PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — While some parents are calling for a pause, Superintendent William Hite says the School District of Philadelphia will move ahead with its new admissions policy for its top-performing magnet high schools.
The new policy announced in October aims to be more equitable by taking human bias out of the process for admission to the district’s criteria-based schools. Qualified students are now put into a lottery, with preference given to students from historically underrepresented zip codes. Previously, principals had influence over admissions decisions.
At a City Council hearing this week and at the school board last week, parents called on the district to put the process on hold, saying it was announced with little public input and could result in less equity. City Councilmember David Oh, at Wednesday’s hearing, said he would draft a letter to the school district asking for a halt to the policy.
"There are good goals, of course," Oh said, "but the process should not be worse than the one that already exists."
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Hite said he has no plans to pause the selection process, telling KYW Newsradio, "I don't see any reason to change what we have done this year, but we will learn from this year and apply that in future high school selection processes."
He said the new admissions process for criteria-based schools including Central and Masterman may be modified in future years.
"Those data will indicate to us whether or not we have been able to provide more equitable access to more children, particularly from communities where children have been under-represented although they have the qualifications," Hite said. "Until we conclude this year's process, it's hard to talk about what we should change moving forward."
The new process — which grades writing samples by computer and puts qualified students into a lottery — is designed to be more equitable that the previous system. Hite said the process needed to be changed, to give qualified Black and brown students equal opportunities to be admitted to the district's magnets.
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Critics, however, told Council the software being used to grade the writing samples wasn't designed to evaluate students. The machine-scored writing test is now being used to evaluate applicants to Central, Masterman, Parkway Center City Middle College, Academy at Palumbo, and Carver High School of Engineering and Science.
Critics of the policy were also concerned that giving lottery preference to gentrifying zip codes in North Philadelphia could result in more inequity.
Parents of students in magnet middle schools also said they believed their children would have preference for admission to their associated high schools, but the district has said there was never any such guarantee.
Parents told the school board and City Council that there should at least be an appeals mechanism for qualified students who didn't make the cut.