Since then, many school districts have indeed announced closures, including in the communities of and, where we live and work. More, unfortunately, are on their way.

School closure announcements can elicit the worst kind of deja vu. These feelings are well-founded. Atlanta plans to shutter schools in the south and west parts of the city, which is also where overwhelmingly live and where previous closures left several buildings vacant or underutilized for years. In Philadelphia, found that achievement gains occurred only when displaced students were moved into significantly stronger schools, while peers sent to schools of similar or lower quality did not benefit and, in some cases, saw setbacks.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Districts may have to close schools for financial or performance reasons, but they don’t need to exacerbate inequities along the way. By learning from past examples, we believe it’s possible — with thoughtful, comprehensive planning and deep and broad community engagement — for school closures to serve as a new opportunity for students, families and educators. 

The first of four steps to a more constructive, less harmful closure is about stabilization. The time between when a closure is announced and when students move out of the school can produce learning loss, staff instability and family stress. 

These in-between periods are not trivial lengths of time. Students at one Philadelphia school included in the district’s January announcement will . In other words, the students who are currently in kindergarten at this school are poised to spend their entire elementary years — through fifth-grade — in a school the district has said should close due to its low enrollment and poor facilities.Ěý

That’s a long time, especially considering students are impacted as soon as the closure is announced. found that the largest negative achievement effect occurred between the time when the closure was announced and when students actually moved to new schools. Students in schools that were being closed had scores that were lower than expected in the year of the closure: roughly in math.

To avoid this drop-off, districts can commit to maintaining through the school’s final year. They can also help reduce staff turnover by providing early clarity on placement processes, minimizing uncertainty about job security and offering retention support. 

The second step has to do with the building itself. Again, found that neighborhoods that experienced school closures led to and lower shared sense of capacity for neighbors to act together for the common good. Schools often serve as community anchors, and closing a school can make a community feel unmoored. Countering this outcome involves smart, collaborative planning to ensure buildings are invested in, not abandoned. By this measure, Philadelphia and Atlanta are off to a positive start; their closure plans include repurposing buildings for other uses, such as in Philadelphia and in Atlanta.Ěý

The third step is about student learning, particularly ensuring students leaving a closing school can attend a higher-quality alternative. This focus shifts the conversation from the non-academic factors that often drive closure decisions — like building utilization rates and the cost to repair aging facilities — and instead centers on student learning. Administrators must ask: Which local public schools could take in displaced students without reducing the quality of their education? 

This is not a quixotic exercise. Studies from multiple cities have when students are able to transfer to demonstrably stronger schools with higher achievement levels, more experienced teachers, richer course offerings and better facilities.Ěý

The fourth and final step is about the schools receiving new students. Especially with the months and, in many cases, years between when a closure is announced and when it takes place, there is no reason receiving schools should be caught flat-footed. These schools should have both academic and social-emotional support available for students, and districts should cap how many new students each school receives. The odds of giving individuals the support they need decrease with each additional student an institution takes in.

What we are calling for is a paradigm shift. District leaders need to begin shifting from announcing “we’ve decided to close schools” to “we’ve decided to close schools and for preventing harm and maximizing student opportunity at every stage.”

District leaders in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and elsewhere deserve credit for recognizing the trends and taking action. What’s important for these and other leaders to recognize, however, is that their work is just beginning. 

The head of the Philadelphia City Council Education Committee says he disagrees with parts of , kicking off what may become a fraught conflict over which schools are ultimately shuttered.

The district said Thursday that nearly 5,000 students will have their schools closed in the coming years. Along with closures, the plan includes co-locating and relocating several schools and modernizing some school buildings, shuffling where many students go to school across the city.

But Councilmember Isaiah Thomas said he would “never support” closing one of the schools on the district’s list — Conwell Middle School — and has major questions about the district’s plan for several others.

Other officials urged the district to be transparent with schools and make sure students and families are supported. A spokesperson for Mayor Cherelle Parker said she was not available to comment. And union leaders said they needed more time and more information to determine whether or not they support it.

The reactions that began to trickle out Thursday will set the stage for what will likely become months of tense discussions and negotiations over what could be a jarring transformation for Philadelphia schools. District leaders say the plan would improve academics and use resources more efficiently and .

Members of the Board of Education, who were nominated by Parker, will review the plan at next month’s board meeting. The plan must be approved by the board, although Thomas and other city officials could use their political influence to complicate the plan’s path forward, or change it.

Though school leaders have said for months that closures were coming, the timing of the news still shocked many educators and families. Whispers of a list of schools the district plans to close began to spread Tuesday and Wednesday. Meetings and protests about the plan are likely to happen early and often.

Outside of Motivation High School in West Philadelphia Thursday afternoon, students said they had learned their school was closing during a meeting in the school’s auditorium earlier in the day.

“I pray it doesn’t happen,” said Journee Tucker, 16.

The district wants Motivation to merge into Bartram High School as an honors program beginning in the 2027-28 school year. The Motivation building is slated to be repurposed as district swing space.

But Tucker said she worried that Bartram is “too chaotic.” This year, it has nearly 600 students enrolled — four times the size of Motivation.

If the plan goes through, she said her mom has already said she would attend a different high school than Bartram.

“It’s going to be a mess,” Tucker said. “I just don’t see the point.”

Councilmember wants to protect Conwell Middle School from closure

Thomas’ reaction stood out Thursday, in part because several elected officials did not say if they were for or against the plan, or comment on specifics. Others weren’t available for comment.

Thomas is an influential voice in the city’s education system, and has been a proponent of several charter schools.

Thomas said he immediately disagreed with parts of the plan — especially the district’s plan to close Russell Conwell Middle School, which he attended.

“If you’re a Philly person, you understand,” he said, adding that the school’s strong alumni network and culture is a huge benefit to the community.

The school, which is in a 100-year-old building in the city’s Kensington neighborhood, is one of several middle schools the district plans to close.

Thomas said he also disagreed with the district’s plan to merge students from Parkway Northwest High School into Martin Luther King High School, and turn Parkway Northwest into an honors program in the school.

Thomas said he also did not understand how the district expects to expand Ellwood from a K-5 school to a K-8 school while the school is already nearing capacity.

“I’m not looking to completely blow anything up or anything like that,” Thomas said of the plan. “There are some things that I agree with, there are some things I have a few more questions about, and then there are a few things that I disagree with.”

Union leadership says school closures would be ‘devastating’

District leadership has said no teachers will lose their jobs as a result of the closures, and teachers at schools that close will help fill vacancies elsewhere.

Still, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg said Thursday the news has been “devastating and disheartening” for staff.

Steinberg said he could not comment on whether he supported the plan until the district shares more information on how they arrived at their decision. During community engagement events last year, . But it did not explain how those factors would influence decisions.

“It’s like they took all these ingredients, threw them into a blender, and came out with a finished product,” Steinberg said.

Ultimately, Steinberg said he is never an advocate for closing a school. But he said he understood that the district has had years of “chronic disinvestment” and needs to address its .

Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators which represents principals and other school staff, said she appreciated the district’s efforts to survey staff and families for feedback about facilities before announcing the plan.

But she said she still worries closures will be problematic for school communities and create uncertainty for many school staff.

“I understand the superintendent has a job to do, and I don’t think that he did it lightly,” Cooper said. “I just think it’s a no-good situation all the way around.”

Families, teachers worry school closures will be damaging

In West Philadelphia, Rhemar Pouncey is worried about what will happen to her grandson if Overbrook Elementary School closes.

In the district’s proposal, Overbrook students will be reassigned to four other neighborhood schools, and the building will be repurposed as district network offices.

Pouncey called the school “a family and a community in itself,” referencing staff who know students by name, as well as food and gift drives organized by the neighbors.

“I do not concern myself with sending my grandson to Overbrook Elementary, because I know he’ll be safe,” Pouncey said. “I know when he gets dropped off that he has an extended group of aunties and uncles.”

The district has said it will create a transportation plan for students whose schools change, but has not released more details.

Pouncey said she worries about her son walking through “danger zones” in the neighborhood to get to another school.

About two dozen schools have a that hires adults to patrol school perimeters and sometimes walk children home after school. Separately the City of Philadelphia runs a to escort students before and after the school day.

“What’s going to happen if one of our kids gets shot or gets killed because you close down the closest school to them, for them to have to go all the way to John Barry, or all the way to Bluford?” Pouncey said.

Several teachers said the district had forbidden them from talking to the press about the plan.

One teacher at Lankenau Environmental Science High School, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said the entire school was taken aback to hear the school would be closed and turned into a magnet program at Roxborough High School.

Much of the school’s programming, she said, relies on its location. It organizes a beekeeping and honey collection event with a community partner, for example, that can only happen at the site. And it has other programming connected to a neighboring environmental education center.

“If you’re just talking about buildings, and you’re looking at children as numbers, then, yeah, this is what you do,” the teacher said. “But when you look at the actual educational programming and closing a site like Lankenau, it doesn’t work. You won’t be able to pick the program up and put it into Roxborough.”

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In the three years since Pennsylvania overhauled its high school graduation requirements, Philadelphia students have increasingly graduated without passing state exams.

Instead, students last year were most likely to graduate by fulfilling alternate requirements, according to .

All students still must earn a certain number of course credits. But they can meet additional graduation requirements by being accepted into a four-year college, earning a certain score on career and technical education exams or SATs, and showing “evidence” that they’re prepared for college or jobs, among other options.

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The change has been fast. The Class of 2023 was the first to graduate via the new system. Since then, the portion of Philly students who graduated by meeting certain score thresholds for their state exams dropped from more than 50% to around a third.

But lawmakers and state officials have published little follow-up that examines whether the shift has left young Pennsylvanians more or less prepared for their futures.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said in a statement that it is “difficult to correlate graduation pathways with other postsecondary metrics” because it is hard to track students after high school. Researchers partnering with the district in Philadelphia say understanding the impact of the new system in the city will likely take years.

Since the switch, one alternative pathway to graduation has ballooned in popularity: submitting industry-recognized credentials. That’s a broad term used to describe certifications that are sought after by certain sectors, like medical assistant credentials, emergency first aid certifications, and auto mechanic qualifications.

Last school year, more than 3,400 Philly students — around 40% of those who had completed enough credits that made them eligible to graduate — submitted at least one industry-recognized credential to graduate. Some submitted them exclusively.

Neither the district nor the state publish a list of which credentials students are using to fulfill this requirement.

When then-Gov. Tom Wolf signed the new graduation requirements into law in 2018, he that the aim was to give students “several options to demonstrate what they’ve learned and that they’re ready to graduate from high school to start a career or continue their education.”

The move permanently did away with the legislature’s previous plan to make passing the Keystones a requirement to graduate.

“How a student does on high stakes tests is not a useful way to decide if someone is ready to graduate from high school,” Wolf said at the time.

Yet amid the booming number of students earning industry-recognized credentials in Philadelphia and nationwide, some researchers worry that there isn’t enough evidence that they’re all useful.

“It’s great to have an alternative option, because there just are going to be some kids who aren’t going to go to college,” said Jay Plasman, a professor at The Ohio State University who has studied how earning credentials affects student outcomes. “The problem is not all credentials are created equally.”

Earning credentials is part of what’s called the “evidence-based” pathway to graduation. It requires students to submit three pieces of “evidence” from a pre-approved state list. Credentials count as evidence, as does being accepted into a two-year college; attaining a guarantee of full-time employment; earning a college-level course credit; achieving certain AP, IB, or SAT scores; and other options.

There are a total of 12 evidence options. Submitting credentials is the most popular one by far.

The state’s includes everything from certifications for barbers and child care workers to credentials related to Microsoft Office and ladder safety. Experts warn it’s important that states carefully review credentials to ensure they’re valuable to students and can lead to good jobs.

Philadelphia offers credentials from a subset of the state’s list, along with additional options based on student interest and industry recommendations for students graduating via the “evidence-based” pathway, according to district Executive Director of Career and Technical Education Michelle Armstrong.

It’s unclear which credentials are most popular among students, given the lack of public data about them.

The district’s graduation rate has risen in recent years, with more than 77% of students graduating within four years in the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year of data available.

Obtaining a high school diploma is valuable, and researchers have found that those who graduate high school are likely to earn more and live longer than those without.

But the increase comes as Philly students’ achievement on some state exams . Last year, Keystone. Even fewer achieved proficient scores in algebra and biology.

Alyn Turner, co-director of the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, which partners with the district, said her team is working to analyze which pathways students are accessing and what evidence they’re using to fulfill requirements. But she said the larger question of whether students are more prepared for jobs or college is still unknown.

“The extent to which this policy is supportive of that, or adding additional barriers to that, we just don’t know,” Turner said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

When Kimberly Halevy’s son Joshua was 3, she started hearing from his preschool that he was acting out. He rarely participated in circle time and had trouble playing with other kids.

Halevy’s friend had recently opened the preschool, and she liked that someone she knew took care of her son. But eventually, the preschool said it would only allow him back if he had a 1-to-1 aide to address his “disruptive” behavior, Halevy said.

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At first, Halevy thought getting him that aide would be straightforward. But she now describes the effort to get her kid support through Philadelphia’s federally mandated, publicly funded early intervention system as exhausting.

Though state evaluators found Joshua should receive multiple forms of therapy each week, it took months for any services to begin, Halevy said. Then, once providers contacted her, she said it became a “guessing game” whether her son would receive the home-based occupational therapy and specialized instruction he qualified for every week.

“I kept being mad at myself for not pushing,” Halevy said. “But now I realize that it’s just the program.”

Across Philadelphia, young kids like Joshua are waiting months and sometimes years for early intervention services that they are legally entitled to, according to families, therapy providers, and advocates Chalkbeat spoke with.

Federal law states a child must receive services as soon as possible after an evaluation team completes their Individualized Education Program, or IEP. Pennsylvania has interpreted that to mean 14 days. But one provider said the list she can access of children waiting for speech therapy — one of several early intervention services — is sometimes more than 2,000 families long.

Early intervention providers are , with not enough funding or staffing to meet the need. But in Philadelphia — home to 16% of the state’s early intervention population — one player is largely responsible for the system: a 170-year-old nonprofit called Elwyn that the state pays to manage the publicly funded program.

As Philly’s early intervention system struggles to meet the needs of all kids, some providers and advocates say neither Elwyn nor the state officials who oversee the program are doing enough to ensure kids get services on time.

In response to Chalkbeat’s questions, Elwyn President and CEO Charles McLister said Elwyn does not comment on specific cases, but the organization works quickly to assess children and provide them with services. “For the vast majority of cases, services are provided within the defined window,” said McLister.

But McLister acknowledged that there can be delays due to family communication, transportation, scheduling, provider availability, and severe staffing shortages across the sector.

Erin James, press secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said in a statement that the department stays in close contact with Elwyn throughout the year “to remind them of their legal obligations.”

James did not respond to questions about service delays for Philadelphia families. But she said that early intervention programs often lack resources. “Current funding levels for EI [early intervention] services are not sufficient because the population of students who qualify for EI services has been increasing for years,” James said.

In Philadelphia, the program’s delays are a key reason many of the city’s most vulnerable kids fall behind before they even start kindergarten, advocates say. Data from early intervention the state publishes shows Philly children in early intervention programs lag behind their peers elsewhere in key growth areas, like developing social emotional skills.

“The whole idea of having to wait more than the required time is really putting kids at a disadvantage,” said Inella Ray, director of parent advocacy and engagement at the advocacy organization Children First. “Because when kids don’t have the support that they need, in today’s current education or environment, they get pushed out.”

Parents face delays accessing early intervention services

Early intervention is part of the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which dictates that all children with disabilities must have access to a free and appropriate public education. Though each state creates and manages its own program, all kids through age 5 who are identified as having a developmental delay or disability are eligible.

In Pennsylvania, the Department of Education oversees local early intervention programs for preschool-age kids. In almost every county, families get connected with services through an intermediary unit, a kind of regional education service agency.

But in Philadelphia, things work differently. The state pays Elwyn a combination of state and federal dollars to administer the city’s preschool early intervention program, along with a much smaller program in Chester. Last fiscal year, its contract was worth around $90 million. Elwyn is in charge of assessing children, developing their IEPs, and subcontracting with a network of providers for services they qualify for.

When Halevy’s kids’ preschool said her son needed an aide, the preschool owner gave Halevy advice: phone Elwyn. So she did, and she was relieved when the organization told her they could fit Joshua in to begin his evaluation later that week.

That was July 2024. She hoped Joshua would have services in time to be back at preschool by the following September. But soon, Halevy said she began hitting roadblocks.

In August, she said she didn’t hear much from Elwyn. Like other early intervention programs statewide, Elwyn often takes a two-week service break at the end of summer — one of many scheduled break periods during the year.

But then when she did hear back that September, she learned Elwyn wouldn’t consider providing a 1-to-1 aide without observing Joshua in his educational environment. But the preschool said he couldn’t return to class unless he had someone there to specifically support him.

At the end of September, when evaluators wrote Joshua’s initial IEP, they documented that they discussed adding an aide to assist Joshua at preschool. But they wrote that because they could not observe Joshua in his educational environment, they did not have enough information to support that recommendation. “[T]he family is in a difficult position,” the team wrote on the IEP, which Chalkbeat has reviewed.

Joshua’s IEP states that he should receive occupational therapy and specialized instruction each week. The law requires services to begin within 14 days. But more than a month after, Joshua still wasn’t receiving services, Halevy said.

At the time, Halevy was stretched thin. She was also working to get services for her 2-year-old daughter, who struggled with speech, through the separate early intervention program that serves children up to age 3 run by the city.

For Halevy, sorting out her daughter’s services in the birth to 3 program was simple. Service providers quickly began contacting her and therapists started showing up for sessions. But for her son, nothing.

“One day, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on with Josh?’ and I start calling every number I had at Elwyn,” said Halevy.

It wasn’t until two more months later, in November, when he finally began to receive occupational therapy, she said recently after reviewing text messages. In December, she said his special instruction began.

Early intervention IEPs not always followed

Elwyn’s Philadelphia program is the largest in the state, serving around 11,000 preschool-age children, according to the from the 2023-24 school year. The organization first won its contract for early intervention services in Philadelphia in 1998.

But its outcomes for kids are behind the rest of Pennsylvania.

The state requires early intervention programs to report data on how kids progress in certain areas, like social emotional learning and acquiring new skills. show that for the last five years of data, children in Elwyn’s Philadelphia program have been less likely to progress in all three growth categories compared with the state average.

Margie Wakelin, a senior attorney at the Pennsylvania-based Education Law Center, said her team has assisted more than 80 Philadelphia families in the last year whose kids’ education was disrupted at least in part because they couldn’t access appropriate services from Elwyn. The vast majority of those children, she said, were Black and Brown kids affected by poverty.

Some families hire attorneys to help them access the services they’re entitled to, or get pro bono representation from organizations like the Education Law Center. Many who win their cases get compensatory education, often in the form of money the family can use to pay for services after the case is over.

But that doesn’t make up for lost time as children quickly age out of early intervention. Research shows that than any other time of their life. Many families, Wakelin said, have also had their children or made to only attend partial days because of their disabilities.

“It’s such a critical period for kids to have access to high quality education,” said Wakelin. A system that identifies children as needing services but doesn’t follow through, she added, is “really failing our kids.”’

McLister, Elwyn’s CEO, said the organization has learned that, in some cases, children are suspended from their preschool programs because of learning or behavioral needs. “Elwyn is not part of this decision making and often learns about it after the fact,” he said. He added that the organization is developing tools “that will help us understand the frequency in which this happens” and is creating additional resource materials for families.

State reports show that Elwyn’s program is successful in some areas, like evaluating 97% of kids within 60 days, the state-required timeline. But that’s just the first step in what advocates say often becomes a month-long process to get services.

Though the law is clear that kids should receive services within 14 days of their IEP being written, the state does not publish information on how long kids wait for services after an evaluation, or how many service interruptions they’ll experience when providers are no longer available.

When it comes to Elwyn’s performance, CEO McLister said that students’ growth data does not account for the unique challenges of providing services in Philadelphia. The children Elwyn serves have higher needs than the state average, he said, with higher incidences of developmental delays and a greater prevalence of multiple other challenges, such as limited English proficiency, economic disadvantages, and other social risk factors.

“For younger children, these factors produce more modest gains,” said McLister.

McLister emphasized that Elwyn has been successful in evaluating the vast majority of children on-time, and said the most common reason an evaluation falls outside the 60-day window is a parent cancelling an initial evaluation appointment and needing it to be rescheduled.

He said delays in getting kids services are often the result of scheduling challenges and staffing shortages — 95% of service issues related to speech and language services, he said, are due to a lack of staff. He said other delays occur when families move or change their child’s preschool enrollment, and when providers return kids to the “needs list,” meaning they stop service for that child, which happens “for a variety of reasons.”

For Joshua, getting a consistent special instructor, a position meant to support Joshua’s learning, has been impossible, Halevy said. Her text history, which she reviewed recently, documents the challenges: The first special instructor who contacted her never visited and stopped responding to texts, she said. The next person was more helpful and saw Joshua a few times, but then abruptly quit. Now, after more than a month of no special instruction, a new provider comes mostly regularly, Halevy said.

Access to occupational therapy has been slightly better, Halevy said. For the first several months of service, Joshua’s occupational therapist showed up inconsistently and seemed rushed, Halevy said. Now, after working out a schedule, she consistently comes around once a week.

Early childhood intervention needs more funding, some say

These and other challenges aren’t unique to Philadelphia families. But preschool operators and early intervention providers say there are particular and longstanding problems in Philly.

Two years ago, Sharon Neilson, former director of the Woodland Academy Child Development Center in West Philadelphia, was part of a group pushing to bring attention to problems in the city’s early intervention program. Council members about parents’ challenges accessing services, and Neilson and other providers met with Elwyn.

At the time, Neilson said, she was hopeful that things would improve. But since then, she said, “we’ve actually seen it get worse.”

Neilson, who now works as support staff at Woodland Academy, said of the 22 children enrolled at the preschool, about four currently receive services from Elwyn, and three more are going through the process of getting evaluated.

The preschool helps families navigate the process, in part because submitting required paperwork and scheduling evaluations can create additional barriers, she said. But even with additional help, in her experience it still usually takes months for kids to be evaluated and services to begin, she said.

“I think that’s the saddest thing for me,” Neilson said. “The families are very frustrated because they don’t know what to do — they just know that they need help for their child, but it’s just very hard to navigate.”

Officials say a lack of resources is largely to blame. Over the past decade, the number of preschool-age children in Pennsylvania receiving early intervention services has grown by a third, and funding hasn’t kept up.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said that is why Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed increasing funding for preschool early intervention by $14.5 million in the state budget. However, months past the budget deadline, lawmakers remain at an impasse over the budget and .

One provider who contracts with Elwyn said concerning inequities exist in Elwyn’s program. (Chalkbeat is not naming the provider due to her fears of retaliation from Elwyn.) It’s an accepted norm, the provider said, that kids in nicer neighborhoods get picked up for service much faster than those in poorer neighborhoods.

“There’s an access and equity issue across the board,” said the provider. “And that’s exacerbated by the shortage of providers.”

Asked about those access and equity concerns, McLister said that to address some related challenges, this year Elwyn is implementing more targeted training for staff and plans to develop a family resource center. He said the organization has also employed internal speech language pathologists to assign to high-priority cases.

When families reach out to Elwyn, McLister said staff provide them with documentation and verbal explanations of how the process works to ensure families understand their rights, next steps, and how to give consent for evaluations.

The organization also periodically notifies providers of historically underserved ZIP codes to encourage providers to serve kids equitably across the city, and includes provisions in its contracts meant to “promote fairness and accountability.” McLister said Elwyn places subcontractors on corrective action plans if the organization “detects patterns of non-acceptance that disproportionately impacts underserved areas.”

As for Halevy, she says her family has gotten relatively lucky. They were able to get Joshua started on an evaluation quickly. And she’s been able to get new therapists when others stop showing up.

But her family’s biggest piece of luck, she said, is that her husband recently got a new job with better health insurance. She plans to use that to get some of the services her kids need. That means she no longer will completely rely on Elwyn.

She just wishes she could erase the months of waiting and worrying about why Joshua’s services took so long to start.

“Basically, what happened is we fell through the cracks,” she said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

In late August, Philadelphia Public Schools and its teachers union narrowly avoided a strike with an agreement that included 3% annual raises. But weeks later, the district had to seek permission to borrow up to $1.5 billion to help cover the cost of the contract and other expenses.

Districts in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Baltimore County had to renegotiate teacher contracts this summer after budget shortfalls left them without enough funding for promised raises. And Chicago Public Schools approved raises in a four-year union contract in April while staring down a $734 million deficit, before closing the gap as the school year began.  

Debt has grown steadily for U.S. public schools, from $415 billion in 2013 to more than $586 billion in 2023, according to the latest available. Philadelphia and Chicago were among the nation’s reporting debts exceeding revenues in 2023.

In March, the Philadelphia district adopted a $4.6 billion budget that reflects a slated to reach $466 million in 2027 and $774 million in 2030. Its three-year contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents 14,000 educators, counselors and paraprofessionals, depended on from the state. But more than two months after the deadline for passing a budget, state lawmakers are at an , delaying funding to pay for the contract and other operating expenses. Michael Herbstman, Philadelphia’s chief financial officer, said the $1.5 billion in borrowing will help the cash flow problem.

“The one caveat on that is this does cost us a significant amount,” he said. “The state budget impasse is adding about $15 million to what we will incur in interest costs to borrow — that’s where it hits our budget.”

Experts say declining enrollment, coupled with the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds, have taken a toll on school budgets across the nation. The Philadelphia school district lost from the 2014-15 school year to 2024-25.

Chicago Public Schools is in the same boat. The third-largest school district had more than in 2000. This year’s reported sits at 316,224. The was delayed this year by efforts to close the $734 million deficit, which included a $175 million payment the city expects for a pension fund reimbursement. For months, district officials and school board members debated whether to address the gap by paying the city or taking out a short-term loan.

During that time, the district considered delaying raises included in a $1.5 billion Chicago Teachers Union contract that was approved in April —  until union President Stacy Davis Gates threatened legal action.

“Contracts are not optional documents,” Davis Gates in a letter to the school board. “They are covenants that provide security to the district’s employees, promises to the district’s students and labor peace for the city as a whole.”

Chicago Public Schools approved a $10.25 billion budget in August that included a and other refinancing to close the budget gap. The district decided against a short-term loan and will move forward with the only if it receives extra revenue.

The district told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that it balanced the budget to ensure it could “fully meet its obligations related to wages, staffing and programming, as outlined in its labor agreements.”

In Baltimore County, the school district had to go back to the bargaining table with its teachers union this summer after it ran out of money for raises. 

In 2023, the district had approved annual pay boosts for 9,000 members of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County , according to reporting from . Educators received a 3% raise the first year, but when federal COVID relief funds decreased and the the district’s request for more money, officials rescinded the 5% bump that had been scheduled for July 1.

In May, teachers rallied before and after school, demanding “promises made should be promises kept.” The district offered a 1.5% raise but the union rejected it, leading to an impasse before the two parties in July on 3.05%. Part of the increase took effect in September, while the rest will start in January.

“We know the impact of high-quality educators on student success,” the union said in a June 6 . “When we fight for what we’ve been promised, we do so to keep our veteran educators, to keep our early and mid-career educators, and to continue to compete for new educators to come here.”

In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools from its board of supervisors in January to cover raises that were promised in a union contract, but it received less than half of the amount.

The Fairfax Education Unions’ collective bargaining agreement approved in January was its first in nearly 50 years. It included a for its 27,500 members starting July 1. The county budget shortfall prompted the district to for this school year. Future pay increases will be subject to local government funding.

“The board of supervisors’ refusal to address existing issues and triangulating political interests enables persistent underfunding of [Fairfax County],” the union said in a . “[The board] ignored our input and decided teachers, bus drivers, custodians and educational staff deserve remarkably lower compensation than all other public employees.”

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers declined to comment for this story. Unions in Chicago, Fairfax County and Baltimore County did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Philadelphia teachers union and school district reached a tentative contract agreement late Sunday night, potentially avoiding a citywide teachers’ strike hours before students and teachers return to the classroom.

District and union leaders announced they had reached a three-year contract agreement, but they did not disclose any details about the contents of the agreement as of Monday.

“The PFT is thrilled that we have been able to reach a tentative agreement with the School District of Philadelphia on a three-year pact ensuring that school will open on time, as well as three years of labor peace,” said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg in a joint statement with Superintendent Tony Watlington.

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Watlington said in the statement that the agreement “both honors the hard work of our educators and maintains our record of strong financial stewardship.”

Watlington, Steinberg, and Mayor Cherelle Parker appeared side by side to praise the agreement, at the district’s back-to-school welcome event at Edward Steel Elementary School on Monday,

“You don’t prove that you value public education by simply pumping your fist in the air symbolically,” Parker said. “We’re going to keep moving forward, and we’re going to keep working together.”

Union leaders had been preparing their members for a strike in the leadup to the school year. The PFT, which represents some 14,000 educators and school staff, was negotiating for salary increases, amending the district’s controversial sick leave policy that union members say punishes teachers for using sick days, and adding paid parental leave.

The state budget impasse made negotiations more fraught, Steinberg said Monday. District officials have been operating off of a financial plan that assumed major funding increases under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposed budget, but Republican legislators have resisted approving those increases.

Steinberg said they came to a decision to rely on the budget figures Shapiro has proposed, and that “we’ll adjust on the fly if we have to.”

Parker said she believes teachers “should be paid what they’re worth.” She vowed that “every chance we get to generate more revenue to help them, we will,” but that under the deal announced Sunday, the district and union “did the best they could with what they had.”

Though neither Steinberg nor district spokespeople would comment on the details of the negotiation process earlier this month, Steinberg previously told Chalkbeat the district’s proposals “weren’t as irksome as they usually are” and that during negotiations “nothing that set a bad tone, as it has in the past.”

On Monday, Steinberg said while the collective bargaining process was “adversarial” at times, it “did not stray off into contentiousness very often.” He said Sunday morning both parties “sat down and had a frank conversation,” made progress, and then reached an agreement by late Sunday evening.

The three-year agreement will be put to PFT members for a ratification vote and if approved, it will also go to the Board of Education for a vote.

This story has been updated with additional comments from Mayor Cherelle Parker and Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg.

The Philadelphia teachers union and school district reached a tentative contract agreement late Sunday night, potentially avoiding a citywide teachers’ strike hours before students and teachers return to the classroom.

District and union leaders announced they had reached a three-year contract agreement, but they did not disclose any details about the contents of the agreement as of Monday.

“The PFT is thrilled that we have been able to reach a tentative agreement with the School District of Philadelphia on a three-year pact ensuring that school will open on time, as well as three years of labor peace,” said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg in a joint statement with Superintendent Tony Watlington.

Watlington said in the statement that the agreement “both honors the hard work of our educators and maintains our record of strong financial stewardship.”

Watlington, Steinberg, and Mayor Cherelle Parker appeared side by side to praise the agreement, at the district’s back-to-school welcome event at Edward Steel Elementary School on Monday,

“You don’t prove that you value public education by simply pumping your fist in the air symbolically,” Parker said. “We’re going to keep moving forward, and we’re going to keep working together.”

Union leaders had been in the leadup to the school year. The PFT, which represents some 14,000 educators and school staff, was negotiating for salary increases, amending the that union members say punishes teachers for using sick days, and adding paid parental leave.

The state budget impasse made negotiations more fraught, Steinberg said Monday. District officials have been operating off of a financial plan that assumed major funding increases under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposed budget, but Republican legislators have resisted approving those increases.

Steinberg said they came to a decision to rely on the budget figures Shapiro has proposed, and that “we’ll adjust on the fly if we have to.”

Parker said she believes teachers “should be paid what they’re worth.” She vowed that “every chance we get to generate more revenue to help them, we will,” but that under the deal announced Sunday, the district and union “did the best they could with what they had.”

Though neither Steinberg nor district spokespeople would comment on the details of the negotiation process earlier this month, Steinberg previously told Chalkbeat the district’s proposals “weren’t as irksome as they usually are” and that during negotiations “nothing that set a bad tone, as it has in the past.”

On Monday, Steinberg said while the collective bargaining process was “adversarial” at times, it “did not stray off into contentiousness very often.” He said Sunday morning both parties “sat down and had a frank conversation,” made progress, and then reached an agreement by late Sunday evening.

The three-year agreement will be put to PFT members for a ratification vote and if approved, it will also go to the Board of Education for a vote.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of .Ěý

As a “pink-collar profession” — a nickname given to women-dominated occupations — teaching has historically paid less than comparable fields requiring a higher education degree, and in Philadelphia, the push to close the wage gap could lead to a strike by the end of the month.

Salaries for Philly teachers — — begin at $54,146. That’s . Now, concern over pay has become a sticking point between the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and the School District of Philadelphia as they negotiate a new contract, with the current collective bargaining agreement expiring August 31.

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The its executive board to initiate a strike if the union and the district don’t agree on a new contract by then. With the deadline imminent and no deal in sight, schools may open on August 25 only for teachers to appear on picket lines within days. A strike could leave working parents in a lurch, scrambling for childcare — a task moms usually have to complete. Many Philly teachers, however, are also parents and demanding higher salaries to better provide for their families.

PFT President Arthur Steinberg pointed out that even suburban teachers with less education often out-earn Philadelphia’s top-performing educators by up to $22,000.

“We would like to close that gap as much as we can with this next contract,” he .

Amid ongoing negotiations, Steinberg appeared with School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington at a welcome event for new teachers on Wednesday.

“We are optimistic about a successful conclusion by the end-of-the-month deadline, and it’s important to us that all of our employees feel seen, valued and heard,” said Watlington, who called Steinberg a “tough negotiator.”

To reach an agreement, Steinberg said, “There’s significant work that has to be done, but it’s doable.”

Still, union members are prepping for a strike, making protest slogans at the new teacher orientation. A , when teachers walked out for 50 days.

“Our schools are not safe, they’re not healthy for anybody to work in or go to school in,” chemistry teacher . “We have a hard time with teacher retention and a hard time attracting new talent.”

in 2023 about working in century-old buildings that swelter in early fall heat. Before then, the that the district was not taking robust action to prevent exposing teachers to COVID-19.

The , counselors, school nurses, librarians and other educators. Just , which has garnered nationwide attention since the hit workplace comedy “Abbott Elementary” — set in Philly — debuted in 2021.

In recent years, a number of large urban school districts have gone on strike. They include in March 2023, in September 2022 and in March 2022.

On Friday, the national bus tour of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) will arrive in West Philadelphia to support the PFT ahead ofĚýa possible strike. The event will be the last of six strike preparation events that have taken place before the teachers head back to work on Monday, a week before the first day of school.

This story was originally published on The 19th.

The White House on Wednesday said it had “” $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania after a transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, in 2022 won several medals in Division I women’s swimming.

Also on Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department said its Office of Civil Rights had that the state of Maine violated federal Title IX anti-discrimination law after Katie Spencer, a young transgender pole vaulter, won a state championship last month. The department said Maine could jeopardize federal funding if it doesn’t “swiftly and completely” reverse its policies.Ěý

Protests followed after Thomas and SpencerĚýbegan competing in women’s competitions and fared better than they previously had in men’sĚýevents.

The moves follow through on a promise Trump made 16 days after his second inauguration, when he issued an threatening to rescind federal funding from schools that let transgender women play on women’s sports teams

As with other aspects of Trump’s presidency, it leaves institutions in the unenviable position of caving before an increasingly aggressive White House — or fighting back in federal court, where many of the legal issues remain unsettled and, in a few cases, have actually favored trans students.

The order’s practical effect: confusion, especially in the roughly half of states that allow transgender athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. These state laws and policies now face a powerful conservative backlash that sees trans athletes’ participation at every level as patently unfair and itself, and seeks to remove them — and their accomplishments — altogether.

Leading the charge: the education department’s Office of Civil Rights, which has opened more than half a dozen investigations in two months. Along with probes of anti-semitism, trans athletic policies now dominate OCR’s investigative portfolio, despite to the office by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a former OCR attorney who now consults for educational institutions, called the new administration’s approach “unprecedented — but it’s not even just unprecedented. It’s so much further beyond precedent that it just feels like we’re in a completely different world at this point.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

‘Fairness and safety’

Penn, Trump’s alma mater, late Wednesday said it had not received any notification or details of the action. But a spokesperson told the that the university “has always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams.”

A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

As with Maine, several states are finding that adhering to their own laws can invite a federal investigation — and an abrupt cut in aid — from an administration that is comfortable calling out educators who they see as failing to protect young women in sports. 

The complexity in many ways mirrors public perception. Recent , for instance, find that while 56% of Americans support policies that protect trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces, 66% favor laws and policies that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. 

“As a parent, I’m concerned about fairness and safety for my girls in sports,” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a mother of four. Allowing “biological males” to compete in women’s events, she said, “undermines the level playing field” that federal regulations were meant to protect, “given the inherent physical advantages men have.”

In 2025, the issue no longer falls entirely along ideological lines. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said transgender athletes playing in women’s sports is “” to female athletes. 

States evenly divided

Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding, but whether that applies to trans students and athletics remains an open question. President Biden in 2022 put forth a sweeping set of changes protecting students against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect making transgender students a protected class. But the proposal sidestepped the question of athletics, with administration officials at the time saying those regulations would come soon. 

They never came, and the Title IX protections for LGBTQ students have been repeatedly struck down by the courts. Biden put forth a draft rule to protect transgender athletes that acknowledged fairness issues but suggested they could be solved on a case-by-case basis. He last December in advance of Trump’s second term.Ěý

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a transgender ban on women’s and girls’ sports, but the Senate a bid to consider it earlier this month, leaving educators in many states to figure it out on their own.

Add to that in federal courts that have upheld the rights of trans athletes, said Wernz, and schools are in “an incredibly tough position,” especially considering Trump’s order. 

State laws are on the subject: 23 states and the District of Columbia allow transgender students to play on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Five days after Trump’s executive order, , which oversees sports in public and private schools, that it was banning trans athletes from participating in girls’ sports, saying schools needed “clear and consistent direction” on the issue. For more than a decade, the group had allowed trans athletes to play via a waiver if they undertook sex reassignment before puberty or if they did hormone therapy, among other requirements.

The league, which oversees 318 schools and about 177,000 students, said just five students applied for waivers last year.

In addition to Maine and Penn, OCR is investigating state athletic associations in California and Minnesota, where officials have said they’ll continue allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity. On March 3, it announced an into a school district in Washington State that allowed a trans player to compete in basketball last month.

It’s also San Jose State University and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for what it says are violations of Title IX.

Wernz, the former OCR attorney, who worked in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said schools and districts must now decide, “‘Do we comply with the federal courts, or do we comply with the Department of Education?’ Frankly it’s a pretty new situation.” 

‘We’ll see you in court.’

To many, the case of Thomas, the Penn swimmer, has come to epitomize the current complications. In 2022, Thomas, who’d on the men’s team before transitioning in 2019, rose from 554th-ranked in the 200-yard freestyle to fifth. In the 500-yard freestyle, she rose from 65th as a male athlete to first in women’s competition.

While Penn and several teammates supported her during the process, three former Penn swimmers to remove Thomas’ achievements from the record books.

Pennsylvania’s interscholastic athletics governing body recently its policy to recognize Trump’s executive order, but the Philadelphia School District said it’ll ignore the change in favor of its own policy, adopted in 2016, which allows trans athletes to play in sports that match their gender identity. 

While a few experts say that could jeopardize an estimated $216 million in Title I funding, Philadelphia civil rights attorney noted that Trump’s executive order doesn’t carry the weight of law — or supersede Title IX, state law or multiple court decisions that have sided with trans students.

She said Trump “has been purposely sowing a lot of chaos and confusion,” with schools fearful of losing federal funds.

The push to ban trans athletes comes despite the fact that vanishingly small numbers of these students are pushing to play. Shortly after Trump issued the executive order, NCAA President Charlie Baker said the organization would to restrict female athletic competitions solely to student athletes “assigned female at birth.” Several sports associations followed suit, even though Baker last year told Congress that of the more than 500,000 students it represents, fewer than 10 are transgender.

Chris Young, the principal of , a 720-student regional school in Newport, Vt., near the Canadian border, rarely thinks about the topic. He knows that if trans female athletes in Vermont want to play girl’s sports teams, they can. Though he has no trans athletes on his roster, Vermont says treating students differently is illegal. 

In an interview, he recalled several conversations with students asking whether it’s fair that a young person who’s transitioning from male to female could gain a competitive advantage in sports. 

“My response is, ‘No one does this as a choice. It’s who they are, and it’s an incredibly difficult road to go down if you are a transgender athlete,’” he said. “‘No one chooses that because it’s easy, and no one chooses that because they want to win a state championship or set a record. That’s just not how it works.’”

But when trans athletes like Thomas win at nearly any competition, the backlash is often outsized. In Maine, Spencer, the transgender pole vaulter, in mid-February won the Class B state championship in pole vaulting with a jump of 10 feet, 6 inches — more than six inches higher than the next competitor. That led state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican, to post on X that in a previous season, as a male athlete, Spencer had in the event.

The issue a few days later, when President Trump got into a televised spat with Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, during a meeting of governors at the White House. With Mills’ colleagues looking on, Trump called her out, asking if she’d comply with his executive order.

Mills said she’s “complying with state and federal laws.” Maine bars discrimination based on gender identity.

Trump responded, “We are the federal law,” and threatened to pull Maine’s federal funding. 

“We’ll see you in court,” she replied.

Later that day, the education department . Days later, the administration released a that all but foretold the outcome, saying it’s “shameful” that Mills “refuses to stand with women and girls.” 

For her part, Mills says no president can withhold funding authorized by Congress “in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will.” 

In a , she added, “Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last.”

Philadelphia students could head back to classes before Labor Day for the next two years, according to proposed academic calendars the district released Tuesday.

The pre-Labor Day start for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 calendars will allow for longer spring and winter recesses as well as additional cultural and religious holidays throughout the year, district officials said this week.

Superintendent Tony Watlington also confirmed Tuesday that district schools and offices will be closed on Friday for the Philadelphia Eagles celebratory Super Bowl parade.

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“We look forward to celebrating the Eagles’ victory as a community, and we hope that our students, staff and families will do so safely and responsibly,” Watlington said in a statement.

The question of whether to start before or after Labor Day has rankled families and district leaders , in part because many Philly schools do not have adequate air conditioning. That has forced some buildings to close or dismiss students early due to excessive heat .

This school year, the first day back landed before Labor Day, and 63 schools without air conditioning dismissed students early, during the first week of classes. However, school started , and heat closures still impacted students’ learning time that first week.

Watlington said at his this year that over the past three school years, the number of schools without air conditioning has shrunk from 118 to 57 thanks in part to a

Shakeera Warthen-Canty, assistant superintendent of school operations and management at the district, said their academic calendar recommendations this year are built off of a survey and several in-person feedback sessions.

The majority of parents and caregivers who responded preferred a post-Labor Day start, the survey found. But students, teachers, school staff, and community members reported they overwhelmingly preferred starting the school year before Labor Day.

Some 16,400 parents, students, school staff, principals, and community members responded to the survey the district sent out last September, Warthen-Canty said.

Respondents also said they wanted more frequent breaks for longer durations to accommodate family vacations, as well as time to rest, support mental health, and prevent staff burnout.

State law says districts must have a minimum of 180 student days, or a minimum of 900 instructional hours for elementary school students and 990 hours for middle and high school students. The district’s collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union also requires 188 teacher work days, as well as a minimum of 28 professional development hours.

The district officials’ calendar recommendations will for a vote before they are enacted.

If approved, winter recess would be seven days in 2025-26 and eight days in 2026-27, while spring break would be five days both years.

In addition to the five state and national holidays (Memorial Day, Independence Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Day), Philadelphia school district school holidays in 2025-26 and 2026-27 would include:

• Labor Day
• Rosh Hashanah
• Yom Kippur
• Indigenous Peoples Day
• Veterans Day
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Presidents Day
• Lunar New Year
• Eid al-Fitr
• Good Friday
• Eid al-Adha
• Juneteenth

This school year, both Indigenous Peoples Day and Veterans Day were school days.

As for how the new calendar may interact with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s commitment to : Deputy Superintendent Jermaine Dawson said this week the district has ensured any expansion of that program will work “alongside our calendar of school days.”

This story was originally published at Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

’s K-8 public school students are being taught a new literacy curriculum starting in the 2024-2025 school year. It’s called , and it conforms with what literacy experts call the , which are research-based skills needed to become a strong reader.

The Philadelphia school district and University of Pennsylvania are preparing to launch an artificial intelligence professional development program for school staff that they hope will serve as a transformative national model.

Beginning in March 2025, the Pioneering AI in School Systems or PASS program will be rolled out to select schools across the district with plans to expand to other regional schools and across the country, according to a joint statement from the Philadelphia school district and Penn’s Graduate School of Education Tuesday.

“Our goal is to leverage AI to foster creativity and critical thinking among students and develop policies to ensure this technology is used effectively and responsibly – while preparing both educators and students for a future where AI and technology will play increasingly central roles,” said Katharine O. Strunk, dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education in a statement.

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Since the arrival of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, educators and school leaders have been of Proponents herald the AI revolution as an inevitable boon that will improve academic progress tracking, save teachers time, and allow for more and curriculum personalization. According to , by the end of the 2023-2024 school year, some 60% of districts said they planned to train teachers about AI use. Notably, the report found that urban districts like Philadelphia were reportedly the least likely to deliver such training.

But AI skeptics have raised about inherent bias, inequity, and inaccurate information embedded within the technology along with questions about where students’ and teachers’ sensitive data is being fed, stored, and handled.

Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington praised the PASS program in his statement Tuesday, saying it will “help advance academic achievement for our students by equipping our educators, school leaders, and district administrators with tools needed to make sure our students graduate college or career-ready.”

According to the press release, the program will have three tiers.

• Tier 1 for district administrators: Will focus on strategic planning, governance, and policy development to allow administrators to build “a solid framework for AI integration that aligns with educational standards and goals.”
• Tier 2 for school leaders: Will focus on implementing AI tools in schools and aligning the tools with already existing goals for classroom instruction and student support.
• Tier 3 for educators: Classroom teachers will get practical training on AI tools to “personalize learning, enhance instruction, and use AI-driven data to monitor student progress and provide timely support.”

The PASS pilot won’t carry any costs for the school district and is being developed in partnership with Penn’s, according to the joint statement. The program is funded in part by the Philly-based Marrazzo Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

But looks can be deceiving. Most weeks, this school sends students to work in high-rise offices, tech firms or a coding center it runs downtown.

In fact, the building’s past history as a neighborhood elementary school may be the only reminder of the big, comprehensive and often unsafe public high schools from which it’s often a refuge. 

Offering a dizzying array of internships, college courses and dual enrollment opportunities, Building 21 challenges nearly all of the conventional wisdom about what an urban public high school should do.

Unlike most urban high schools, Building 21 is small: Enrollment is capped at 400 students, with classes of just 25 or fewer.

It operates under a complex set of that stress the importance of relationships. When conflicts arise, teachers must help resolve them quickly, interfering as little as possible as students work things out. The school was among the first in Philadelphia to introduce so-called , an alternative to traditional — often harsh — school discipline. Instead of a lecture or suspension for misbehavior, students often find themselves deep in conversation about what happened, talking with teachers, counselors and classmates to get to the bottom of a conflict and resolve it. These practices, the school maintains, also teach problem-solving skills.

In operation for a decade, it also boasts something most Philadelphia schools don’t: a 94% graduation rate for the past two years. At last count, the district’s four-year graduation rate .

Nabeehah Parker, a 20-year veteran of the district, came to Building 21 in 2022 to run its partnership program. Her goal, she said, was to make it a place where students can have the same opportunities as students at selective schools.

To that end, the school offers a veritable revolving door of experts coming in to teach classes and students heading out for face-time with employers.

It features the kinds of risk-taking and experiences often reserved for students in elite schools. Yet it admits virtually anyone, with open-enrollment policies that match those of the city’s big neighborhood high schools.

Principal Ben Koch started out as a Spanish teacher here, building its world language program around a concept called “.” Instead of memorizing vocabulary lists and conjugating verbs, students act out stories in the language they’re learning. The audience responds to the actors in a kind of interactive linguistic improv. 

“I saw that just take off,” he said. Students took more risks, retained more vocabulary and learned to speak in full sentences. 

Simultaneously, he organized a class trip to Costa Rica, where students hiked the rainforest, ziplined, helped repaint an elementary school and worked at an elder care center. 

Closer to home, students learn bioscience through a mobile program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research and game design with a teacher who created a mobile app to help schools track inventory. In a cosmetology class, teacher Samantha Bromfield focuses on ensuring employable skills, believing that “everyone should know how to do a range of everything.”

The school’s open-admissions policy is a draw for many families, said Parker, the partnership coordinator. The opportunity for any student to attend, no matter their grades or behavioral record, is “something that parents are looking for.”

But it also means much of Building 21’s energy is spent getting students’ skills up to the level where they can reliably pursue their interests. 

That often takes the form of individualizing assignments and basically personalizing student performance levels. In an English class, all students are writing about topics they’re interested in, but one student may be tasked with writing a cogent essay based on a reading, while another may write one that does more with the reading, incorporating specific details or answering complex questions. 

“What we’re trying to find is that sweet spot where you’re not ignoring the truth of what ‘unfinished learning’ looks like in high school — and you want kids to find themselves and get engaged,” said co-founder Laura Shubilla.

If some of that isn’t sexy or new, she shrugs it off. A lot of what works in education, including systemic differentiated instruction, simply isn’t. “I would say probably we’re more intentional than innovative.” 

As a result, while the school gets a lot of visitors, it doesn’t often appear in the news. These days, one of the main things the school is known for in Philly — a district plagued with decrepit building conditions — is its three-month closure last spring after inspectors discovered . In May 2023, one day after it reopened, shut it down again, just hours after a big celebratory barbecue. 

“Four o’clock in the afternoon,” Shubilla recalled, “the ceiling fell in.”

A ‘backwards-mapped’ curriculum

The school offers four years of competency-based learning, in which mastering skills takes precedence over seat time. Since students progress at their own rate, each enjoys what amounts to an individualized education.

It turns the idea of grades on its head, offering students the opportunity to submit and re-submit work until it meets high standards. Assignments are graded on a 2- to 12- point scale. If a student hands in a writing assignment that’s adequate or only touches on a few competencies, it might earn an 8 or 9 or lower. If she wants to earn a 10 or 11, she can refer to a chart that lays out the skills associated with such a piece of writing: It must have a compelling hook and strong point of view, cite evidence and acknowledge other perspectives.

Earning a 10 or higher means it’s as good as something a college student — or at least a college-ready student — might produce.

“We did a lot of studying on what it takes to be successful in college and on a job,” said co-founder Chip Linehan, “and we sort of backwards-mapped from there.”

Hassan Durant, 17, a senior, said the curriculum is challenging but worth the effort. “It pushes us to think harder and more on a college-based level,” he said

Understanding how to move up the grading scale was difficult at first, but many students now welcome it.

“A lot of people that I know that feel like they should have scored higher go to the teachers and ask, ‘What can I revise? What can I work on? What can I fix and change to take this from an 8 and bring it up to at least a 10?’” Durant said.

After years of traditional learning and report cards, he said it was difficult to get his parents to understand the subtleties of competency.

He recalled telling his parents, “I’m not really failing, and I wouldn’t say I’m passing, but I am getting the work done and doing what I have to do so that I can pass.” 

Roots at Harvard, MIT

Co-founders Shubilla and Linehan created Building 21 after meeting at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2011, where they studied with renowned scholar . 

Elmore pushed students to rethink everything. “His question was always, ‘Why does this thing called learning have to take place in this place called school?’” said Shubilla. If not, he would ask, what would you replace it with?

She and Linehan soon realized that they had similar answers: Both believed school should start with an “anchor learning site” connected to opportunities elsewhere.

So they designed a school that both brings in experts from outside and gently pushes students into workplaces. Linehan likes to think of it as making the school “as permeable as possible.” 

Elmore, who died in 2021, also pushed students to confront their biases. More broadly, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education urged teachers to confront bedrock views about their own authority and interact more patiently with students.

“Their saying was, ‘You can’t transform the sector until you transform yourself,’” Shubilla recalled.

Building 21 opened in 2014, and now operates two campuses, one here and another in nearby . Beyond that, its curriculum is open-sourced, readily accessible to other educators wanting to try their hand at competency-based learning. 

The school’s name is a sly nod to MIT’s fabled , which for 80 years served as coded shorthand for a center of innovation. After World War II, it became home to dozens of researchers and technologists, including MIT’s legendary , widely seen as the first group of computer hackers.

Mastering skills preoccupies much of the first two years here, but the final two take on a different cast, with juniors spending large chunks of the day connecting what they’re learning to their interests through internships and senior projects. 

Last spring, Durant, the senior, spent a lot of time downtown at , Building 21’s IT pathway program, to learn the Python computer language. He’s also in the middle of a paid “externship” with , an engineering software company that specializes in infrastructure. The company — one of 83 outside organizations that partner with the school — sponsors five such positions each spring and summer. 

Last fall, Durant was also enrolled in a public speaking class at La Salle University, one of three colleges where Building 21 students can sign up for dual-enrollment classes. Building 21 also runs three dual enrollment classes onsite through Harrisburg University.

Like many schools that emphasize project-based and competency-based learning, it puts seniors through “capstone” projects that often summarize their learning, scratch an itch or answer a nagging question.

In one case, a student who wanted to start a theater program visited stages at nearby schools and returned to Building 21 with a detailed proposal to create a homegrown initiative, complete with budget, staffing projections and recommendations.

Another surveyed the African-American history curriculum and came away with a keen observation: When it came to Black Americans, it relied heavily on “the oppression narrative” of slavery, racism and subjugation, Shubilla recalled. “And her question was: ‘Why is there not more Black joy in the curriculum?’” 

Not only did teachers listen, they spent the following summer staring down the student’s complaint and eventually concluded that she was right. They redesigned it. 

One teacher that teaching about racial trauma opens a wound for many students of color that teachers often fail to consider. So the school added more readings and projects built around “enlightenment and empowerment,” such as a study of the crusading journalist and others.

Taken together, the experiences resonate with students, who mature quickly as they approach graduation.

Aaliyah St. Fleur, 18, a senior, admitted that she wasn’t really focused on the big picture until last fall, when she met a group of Black women doctors from the University of Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital at a medical conference. She now wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse — or perhaps a gynecologist.

More importantly, she realized that if she wants to be a doctor, she has to get serious about school. 

“I was on my grades, but iffy about it,” she admitted. “But then once I did the trip, I was like, ‘OK, my GPA has to be higher.’”

Most schools might not sympathize with a student realizing in the spring of her junior year that she must focus to get into medical school, let alone college. But Parker, Shubilla and others said she’s got time to begin building a transcript that will help get her there. Likely it will take a big investment in dual-enrollment classes come this fall, when she begins her senior year. 

No one understands that better than Aaliyah, who knows that her time in high school is short. “I’m actually paying attention.”

A Philadelphia group wants schools to focus more on being places of joy as a way to overhaul the culture in district schools, and it’s relying on parents and community voices for help.

Lift Every Voice, the organization behind this year’s Joy Campaign, is backing the creation of a to bolster access to recess, the arts, counselors, and the district’s program to bolster student mental health known as the Support Team for Educational Partnership. The blueprint would also create a Chief of Joy position in the district; in June, the City Council a resolution in Philly schools. The group says this approach to budgeting and community input is crucial for reducing things like disparities in student discipline.

The district has its own federally funded restorative justice program that focuses on student empowerment and engagement. But Lift Every Voice wants its work to be broader by auditing whether collective punishments like enforced quiet times and limited recess in schools contribute to inequities and an anti-Black environment. Parent surveys conducted by Lift Every Voice from earlier this year show that student mental health and school climate and environments are still major concerns that the district must address, the group says.

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Ultimately, it

“The school system is a closed system that doesn’t want to be told what to do and we’re starting to force them to come to grips with our voice that’s not going away,” said Wes Lathrop, Lift Every Voice’s organizing director.

Councilmember Kendra Brooks, who co-sponsored the June resolution, sees the campaign as a way to help schools embrace cultural differences, and as a way to to reduce disparities and biases, including those held by adults.

“We have to find a way to embrace the model and make it part of the normal cultural norms,” Brooks said. “A project we’re taking on has to be embedded. The only way we do that is consistency and sustainability, and oftentimes we haven’t seen that.”

Lathrop sees community involvement in restorative justice as a two-way street, pointing to the importance for all citizens of having students who are well-prepared for the job market and post-graduation life: “Parents can be a real guiding powerful force to really shape the future of the district.”

Susan McLeod, a Philadelphia public schools parent, got involved with Lift Every Voice because of issues her child was facing. She feels crucial decisions are made in the district without any parent involvement, such as announcements of district school closures more than 10 years ago that took her completely off guard. The group has helped her feel empowered on her own and her child’s behalf.

“It’s important for us to lay this foundation for our kids to have a better learning experience as young as elementary school,” McLeod said.

Racial disparities in student discipline represent one particular concern. The district has adopted practices rooted in restorative justice, an approach to discipline that emphasizes conflict mediation between students and other forms of resolving conflicts as alternatives to student suspensions and expulsions.

Overall suspensions have declined in Philadelphia public schools recently: The percentage of students with at least one suspension in a school year has dropped from about 11.5% in 2013 to about 5.7% in 2023. But over that same period, Black and Hispanic students were suspended at higher rates relative to their total enrollment than white students, according to data from the .

The district’s Relationships First initiative started in 2019 and expanded in 2023 to include more schools. It’s focused on developing students as leaders in restorative justice efforts and trains teachers to guide students in that work.

“Folks have the opportunity to engage in restorative conversations … and to be able to provide alternatives to suspension across the entire district,” said Luis Rosario, assistant director of school climate and culture for the district. “I do think it’s a testament to the leadership of our school district to move in that direction.”

These efforts dovetail with another led by Healing Futures. Healing Futures is operated by the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project that receives case referrals from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office in place of a legal charge. In programs that last a minimum of eight weeks with mentor participation, students attend weekly discussions about their values and community and how to take accountability for the harm created by the student’s actions.

“We want to make sure that as many different perspectives of a situation can come into the room and offer their insight and support collectively,” said Hanae Mason, who is shadowing Healing Futures as part of her work as a to improve systems serving youth.

Building students’ agency and perspective can take different forms and lead to various outcomes.

Mary Libby, former principal at what’s now the Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy, worked to introduce restorative justice practices and noticed students taking on more responsibility after formal restorative sessions. Students led the push when in honor of singer and local civil rights activist Marian Anderson, Libby said.

“In order for us to collectively move forward in a restorative and inclusive way, we need to trust and let the kids lead that process,” Libby said.

Malachi Grogan, an incoming seventh grader at Anderson who helped lead efforts to change the school’s name, is proud of the trust he has created with his peers where he can now lead restorative or cooling conversations.

“If we talk about it then we can get to know how people are feeling,” Grogan said. “And if we don’t know how people are feeling, how are we supposed to help them?”

Correction, Aug. 8, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Healing Futures is not led by the district attorney’s office, but is part of the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project. It receives case referrals from the district attorney’s office but is not part of city government.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appeared together in Philadelphia Tuesday at a rally on Temple University’s campus, the first time she has visited Pennsylvania as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president. It’s been less than a month since Harris’ last visit to the City of Brotherly Love, but in that time she’s gone from being President Joe Biden’s running mate to leading at the top of the ticket.

The speculation about Harris’ running mate reached a fever pitch on Monday, with observers looking for any clue about who her pick would be. On Tuesday morning, she ended the guessing, .

The running mates took the stage at the Liacouras Center to raucous applause from the full arena, with “Freedom” by Beyonce playing.

“We are the underdogs in this race. But we have the momentum, and I know exactly what we are up against,” Harris said. She said in her past roles as a prosecutor and senator she “took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who scammed consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But her campaign is not just a fight against Trump, Harris added, “It’s a fight for the future.”

Harris described Walz’s career path as a teacher and high school football coach, taking a winless team to a state championship. He also championed students who were struggling with acceptance, she added, becoming the faculty advisor for students who wanted to start a support group for LGBTQ students.

“Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved,” Harris said. “Tim Walz was the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having, and that every kid deserves that kind of coach, because he’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong, and then inspires them to dream big. And that’s the kind of vice president he will be.”

WatchĚý— Walz on Education:

When Walz took the stage, he began by praising Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was also a finalist for the VP role.

“He can bring the fire. This is a visionary leader,” Walz said. “Also, I have to tell you, everybody in America knows when you need a bridge fixed call that guy,” in an apparent reference to Shapiro’s work to get a after it was damaged in a fiery crash in 2023.

He thanked Harris for bringing back the “joy” to the race for the White House.

Walz touched on several issues that illustrated his record as a lawmaker. He said he was old enough to remember “when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now, what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves.”

He also spoke about the challenges he and his wife Gwen had using in-vitro fertilization to start their family. “We spent years going through infertility treatments, and I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked,” Walz said. “So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.

When the vice president and I talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and for our children to be free to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in their classrooms,” Walz added.

Walz next turned his focus on GOP vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, mocking his oft-told origin story of growing up in rural Ohio.

“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community,” Walz said. “Come on, that’s not what Middle America is. And I gotta tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

The Harris campaign said there were 14,000 people at Temple either watching the rally at the Liacouras Center, or in an overflow room at nearby McGonigle Hall.

Shapiro warmed up the crowd before Harris and Walz took the stage. The fired-up audience began a chant of “he’s a weirdo” when he mentioned Vance, a call-back to comments and that the Harris campaign has run with, branding Trump and Vance as “weird.”

“I love you, Philly. And you know, what else I love? I love being your Governor,” Shapiro said. “I want you to know I am going to continue to pour my heart and soul into serving you every single day as your governor, and I’m going to be working my tail off to make sure we make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the next leaders of the United States of America.”

If Shapiro was disappointed to not get the VP nod, however, he did not show it, thanking the audience and praising the Democratic ticket.

“Let me tell you about my friend, Kamala Harris, someone I’ve been friends with for two decades,” Shapiro said. “She is courtroom tough. She has a big heart, and she is battle tested and ready to go. Whether in a courtroom, whether fighting as attorney general, whether remembering the people who have oftentimes been left behind when she was sitting in the halls of power in the Senate, Kamala Harris has always understood that you got to be, every day, for the people.”

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign released a statement shortly after the Walz news was announced Tuesday. “It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” Trump campaign Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide. If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”

Walz gets positive response

U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-4th District) said after the rally that she had been pulling for Shapiro to get the VP nod, but was impressed with Harris’ pick. “I was a hometown girl for Josh, but I think this is a terrific combination and Josh will be right by their side, lifting up this ticket,” Dean said. “This is a ticket that believes in the American values of small d, democracy, rule of law and freedom. It couldn’t be a greater contrast, so this was spectacular.”

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, the city’s 100th mayor and the first Black woman to hold the position, was the first local elected official to speak at the rally on Tuesday.

“I need you to know that this is a history-making day here in Philadelphia and in our country because we are on the cusp of electing our Vice President Kamala Harris to be the 47th president of the United States of America,” Harris said, to big applause.

Parker praised Harris’ record as vice president and noted they are both “divine nine sisters and graduates of Historically Black colleges and universities.”

Parker warned about staying focused on the race.

“Don’t let Trump the trickster take our eyes off the prize,” Parker said. “We have to remember that there is nothing that is more important than electing the Harris-Walz team and taking them where they belong, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”

Carlos Ruiz III of Philadelphia told the Capital-Star that prior to the rally his first choice for vice president was Shapiro, but after doing some research on Walz, he liked what he read and is happy with the pick.

“I think one of the, one of the groups of voters that she was probably going to have a hard time connecting with was older white voters, and I think that’s probably why she leaned towards Gov. Walz” Ruiz said. “And he’s very relatable, seems like the everyday kind of guy, and I think that’s going to bring what was missing to the ticket.”

Jane Poblano, a teacher from Montgomery County, told the Capital-Star that Walz seems like a “great guy, very humble,” and offered words of encouragement to him joining the ticket.

“I think it’s a good choice,” Poblano said. “She had a lot of good choices.”

How it started/How it’s going

The month of July began with Biden trailing in the polls after a poor debate performance in late June raised concerns about whether he could beat GOP nominee Donald Trump. Two days before the Republican National Convention, a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, killing one rally-goer and injuring two others. The following weekend, Biden bowed out of the race and immediately endorsed Harris, with Democrats quickly coalescing behind her candidacy.

Late Monday, the Democratic National Committee announced Harris had secured the support of 99% of delegates to formally become the party’s presidential nominee, following the conclusion of a five-day virtual vote.  She is expected to formally accept the nomination at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

The Biden-Harris $284.1 million between January 2023 and June 30, 2024,  while Trump’s campaign raised $217.2 million during that time period. Trump entered July with $128.1 million on hand, while Biden’s campaign had $96 million on hand.

But Harris raised $310 million in July according to her campaign, while Trump’s campaign said it raised $138 million.

And although the election is still less than three months away, Pennsylvanians are already being inundated with ads and will continue to be throughout the campaign. showed that Trump and Harris are slated to spend more than twice as much on advertising in Pennsylvania as any of the other pivotal battleground states.

Another race in the commonwealth garnering  a lot off ad spending is Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey’s bid for a fourth term against Republican challenger Dave McCormick.

At the rally on Tuesday, Casey praised Harris’ record “as a prosecutor putting away dangerous criminals, to her time in the United States Senate and as vice president, fighting for women’s rights, voting rights, and workers rights.”

He also told the crowd that they couldn’t trust McCormick, referencing his recent previous residency in Connecticut and work as a hedge fund manager.

McCormick, who was also in Philadelphia on Tuesday, sent out a statement earlier in the day calling Harris-Walz the “most liberal presidential ticket in history” and linked them with Casey  on border policies, inflation, energy production, and other issues.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), delivered brief remarks at the rally on Tuesday noting that he’s a “yinzer,” Steelers and Sheetz guy, referencing his roots on the opposite side of the commonwealth — which drew boos from the crowd — he said they were all on team Harris/Walz, which drew applause.

“This election is about moving our country forward with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz,” Fetterman said. “Or a couple of really really really really weird dudes.”

After Fetterman exited the stage, some “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants broke out.

While most of the state’s delegation backed Shapiro to join the ticket, about having him in the role.

Prior to Biden’s exit from the race, Trump was consistently polling slightly ahead of Biden in Pennsylvania. However, since Harris emerged as the presumptive nominee, shows the race in a statistical tie.

“One of the things that stood out to me about Tim is how his convictions on fighting for middle class families run deep. It’s personal,” Harris said in a statement  Tuesday, offering praise for Walz’s record as governor, including passing a law to provide paid family and medical leave and making Minnesota the first state in the country to pass a law providing constitutional abortion protections, and  a bill requiring universal background checks for gun purchases.

Tuesday is Harris’ seventh visit to Pennsylvania this year, according to the campaign. Her most recent appearance in the commonwealth was on . She’s also to tout the administration’s infrastructure investments, in , and in Montgomery County to . Harris has been the Biden administration’s primary voice on abortion rights, particularly in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

And in case anyone doubted Philadelphia’s importance in the 2024 race, Vance on Tuesday as well, for his first campaign event in Pennsylvania.

Trump was most recently in the state last Wednesday for an indoor rally in Harrisburg, since the assassination attempt.

Harris’s campaign swing with her running mate begins in Pennsylvania, then she’s scheduled to campaign in other key battleground states over the next few days. Planned campaign stops in and were postponed due to Hurricane Debby.

Trump and Vance are also slated to make appearances in key battleground states later this week.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on and .

Roughly 300 employees are not receiving pay or benefits during the lockout. The union, the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO), has been without a contract since May 31.

The NEASO launched the strike — its second walkout this summer — on July 5 in Philadelphia, during contract negotiations and the union’s annual delegate assembly. In response, the NEA canceled the remainder of the conference, which had been scheduled to go through the weekend. Biden was supposed to speak at the event but pulled out, refusing to cross the picket line.

On July 8, the day after the conference had been scheduled to end, NEA shuttered its office doors.

Hundreds of NEASO members rallied in front of NEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on July 8 and 10, calling the lockout unlawful and punitive. 

“They have tried to paint the picture of NEASO as being disrespectful. They have tried to paint the picture of NEASO being individuals who are greedy,” Robin McLean, NEASO president, said at the July 10 rally. “They look at us like we are not humans. They have bars on the doors so you can’t get in. Who does that?”

Contract negotiations focus primarily on wages, such as an annual 4% raise, a return to annual salary step increases after a 12-year freeze and limits on when the NEA can contract out bargaining unit work. 

NEASO staged a previous strike in June, claiming the union has a history of engaging in bad-faith bargaining tactics and committing other unfair labor practices. The union has with the National Labor Relations Board this year, including allegations that the NEA withheld holiday overtime pay and failed to give information on the outsourcing of millions of dollars in bargaining unit work.

In , NEASO alleged that a manager physically assaulted a staffer and retaliated after the employee reported the attack. It also claimed that the NEA has unilaterally changed working conditions without bargaining them.

NEA officials have . In an email statement July 8, a spokesperson said the union has “always bargained in good faith and remain[s] fully committed to and respect[s] the collective bargaining process.”

“Over the past two weeks, NEASO employees have walked off their jobs twice,” NEA said in the email. “To best protect the interests of our members, the Association and our staff, we have made the difficult decision to institute a protective lockout of the NEASO-represented employees to safeguard NEA’s operations.”

In a letter to Kim Anderson, NEA executive director, McLean contested union claims that the walkouts weren’t covered under the National Labor Relations Act. She said the job actions weren’t unlawful because they weren’t a “a plan to strike, return to work and strike again” or a strategy of a “multiplicity of little ‘hit and run’ work stoppages” to harass the organization.

NEASO has repeatedly called for NEA to allow staff to return to their offices, saying the union’s decision to lock employees out is unlawful retaliation. 

“It is my sincere hope that NEA will start complying with the National Labor Relations Act, cease and desist in any further unfair labor practices and comport itself like a labor union, not like an anti-union corporation,” McLean wrote in the July 11 letter.

“NEA has offered and remains prepared to reach an agreement that provides raises and a competitive salary, maintains all aspects of a generous package of benefits, a pension plan that provides a secure retirement for all staff and accessible, high-quality health care for staff and their families,” the union said in a July 8 statement.

Erin Wagner, who has worked as a senior digital strategist for NEA the past six years, said at the July 10 rally that she has hardly seen any change in her compensation since she was hired.

“On the salary that I make, trying to live here, trying to raise my daughter in this city, it’s just not sustainable,” said Wagner, who lives in Washington. “I am one of the 25% of NEASO members who have to work second and third jobs just to work here.”

McLean urged members to stand their ground through the lockout and negotiations. 

“Remember we can’t get weary. We have to stand the course. We have to see this to the end. The very end,” she told the crowd at the July 10 rally. “Some may say that how do you do it? I do it because of you. I worked with all of you for almost 23 years as of August. I don’t take this role lightly. We are making a difference. Stand the course. We’re going to win.”

In 1969, Debra Matthews was almost 9 years old and looking forward to fourth grade with her friends at Rowen Elementary when her mother told her she would be going to a different school five miles away from her West Oak Lane home.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Matthews recalled. Rowen had just built a brand new annex building that Matthews had been excited to explore. “I thought I would be going there. I was looking forward to that.”

Instead, until she graduated, Matthews, who is Black, rode a bus every morning, about a half hour each way, to predominantly white Northeast Philadelphia. First in a school bus to J. Hampton Moore elementary, then via SEPTA to Woodrow Wilson Junior High, now Castor Gardens Middle School, and then to Northeast High School.

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All in the name of school desegregation.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of what is perhaps the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed Jim Crow laws in 17 states that required Black and white children to be educated in separate schools.

As the nation commemorates Brown, Philadelphians are reflecting on their own long and complicated history with school segregation.

Philadelphia was a city where segregation was not de jure, or imposed not by the laws that Brown struck down, but instead de facto — the result of personal choices, such as where people choose to live, that led to massive white flight.

For some civil rights leaders of the time, Philadelphia was a perfect . While a federal case was never filed, the district experienced more than 40 years of litigation and oversight from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission aimed at integrating schools. This resulted in generations of students like Matthews, almost all of them Black, bused to schools outside of their neighborhoods and decades of court pressure to implement other policies designed to end segregation.

But, today, the city’s students are still largely attending some of the most segregated and under resourced schools in the country. is 50% Black and 14% white, while the are nearly 40% Black and 34% white, reflecting a longstanding pattern of most white families attending private schools. Although the city is home to a few of the most racially-mixed schools in the state, found Philadelphia’s schools overall remain nearly as segregated as they were 30 years ago. White students are concentrated in a little over a dozen mostly special-admissions schools and comprise just a tiny percentage in the vast majority of neighborhood schools, the study found.

In the 70 years since Brown, “Segregation in the North has gotten worse, and the Philadelphia area is no exception to that,” said Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center, a legal advocacy group.

Advocates like Churchill haven’t given up on desegregation as an ideal, but they have shifted focus to the new frontier in educational equity — school funding

“The schools that have the most minority children also have the least funding,” said Churchill, who has represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking fair and adequate school funding in Pennsylvania. “And as difficult as it may be to fix the physical segregation of students, there is absolutely no excuse why there should be such funding disparities.”

The Brown anniversary comes at a time when Pennsylvania’s governor and state legislature are grappling with reforming the state’s funding system in the wake of Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer’s February 2023 decision declaring it unconstitutional. She said Pennsylvania overly relies on property taxes to fund education, depriving students in poorer areas of a “thorough and efficient” education. And she , drawing on and testimony, that Black and Latino students are disproportionately located in districts with inadequate funding.

While Philadelphia is surrounded by overwhelmingly white, better-funded suburban districts, the lead plaintiff in the school funding case is the William Penn School district on the city’s southwest edge, itself an example of : after more Black families moved into the district, white families once again left, perpetuating the largely separate and unequal system. Property values went down, tax rates went up, and those who could afford to move did.

And that unequal system has been proven to , Hispanic students, and students from low-income backgrounds by and educating them in and often plagued with lead and , among other challenges.

“There is an anti-big city, anti-urban attitude,” said Roseann Liu, a visiting professor at Swarthmore College, at an event for her recently published book Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve,” which is a case study of the issue in Pennsylvania.

“What that really means is anti-Black. … I don’t think that state legislators are racists, but there is something to be said about people in power holding ideas about the value of different kinds of children.”

The history of desegregation efforts in Philadelphia

For decades until the 1970s, the school district clearly designed to segregate its schools.

In the early and mid-twentieth century as they built new schools to accommodate the city’s growing population – including many Black families moving from the South – officials drew school catchment area boundaries to segregate students as much as possible.

And well into the 1950′s, the district maintained segregated elementary schools to employ a growing cadre of Black teachers and principals. The white power structure of the day was steadfast in opposition to allowing Black teachers to teach white students and to having Black principals supervise white teachers.

While some practices had eased by then – there were a handful of Black teachers and principals in high schools – discrimination was still very much in evidence in 1970, when the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which had begun monitoring city schools several years before, filed a complaint against the district. The commission, which at the time had the power to enforce anti-discrimination laws, wanted mandatory busing to remedy segregation.

School officials fought any effort to forcibly bus students out of their neighborhoods, especially white students, but they did agree to a voluntary plan in which students like Matthews took part. They also agreed, in the 1970s, to create several new, specialized schools such as George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science in the hopes of attracting a diverse student body.

When Constance Clayton became the city’s first Black (and first female) superintendent in 1982, she and her chief of staff, Penn law professor Ralph Smith, devised a more sweeping plan to satisfy the commission.

Clayton’s plan had two major components. One was to provide extra resources, including free extended day activities and art, music, and technology programming, to mostly Black schools in racially integrated areas as an incentive for white students to attend. Such a school was considered successfully desegregated if it reached 25% white population.

The second component was aimed at the significant number of neighborhood schools that remained virtually all-white, most in Northeast Philadelphia. Under this initiative, the district vastly expanded the voluntary busing program, with the goal of reaching 40% Black enrollment in as many of these schools as possible. Many more thousands of students than was the case in Matthews’ time were bused starting in the Clayton era.

While the voluntary busing did change the demographics of many schools, the commission, which continued to advocate for mandatory busing, took the district to court again in the 1990s. By that time, with more desegregation becoming virtually unattainable, the case evolved to focus on the adequacy and equity of funding.

Commonwealth Court Judge ordered the district to invest more resources in the district’s poorest, “racially-isolated” Black schools. But when she also ordered Harrisburg to send Philadelphia more money to help pay for this, the state Supreme Court summarily took her off the case and the state legislature largely ignored her directive.

Around that time, when Superintendent David Hornbeck called the state’s education funding system “racist,” Gov. Tom Ridge took umbrage at the comment, an incident that helped precipitate the state takeover of the Philadelphia school district in 2002. The state controlled the district until 2018, an era that saw the rise of charter schools as the primary reform effort to improve the education of low-income, Black, and Hispanic students.

The busing continued until 2009, when the district’s second Black superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, , citing the expense of busing and a waning commitment to desegregation itself for its own sake.

‘Integration 2.0′

As the nation reflects on the Brown anniversary, Philadelphia educators and policymakers have been pondering what next steps should be.

“The other legacy of Brown, is when desegregation did happen it was done at the expense of Black communities,” said Erica Frankenberg, who studies the subject at Pennsylvania State University. “It was done inequitably in that it made some communities question the importance of it.”

She said she has been “thinking about this idea of what would integration 2.0 look like, integration in a multi racial way, with equitable sharing who has to travel, making sure what is reflected in the curriculum and history classes, integrated teachers. All of that is done in some places, but it is not widespread.”

Sharif El-Mekki, a former school district and charter school principal who now runs the , said Brown was invaluable in that it invalidated what he described as an “apartheid” system. At the same time, he said, quoting activist Stokely Carmichael, it is not segregation per se, “but white supremacy we should be fighting against. What’s important is that we don’t have government-sanctioned forms of segregation.”

El-Mekki, who is working hard to recruit more Black teachers at a time when their attrition rate is greater than that for white teachers, said while the government and institutions should be vigilant about discrimination, they should also be doing more to support “all-Black spaces that are holistic and affirming.”

To mark the anniversary, DesireĂŠ Chang, the Director of Education and Outreach at the state Human Relations Commission that pursued the Philadelphia case for so long, said there is still work to be done.

“Students living in lower income communities are deprived of the same resources provided to students in higher income communities,” she said. “This underfunding has led to crowded classrooms, fewer teachers and outdated schools, textbooks, and an overall unequal education.”

In in Black community where Debra Matthews grew up, and still lives, and in others like it, there was long the assumption that schools with white students would be better than the one in the neighborhood. The students taking the opportunity to travel from Rowen to the Northeast filled the school bus.

Matthews, now 63, can’t say for sure how or whether she benefited from her experience traveling far from her home to attend school, having nothing to compare it to. She noted that at J. Hampton Moore, the building was more modern, the gym had more equipment, and the schoolyard was bigger than at Rowen. She recalls that she made new friends and enjoyed “a rainbow of classes.”

She remembers that at Rowen she had been on an accelerated track, whereas in her new school she was not. After her mother complained, however, she was switched.

And she recalls that when she arrived, as a nine-year-old, several of the girls in the class had letters from their parents saying that they were not to sit next to any Black students. And the teacher complied.

But, she said, over time, she made friends, even with some of the girls who had the letters. In an era when many students went home for lunch, something the bused-in students couldn’t do, she was invited to go home with a classmate.

“I did that one time, and I wasn’t impressed,” she said, laughing, recalling that the only difference between her Philadelphia rowhouse and theirs — down to the plastic covers on the furniture — was that her friend’s mother didn’t toast their bread.

“I thought I was going to see something with more splendor, grandeur. But they were just an average family. And I was missing pizza day.”

There were occasional conflicts and awkward incidents, but by fifth and sixth grade she and her girlfriends were sitting around together cutting out pictures from magazines of their favorite idols, which included both the Osmonds and the Jackson 5.

“We got along,” she said. “Sometimes, if adults just let children be children and stop trying to spread beliefs onto them, it will work out.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

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Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

But being awakened in the middle of the night by sharp pains was new for Coreano and their family. Rats had begun to bite them in their sleep. Later that morning, they went to their Kensington school and pretended nothing happened.

Chronicling the life of Corem and two other Puerto Rican students from Philadelphia, author Nikhil Goyal presents harrowing accounts of childhood in his latest book . 

Readers see Corem, Ryan Rivera and Giancarlos Rodriguez grow up overpoliced and underfed. By the time they reached high school, the system threatened to close some 37 schools, and only after , shuttered 24. 

In some cases walking an hour one-way to school without transportation after an eviction left them displaced, Corem, Ryan and Giancarlos give low-income children a human face and serve as a cautionary tale. The Census Bureau has revealed the rate of childhood poverty has doubled, and the country will soon see pandemic-era relief for families, schools and come to an end. 

“If we believe that schools should be equitable and humane and child centered, then we’ve got to be willing to fight for an agenda that will end poverty,” said Goyal, who for the last two years served as the senior policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Budget Committees. 

Their stories illuminate exactly how economic instability and harsh discipline policies impact children’s ability to learn safely, making the case for change, particularly as educators nationwide grapple with how best to support students academically after pandemic disruptions.

Making economic stimuluses like the Child Tax Credit permanent, Goyal added, would mean “the lives of educators and school staff and counselors would be a lot easier.” 

Named one of 2023’s best books by the New Yorker, also illuminates how school policies governing students can disproportionately shape entire futures, particularly for students of color who are more often suspended and expelled than their peers. Zero tolerance discipline policies, for instance, put children like Ryan Rivera in juvenile incarceration and harsh schooling isolated from friends for years, after being pushed to light a trashcan on fire at 12 years old.

In conversation with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, Goyal reflects on school closures, community schooling, chronic absenteeism, and what policies stand to make a difference for the nearly living in poverty nationwide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You frame childhood poverty as a crisis to be — why release this book now? What’s happening?

The Census Bureau released its — child poverty more than doubled. More than 5 million children are plunged into poverty. It was the single largest increase in poverty in recorded history, just an astonishing development in public policy that I think deserves enormous attention as well as a full-throated response from people in Washington and people in power.Ěý

The increase in child poverty coincides with the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit, economic stimulus payments, expanded unemployment insurance, and a number of other programs that have enormously benefited children and families, whether in terms of food assistance, or housing assistance, or Medicaid access.Ěý

We’re also at this moment where a lot of districts throughout the country are facing dropping enrollments, facing fiscal cliffs with the end of ESSER funds. People are anticipating a lot more consolidations, and possibly something like what happened in Philadelphia where a school system weighed closing dozens of schools. What are some lessons that school leaders might glean from what happened in Philadelphia? 

In 2013, the school district proposed closing some three dozen. The argument was that the district was bleeding in a major fiscal deficit. In the book I cite a major report by Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by the district to evaluate the fiscal state of schools. One of the recommendations was a mass closure of schools. They also recommended a mass firing of teachers and other school staff and a very market-oriented approach to public education. The key recommendation was taken up by the school district, against the wishes of students and parents and educators and unions, who were an incredibly robust coalition.Ěý

Pew Research and others have found that school closures haven’t actually yielded the balance of savings that the architects originally envisioned. They cause a lot of displacement, educational instability. And, and in many instances, students are not actually necessarily attending so-called “higher performing schools” after their schools shut down. 

I read about Fairhill School, this extraordinary school in the poorest neighborhood of Philadelphia, which had been serving generations upon generations of children of the working class. This was a school that had been deeply underfunded. And in spite of that, they were still able to provide children with a nurse, a safe environment. 

Their test scores weren’t as good as suburban districts, sure. But does that mean that we should necessarily be closing a school like that which has been an anchor of the community? I don’t think so. I think if we provide public schools with equitable resources, and the type of respect that they deserve, so many of the issues that folks might point you to in public education, I don’t think would exist. 

The charter movement has capitalized on this. But if you go back to the history of charter schools, and you go back to Minnesota and some of the earliest charter schools, these were laboratories of progressivism. We’re gonna bring innovation, bring the best, experiment with interesting ideas in pedagogy and curriculum and instruction and the teaching force. See what works and then bring the best ideas into the public system. That is the model that I would prefer, where charter schools work in tandem with public schools, not as competition.

Something I appreciated while reading is that you give these trends and the political events around them a human face, from the war on drugs and no tolerance policies for violence that led to thousands of incarcerated youth. What’s currently underway that you think might be on track to cause more devastation? Particularly for Black and brown children?

I think there’s a dramatic rise in the privatization movement. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in the voucher schemes as well as charter expansion. In Philadelphia alone, nearly 40% of children attend either charter schools or cyber charter schools. There’s cities all over this country where traditional public schools have become dismantled, and we’re seeing a rise of the private sector intervening in public education. There’s obviously some really amazing organizing and efforts by teachers unions and advocacy groups like Journey for Justice fighting back against those policies all over the country.

What’s at stake, if these models are to continue at the scale that they have? What would be the impact for students, based on your research and experience with Philadelphia?

If we continue down this path, where more and more charters replace traditional public schools, where voucher programs siphon even more dollars away from the public system into the private system, particularly the religious sector, then I think that’s one of the most grave and profound threats to American democracy. I think the foundations of American democracy are found in public education. I think it’s one of the areas of our society that has not been fully transformed and taken over by the market.

Look at health care, look at energy, look at housing. By and large, public education has withstood a number of those assaults over generations, but I think public schools are facing their most serious threats. The pandemic didn’t help. We can debate about school closures, the efficacy of that or not, but I think the reality is that they breed a distrust among parents who were rightfully frustrated about making sure that there was a place for their children to be during the day and be educated. 

One exception to this threat you’ve identified to the traditional public system is the expansion of 3K and pre-K programs in many cities. 

The early childhood education space is very fascinating to me. Public dollars might go to both public providers as well as private providers, and you’re seeing that there’s not a sustained level of federal dollars. A lot of those private providers cannot remain open because their margins are so low. 

There is a growing interest from states all over this country as well as cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they have poured an enormous amount of money into public pre-K. We’re talking about an area of great optimism. I am deeply encouraged by efforts by states and cities to expand early childhood education, because it is not only the right thing to do, it is good for our economy and society.

At one point in the book, you say their story is one of survival, where 18th birthdays are not rites of passage, but miracles. That it’s a story of social contract in tatters. In this reality, where so many children grow up in poverty, what are some best practices for school systems?

I think every school should be turned into a community school, where they have wraparound services, social and health supports. Universal free school meals, extended hours, restorative justice, well paid teachers and staff and modernized infrastructure. 

There are incredible examples of community schools all over this country. I will point to Cincinnati as the gold standard for community schooling, because they’ve converted virtually all of their public schools into Community Learning Centers. I am always struck by the fact that they have dentists and mental health professionals and other medical staff and doctors who are literally based in the school itself to provide care to students. 

We have to recognize that the issues and challenges that young people experience in their homes and in their communities don’t get left behind when they go to school every day. It affects their ability to learn. It affects their relationships with their teachers and counselors, and their relationships with their peers. 

We’ve got to really recognize that poverty and economic insecurity is the root cause of many of these educational inequalities. That schools can be places where children can get access to healthcare and all their social support. I’m very encouraged by that trend across the country. And the research shows that community schools have a positive impact on absenteeism, on truancy, on graduation rates, and student engagement. 

It’s the idea of, meet people where they’re at, provide them with the basic, basic building blocks for dignified life and you will see many of the social problems that once existed, either be reduced or eliminated.

were chronically absent by the end of the last school year, and we’re hearing more and more about school avoidance. What does Corem’s story reveal about this trend and its links with mental health, which is what some believe to be a root cause right now?Ěý

It’s a great crisis. I would say that Corem has a harrowing, fascinating story with a lot of lessons. Today Corem uses they/them pronouns. When they were growing up, they lived with their mother who was disabled. They endured consistent housing and food insecurity. They would run out of food. They had to endure evictions. They moved in some years, twice or three times, which meant that they had to constantly switch schools and never really settle into one school. That meant Corem’s academic performance faltered.Ěý

I know they’ve suffered from absenteeism at times, not due to their own failings, but simply because they were deprived of the basic necessities of a decent life. They didn’t have the tools and resources that would allow him to get to school on time every day. There’s one moment in the book where the landlord tells their mother that sorry, we just sold the house and you have to leave immediately. 

That means, in the middle of the school year, they have to walk more than an hour from the new home to the old school. Their mother was able to get them a public transit pass, but it just goes to show homelessness and housing insecurity are huge obstacles to consistent and regular school attendance. 

There’s a lot of research to show that homeless students in particular make up a significant part of the population that is going to be absent. As emergency rental assistance winds down and now we’re more than two years since the end of the national eviction moratorium, our families are really suffering through the housing affordability crisis. And I think we see that play out with children.

For William Gao, his research is personal. Three of his grandparents, who lived in rural China with sparse access to health care, were diagnosed with cancer. 

“Poor health care meant late diagnoses,” Gao said. “And late diagnoses meant grim prognoses.”

During his research, 18-year-old Gao noticed that shortages in pathologists around the world cause long diagnosis times, especially in developing countries. He said this elevates mortality rates in breast cancer patients, for example.

To tackle these health care disparities, the teen from Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Maryland, developed an AI diagnostic tool to support doctors and hospitals in the diagnosis process. Rather than sending tissue samples to a separate lab, with long wait times for results, Gao’s app creates a heat map, then and there, of a biopsied tissue revealing exactly what part of the tissue sample could be malignant.

Knowing where to look in a tissue sample could vastly speed up the diagnostic process, Gao said. And, not only that — the app ameliorates the risks associated with patient privacy, since it eliminates the process of transferring patient data between institutions.

Gao said that this is a noteworthy step towards offering more equitable health care outcomes, and he sees room to collaborate with the venture and entrepreneur space to scale the app. 

“I hope it can be applied in rural areas which can create a real impact and really have an ability to support patients around the world,” he said.

Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur knew from an early age that STEM was for her. But it was in high school that she knew she wanted to specialize in neuroscience, “I think because we know so little about the brain,” she said.

She also knew that anxiety impacts many young people, and that current therapies aren’t as effective as they could be, or they’re very expensive — or both.

The 18-year-old senior at Julia R. Masterman High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said she was interested in understanding what’s happening on a cellular level with anxiety to help inform the development of more effective treatments.

Her experiment: Make fruit flies anxious. She targeted a certain brain pathway called IRE1, knocking it down in the flies. “Knocking down is like turning down the volume when you’re listening to music,” she explained. 

Then she observed their behavior. And like the proverbial wallflower at a school dance, the fruit flies clung to the wall of the petri dish, rather than spread over the surface as they normally would. In other words, the flies exhibited anxious behavior.

Kalish-Schur discovered that these flies had different protein levels than the control group. Understanding the relationship between the IRE1 pathway and anxiety, she said, can lead to more targeted treatments for anxiety in humans. 

”We can use what we already know and new techniques to develop cures for diseases that harm a lot of people,” Kalish-Schur said.

One of the first self-directed learning centers for homeschoolers, or what today we might call a microschool, opened just outside of Philadelphia in 1978. has grown and flourished over the past four decades and inspired the creation in 2016 of , a microschool in the Germantown section of Philadelphia that embraces non-coercive, self-directed education for homeschoolers of all ages who attend the center several days a week. 

When I visited Natural Creativity in the winter of 2018, it had about 20 learners in a bright but cramped section of a local church. Now, Natural Creativity has 50 learners ages 4 to 18 in a large, loft-style building a few blocks away from its previous location. Krystal Dillard joined Natural Creativity as co-director in 2020 after seeing a about the center and its embrace of unschooling and self-directed education principles. “I have a Master’s degree in education and never heard about this idea,” said Dillard, who taught in public schools in Fairfax County, Virginia and in an inner-city charter school in Los Angeles before moving to Philadelphia and working as a literacy coach in the Philadelphia Public Schools. “There was so much violence and trauma in the schools here,” said Dillard, who began to feel that education could and should look different. When she discovered Natural Creativity, it showed her what was possible. 

The story was similar for David O’Connor. He was teaching theater courses at the University of Pennsylvania when he and a group of parents learned about (ALCs), a global network of microschools and self-directed learning communities. The parents had been inspired by the educational philosophy of the , a Sudbury-model school that opened in 2011, but they gravitated to the tools and practices of the ALC approach. The group launched in 2018 with 20 learners in a church basement. 

Today, 50 learners of all ages learn together in a spacious building in Philadelphia’s Bella Vista neighborhood, with a second location at the Awbury Arboretum. 

“What shocked me the most at the university level was how much my students had to unlearn in order to have the curiosity again to learn new things,” said Philly ALC staff member, Jessie Dern-Sisco, who taught college students at Villanova University for several years during and after receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy there. “Here, we don’t have that problem.”

“A lot more families are looking for something like this,” added O’Connor, who explained that about 16 of the current learners attend Philly ALC as full-time recognized private school students, while the rest attend part-time as homeschoolers several days a week. Tuition is pay-what-you-can and accessibility is a key priority. O’Connor said the average family is paying about $7,000 per learner, with the maximum annual tuition at $11,000. Fundraising and philanthropy, such as the microgrant Philly ALC and other local microschools received from the , help to make these programs even more affordable to more families—especially in a state like Pennsylvania that has minimal education choice policies. 
It was a VELA grant that helped Lauren Umlauf and Hannah Mackay to grow their program, build community, and begin to find ways to help other prospective founders launch similar spaces in their own neighborhoods. Previously part of the Philly ALC community, Mackay and Umlauf spun-off their self-directed learning center, , in a separate neighborhood where they now serve 18 learners ages 5 to 12, with plans to create a teen program. Both former public school teachers, Mackay and Umlauf wanted a radically different approach to teaching and learning for their own children and others in their community. They piloted their program outside in a public park in 2021 and opened the doors to their dedicated space in a bright and colorful building in South Philly in fall 2023. In addition to The Dandelion Project’s three-day program for homeschoolers, it also offers afterschool programming and vacation and summer camps for local youth.

Beyond Self-Directed Education

While the City of Brotherly Love has seen escalating interest in low-cost, self-directed learning models like those described above, I was particularly pleased to see the growth of other alternative education models that embrace different learning philosophies while placing children first. A diverse, dynamic ecosystem of decentralized education options enables families to find the learning environment that best meets their distinct needs and preferences.

Some of that growth has occurred as a result of the pandemic response and prolonged remote schooling that led parents to consider — or create — new educational options. That was how came to be. A local mother of four children began offering a space in her home for local families who removed their children from school in 2020. That evolved into an established non-profit learning cooperative that centers the experience of Black and Brown homeschooling families. Since fall 2023, learners meet up to four days a week in a warm, welcoming storefront location, tucked along a quiet, brick street in Germantown. 

“The model of traditional schooling doesn’t fit with kids’ desire to move and have a voice in their day and in their learning,” said Jasmine Miller, a mother of three who helps to lead Koku-Roko. Miller was drawn to homeschooling but wanted something more collaborative. As a learning center for homeschoolers with hired educators, Koku-Roko enables Miller and the other founding parents to continue to work as full-time professionals, while taking turns being on-site to help steward their center, which emphasizes family-focused, child-led, project-based learning.

Miller explained that Koku-Roko’s founding parents actively sought a location for their co-op in the largely African American Germantown neighborhood in order to be closest to the families they serve. That was the same catalyst for Imani Jackson and Kareem Rogers, two educators currently working in a traditional private school in Philadelphia who are opening Poinciana Montessori this fall in Germantown. Part of the fast-growing microschool network that emphasizes affordability, equity, and an inclusive, culturally-responsive learning environment, Poinciana will be the second Wildflower elementary microschool in the city, following in the footsteps of Hyacinth Montessori that launched in West Philadelphia in fall 2022.

Philadelphia resident Sunny Greenberg works for the Wildflower network helping to support new and prospective microschool founders. She sees rising interest in microschooling, both in her city and nationwide. “Microschools like Wildflower can meet children where they are more quickly and pivot when necessary,” she said. “Because of their size, it is easier to build community and the sense of belonging that can be missing in larger school settings.”

It’s breathtaking to witness the expansion of affordable, learner-centered education options in Philadelphia in just six years. Not only have the microschools I visited in 2018 grown in size and space, they have helped to lay a foundation for education innovation throughout the city. 

As Madeleine Nutting, co-founder of Hyacinth Montessori, told me: “The school I wanted to teach at didn’t exist.” Like so many other entrepreneurial parents and teachers in Philadelphia and beyond, she built what she couldn’t find.

Upon becoming mayor of Philadelphia, that she will establish a working group on full-day and year-round schooling – an idea she had supported . The group will develop a strategy to keep Philadelphia public schools open for longer hours during the week, from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., as well as over the summer, and to provide “meaningful, instructive out-of-school programming and job opportunities for students.”

Below, education expert answers five questions about year-round schooling in Philadelphia.

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What do we know about the mayor’s plan?

Parker is proposing to keep Philadelphia public school buildings open longer hours and more days throughout the year. According to Superintendent Tony Watlington’s strategic plan, a year-round and extended-day school calendar will be piloted in up to 10 schools, with the goal of increasing student academic achievement. It does not state how many days or hours will be added to the 180 days Philadelphia currently requires.

This is different from what’s commonly known as , which doesn’t add extra school days but simply moves the existing days around so that there are multiple short breaks instead of a long summer break. For example, students might have 45 school days followed by 15 days of break, or 60 school days followed by 20 days of break.

The Philadelphia school district plan aligns with a recommendation made over 40 years ago, in 1983, in the report commissioned by the Department of Education. The report suggested that the school year should be increased to 200 to 220 days.

How prevalent is year-round schooling?

The length of the school day and year varies around the world. Japan and Australia have school for almost the entire year, while the U.S. has school for only about nine months. In contrast, countries like Finland, Iceland and Ireland have shorter school days and years than the U.S. France has a longer school year but similar total hours per year as the U.S. get a two-hour lunch and do not attend school on Wednesdays.

In Philadelphia, have added a summer extension program. But they still maintain traditional school hours during the school year.

Several states are participating in an initiative this year called the . This three-year initiative involves 40 schools that will add 300 hours to their existing school calendar by having either longer days, longer school years or both.

Can the mayor legally do this?

The current minimum number of days that Pennsylvania schools are required to be open is 180 – similar to . Districts can decide when they start and finish. The Philadelphia mayor can certainly extend the school day and the school hours since she , who in turn control who is hired or fired as superintendent. And, most importantly, the new superintendent is supportive of the mayor’s plan.

A more important question is: Should the mayor do this?

Parker has said that she wants to catch kids up academically to grade level. Only about in Philadelphia public schools score at or above the proficient level on standardized reading tests, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But what are the additional costs? In addition to possible increased student and teacher fatigue and stress, the main cost is money. Keeping schools open and staffed longer requires more dollars.

Despite the hope that longer school days or years will lead to gains in student achievement, there’s .

If Philly does in fact adopt a longer school day or year, even with just 10 schools on a voluntary basis, it could prove difficult to evaluate the effects.

Foremost among these challenges is . Schools that have support to opt in are likely different from schools that do not.

A better evaluation plan would be to first solicit applications for the pilot program from the more than 200 Philadelphia schools. Then, from those schools who volunteer to participate, randomly choose 10 for the pilot and then, at the end of the school year, measure the outcomes and compare them to the schools that weren’t chosen.

What are the potential gains?

The Accelerate Philly plan cites , which suggests that “summer and after-school programming can be effective in accelerating learning.”

Adding additional hours for before-school and after-school enrichment, and for more days during the school year, supports parents by providing free and convenient child care. It makes it easier for them to drop off and pick up kids on their way to and from work.

It also provides kids a safe and supportive environment for more hours. Keeping kids at school longer during the day and for more days during the year can . More time in school can mean less time on the streets.

There is still no decision on whether student participation will be mandatory. If it is not, some kids who might benefit may not get their parents’ consent to go to school earlier, stay longer and go for more days over the summer.

What hurdles might year-round schooling face in Philly?

Funding will be a big hurdle. Keeping school buildings open longer requires more energy. Many Philly public schools to be open throughout the hot summer months.

More importantly, this plan requires more personnel – particularly teachers who can stay more hours. A January 2024 report from Penn State University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis found that Philadelphia teachers are leaving the profession at “” – considerably higher than the rest of Pennsylvania. More Philadelphia teachers are quitting or retiring than those who are being newly trained, according to the report.

It is not clear yet how the to year-round schooling throughout the district or how all the additional hours and programming would fit into the .

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Since January 2021, states have introduced bills and at least 18 have passed laws restricting or banning the teaching of supposed critical race theory. Just states (Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington) have Black history mandates for K-12 public schools. In addition,  , , and have legislated Black history courses or electives during the last two years. But several of the 12 states have new laws on the books that limit their curriculum. 

The Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo has been tracking which states have Black history mandates. The director of the center, LaGarrett King, said it’s important for him and his team to hold teachers and school districts accountable by tracking which states are not only implementing Black history curriculum but actually teaching the lessons.

“If we look at the history of Black history education, whenever there is some form of social or racial strife within society, there’s always this connection to increasing Black history in public schools,” King said. “You saw that right after the Civil War and after Reconstruction, during the late 19th century. You saw that as well during the lynching era in the early 20th century. You saw that in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, and more recently, you saw that during the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Even so, King says that in nearly half of the 12 (Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and South Carolina), the mandates just seem symbolic, using Florida as an example of a state that has a Black history requirement but new policies that contradict it. Its “Stop W.O.K.E. law” restricts how race and gender are discussed in public schools and prohibits teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex or national origin.” 

A prominent component of teaching Black history “is the concept of questioning systematic power and oppression, because that’s part of the Black experience in the United States,” King said. “And if you have laws that say, ‘Hey, you can’t talk about systemic racism, whiteness or concepts that say racism is permanent in our society,’ then I think you’re doing the actual concept of Black history wrong… If your Black history is simply about celebrating heroes, well, here’s the thing: Why are these particular people considered heroes?”

In August, the Florida legislature came under fire after a right-wing nonprofit organization called PragerU created a depicting an animated Frederick Douglass referring to slavery as a “compromise” between the Founding Fathers and Southern states. The video was meant to be shown in K-12 schools and was paid for with state funds.

In Delaware, a for K-12 districts and charter schools to teach Black history went into effect this school year, but educators may not be ready. Deangello Eley, assistant principal of Appoquinimink High School, told that many teachers are “concerned they don’t yet have the tools for these conversations.” Eley believes it will take closer to five years for Black history lessons to be fully implemented.

Some places, though, are doing it right, King said. He pointed to New Jersey and to cities such as Philadelphia and Buffalo as examples of school systems that are working to protect and expand their coverage of Black history.

Though Pennsylvania doesn’t have a K-12 Black history mandate, Philadelphia does, and King said he views it as exemplary both in policy and practice. One of Philadelphia’s biggest priorities is ensuring that teachers have adequate training and resources. The district also prioritizes exposing students to Black history lessons that aren’t typically covered in schools and making sure they can apply these concepts to modern issues.

In 2005, Philadelphia became the first city in the United States to require every high schooler to take an African American history class to graduate. Part of the law included integrating African-American history into all K-12 curricula. 

Ismael Jimenez is the district’s first director of social studies curriculum in nine years. Since stepping into his role last year, he has led a team of three in developing best practices and guidelines for teachers. Though Philadelphia did away with its mandated annual teacher training in social studies a few years ago, Jimenez has instituted a special training just for African-American history teachers called the Africana Studies Lecture and Workshop Series. Teachers are paid to attend these workshops several weekends throughout the year. Scholars and community activists are invited. The district also works with educational departments at cultural heritage museums to offer additional professional development for teachers.

Jimenez and his team have been revitalizing the curriculum, which hasn’t been significantly updated in a decade. They aim to step away from relying on textbooks and are building the curriculum from the ground up themselves. 

Kindergartners begin learning basic social studies concepts like what is a community. Starting in first grade, students are introduced to Black history topics such as the meaning of flags, Marcus Garvey and the creation and purpose of the Pan-African flag. Throughout second and third grade, students are taught about other prominent Black figures throughout world history. In fourth grade, topics include enslavement and the riches that it brought Europeans in the Americas. Those lessons continue through fifth grade.

For the first two years of middle school, the focus is Black history outside the U.S. Sixth graders learn about civilizations in Asia and Africa, such as the Kemet in ancient Egypt, and seventh graders study the role of the Spanish in slave trades in the Western world. Jimenez said the goal is to take the emphasis off Europeans in Western studies, spending only a quarter of the year on ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome and focusing instead on North America and Latin America for half of the year. In eighth grade, the curriculum returns to United States history and includes colonialism and the Civil War.

Students are encouraged to focus less on essay writing and multiple-choice tests and more on what the district calls authentic performance tasks to show their knowledge of course material in creative ways, such as conducting mock trials, writing letters to museums inquiring how they obtained certain African artifacts and contacting school districts and companies that make maps to ask about biases and racism in their creation.

“There’s a short video in ninth-grade American U.S. history talking about redlining, and there’s another one about talking about the riots in Miami in the 1980s,” Jimenez said. “These little clips allow students to kind of access [curriculum] visually.” Ninth graders also learn about the creation of the interstate highway system and suburbanization. “We go over how this identity of middle class was tied to whiteness at the exclusion of black people in America.”

In 10th grade, students complete the required African-American history course needed to graduate. The following school year, the curriculum centers on world history, with a large focus on the transatlantic slave trade. In 12th grade, students learn civics and economics, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and current politics.

“If we’re not engaging in these conversations related to multi-prospectivity and dialectical thinking involving marginalized and historically excluded voices into the conversation, then by default, the teacher is indoctrinating the students because the teacher isn’t allowing them the ability to challenge what they’re being taught,” Jimenez said.

“That’s one thing here that we’re going out of our way to try to make sure is not happening. We’re going to bring up these things that you’ve never heard of that we find interesting and other folks find interesting, but then we’re going to bring in the multiple perspectives related to interpreting it and have dialogue and structured activities around it to really go into the depths.”

Across the United States, arrest rates for young people under age 18 have been declining for decades. However, the proportion of youth arrests associated with .

According to , K-12 schools referred nearly 230,000 students to law enforcement during the school year that began in 2017. These referrals and the 54,321 reported school-based arrests that same year were mostly for minor misbehavior like marijuana possession, as like bringing a gun to school.

School-based arrests are one part of the , through which students – especially Black and students and those with disabilities – are pushed out of their schools and into the legal system.

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Getting caught up in the legal system has been linked to negative , and outcomes, as well as increased risk for .

Given these negative consequences, public agencies in states like , and have looked for ways to arrest fewer young people in schools. Philadelphia, in particular, has pioneered a successful effort to divert youth from the legal system.

Philadelphia Police School Diversion Program

In Philadelphia, police department leaders recognized that the city’s school district was its largest source of referrals for youth arrests. To address this issue, then-Deputy Police Commissioner a school-based, pre-arrest diversion initiative in partnership with the school district and the city’s department of human services. The program is called the , and it officially launched in May 2014.

Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker named on Nov. 22, 2023.

Since the diversion program began, when police are called to schools in the city for offenses like marijuana possession or disorderly conduct, if that student has no pending court case or a history of adjudication. In juvenile court, an adjudication is similar to a conviction in criminal court.

Instead of being arrested, the diverted student remains in school and school personnel decide how to respond to their behavior. For example, they might speak with the student, schedule a meeting with a parent or suspend the student.

A social worker from the city also contacts the student’s family to arrange a home visit, where they assess youth and family needs. Then, the social worker makes referrals to no-cost community-based services. The student and their family choose whether to attend.

Our team — the at Drexel University — evaluated the effectiveness of the diversion program as not affiliated with the police department or school district. We published four research articles describing various ways the diversion program affected students, schools and costs to the city.

Arrests dropped

In our evaluation of the diversion program’s first five years, we reported that the annual number of : from nearly 1,600 in the school year beginning in 2013 to just 251 arrests in the school year beginning in 2018.

Since then, school district data indicates the annual number of school-based arrests in Philadelphia has continued to decline — dropping to just 147 arrests in the school year that began in 2022. That’s a 91% reduction from the year before the program started.

We also investigated the number of serious behavioral incidents recorded in the school district in the program’s first five years. Those , suggesting that the diversion program effectively reduced school-based arrests without compromising school safety.

Additionally, data showed that city social workers successfully contacted the families of through the program during its first five years. Nearly 90% of these families accepted at least one referral to community-based programming, which includes services like academic support, job skill development and behavioral health counseling.

Fewer suspensions and expulsions

We compared data from 1,281 students diverted in the first three years of the school-based program to data from 531 similar students who were arrested in schools before the program began but who would have been eligible if the diversion program existed.

Diverted students were to be suspended, expelled or required to transfer to another school in the year following their school-based incident.

Long-term outcomes

To evaluate a longer follow-up period, we compared the 427 students diverted in the program’s first year to the group of 531 students arrested before the program began. Results showed arrested students were significantly more likely to be arrested again .

Although we observed impacts on arrest outcomes, the diversion program did not appear to affect long-term educational outcomes. We looked at four years of school data and found no significant differences in suspension, dropout or on-time graduation between diverted and arrested students.

Finally, a cost-benefit analysis revealed that the program saves taxpayers .

Based on its success in Philadelphia, several other cities and counties across Pennsylvania have begun replicating the Police School Diversion Program. These efforts could further contribute to a nationwide movement to safely keep kids in their communities and out of the legal system.

, Assistant Research Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and , Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences,

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