When the changes were announced, more than 2,100 people signed a petition (1) condemning the way changes were hurried through without prior planning, notice, or community feedback, and (2) expressing concern that the process would not serve the best interests of the children of Philadelphia. These concerns were shared by City leaders.  Unfortunately, those concerns have proven to be well-founded.

Many impacted parents continue to feel exasperated by the lack of inclusion and lack of accountability from the District.  Superintendent Hite announced that he was leaving the District just days before the new changes were communicated, and then, effectively extricated himself by announcing his new out-of-town CEO job a mere hours before the new school selection results were posted.  So with no one in the District left to account for the fallout, we write this Open Letter to the next Superintendent with hope that the next administration will work more collaboratively with families to meaningfully improve educational opportunities for all students.

Because the changes to the high school selection process were so disruptive to the families of current 8th graders, we want the new Superintendent to be fully aware of the problems and understand how involvement by and feedback from parents and community groups can be part of the solution.  And while there were many inexcusable problems in the execution of the new selection process (such as making students select a maximum of five schools before knowing their writing sample scores), this letter focuses on the process itself and asks the next Superintendent not to fix the current process, but rather, to repeal and replace it in its entirety.

First, we reject the premise that criteria-based high schools should be the primary focus of the District’s efforts to combat inequity.  As parents, we recognize the lack of equity in the Philadelphia public schools, and we agree with the District that change is desperately needed.  However, inequity does not begin in 9th grade.  Considering that the District's own research identified widespread inequities in its K-8 schools, the decision to focus its equity initiative on the selection process for criteria-based high schools misses the mark and ignores the root cause of the District-wide disparate student outcomes.  We are accordingly concerned that the District is just manipulating statistics without addressing underlying issues.  Or put differently, instead of doing the hard work to fix what is broken, the District seems to be trying to proclaim “equity” by breaking what is working.  Indeed, we have no doubt that there are many very talented children throughout the District who could successfully apply for, and be admitted to, the most selective high schools if our K-8 schools were better resourced to identify and prepare them.  We urge the next Superintendent to focus on bridging the achievement gap at the K-8 level, instead of using smoke and mirror tactics to force superficial and highly misleading changes at the high schools level.  

Second, we ask the District to cancel the use of random-choice lotteries for “criteria-based” schools because they undermine the missions of these schools and the educational goals of the students who attend them.  The District’s criteria based high schools have largely been designed to accommodate students with particular academic or creative abilities.  In the schools’ own words:

• Carver “seeks students who have interests in the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, technology, and medicine”; 
• GAMP promotes “musical excellence”;
• CAPA promises an “arts based curriculum”; 
• Science Leadership Academy offers a “project-based environment” with a “commitment to inquiry-based science”; 
• Saul emphasizes “modern environmental and agricultural challenges”;
• Parkway Center City collaborates with Community College of Philadelphia for students interested in “graduat[ing] in 4 years with both a High School Diploma and a College Associate’s Degree”;
• Hill-Freedman promotes “international mindedness”;
• Masterman is designed for “advanced intellectual study” for  “academically talented students.”

Randomly assigning students to these schools by lottery risks undercutting students’ success by misplacing skill sets into the wrong specialized curricula. While the intent of the lotteries was supposedly to prevent bias by “avoiding human judgment,” individual judgment and discretion is fundamental to these schools’ missions.   

Third, the new process undermines parents and disallows our abilities to make practical decisions specific to our own children.  For example, parents living in South Philadelphia might prefer Palumbo, and parents living in North Philadelphia might prefer Central, because the alternative would place their child on public transit for an additional 90 mins each day.  Similarly, families may have practical reasons to try to keep siblings together in the same school.  For these reasons, the lotteries unfairly benefit centrally located students and families with private transportation options, who can apply to more schools with less risk of a transportation burden.  And because the new selection process lacks both reasonable accommodations and an appeals process, random selection will also undoubtedly create hardships for families with special needs students with unique educational challenges and requirements.  There are, of course, numerous other legitimate reasons why children might have individualized needs, but lotteries deny parents the opportunity to make sensible decisions.

Fourth, the new system is unfair to the students already enrolled in criteria-based middle schools.  Middle schools, such as Carver, SLA Beeber, GAMP, Hill-Freedman, and Masterman, have long advertised themselves as gateways to the associated high school.  Students at these middle schools left the comfort of their neighborhoods to study rigorous, specialized curricula with an understanding that, if they had good attendance and earned good grades, they could attend the corresponding high school.  Many traveled more than 90 minutes each way on public transit and became invested in their schools’ communities.  To make these students enter a lottery to stay at their own school disregards and disrespects the commitment they have already made.   

Fifth, the District should cancel the writing test.  By replacing standardized PSSA testing with a standardized writing sample, the District has unfairly advantaged students who excel at language over those who excel at STEM; native English speakers over ESL learners; and normative learners over special needs students.  Moreover, the designers expressly warned that the software’s scoring system does not understand nuance or recognize content and cannot understand the difference between essays about “social studies…, science, language arts, art, or calculus,” making it particularly inappropriate for criteria-based school placement. 

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In summary, the problems with the new high school selection process are too systemic to merely tweak or correct.  We believe that the only solution is to scrap both the lotteries and the writing samples in favor of a more comprehensive, district-wide approach to building equity that starts with the younger grades. In our view, the new school selection process failed, because instead of concentrating on what is best for the actual students, the District only focused on macro-level data and how to portray the District as equitable from a purely statistical (as opposed to personal) perspective.  But children are more than just statistics.  Artificially manipulating the statistical distribution of students through random choice lotteries may help improve the images of the District administrators, but it does not serve the best interest of the students of Philadelphia.

Moreover, we uniformly believe that many of the flaws in the new process could have been avoided, and can be improved going forward, if the District is willing to meaningfully engage with families prior to making disruptive changes.  Indeed, a federal judge in Virginia recently struck down Fairfax County’s high school selection process as unconstitutional, in part because “the process was rushed, not transparent, and more concerned with simply doing something … than with public engagement.”  If the next Superintendent would simply honor the District’s stated commitment to be “dedicated to creating and supporting partnerships among schools, families, and communities,”  we have no doubt that meaningful change is achievable.