PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Philadelphia School District’s new lottery-based admissions policy for its top magnet schools is drawing scrutiny from City Council.
The new procedure is designed to take human bias out of the school selection process, but parents and council members on Wednesday questioned whether the system is truly more equitable.
With Black student enrollment declining at Central High School and Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, the district in October changed the way students apply for admission to criteria-based magnet schools.
Previously, principals would have a say in who got in. Now, student writing samples for admission to five top magnets are evaluated by a computer, and qualified applicants are placed into a lottery.
Related
At a City Council Education Committee hearing Wednesday, University of Delaware professor Joshua Wilson said the software that the district is using, called MI Write, isn’t designed to evaluate an essay on its own.
“It is not meant to be used without a teacher or a human rater looking at student writing,” he said. “Yet, this is what is happening here.”
The machine-scored writing sample is now being used for admissions to Central, Masterman, Parkway Center City Middle College, Academy at Palumbo, and Carver High School of Engineering and Science.
The lottery for academically qualified students gives preference to those in under-represented areas of the city. Parent Jaya Ramji-Nogales testified that a more refined mechanism is needed.
“Many diverse students are going to be penalized for living in a particular ZIP code, even if they attend an underperforming school,” she said.
City Councilmember Helen Gym said equity requires human intervention.
“It is not equity in any definition. It is randomness,” she argued. “Randomness is not synonymous with equity. Randomness can be chaos.”
Sabriya Jubilee, the school district’s equity chief, said the new admissions process was about creating greater access for all students.
“We committed to becoming an anti-racist, equitable organization by uprooting policies, deconstructing processes and eradicating practices that create systems of privilege and power for one group over another,” she said.
Related
Councilmember David Oh asked whether the district was in a position to pause the process. Karyn Lynch, the district’s director of student support services, replied that changing the admissions process now would be impractical.
“If this process does not continue or if this process is further delayed, it’s going to impact the budgets for schools,” she noted.
Parent Miriam Hill said the new rules shouldn’t have been announced right before the application window opened in October.
“Honestly, if you’d given me a year to deal with this, maybe I wouldn’t have been so angry and dismayed,” she added.
State Rep. Donna Bullock told City Council that what the district ultimately needs is more seats at its top schools: “How do we equitably divide the pie when we simply don’t have enough pie?”