Equity

PPS has a history of inequity and substantial racial, economic, and learning specific achievement gaps. We need to do better. Equity must be essential in any education plan for Pittsburgh moving forward. It is at the core of the community proposal. Below you can find the methodology and details explaining how the community proposal actualizes equity.

Resource Equity

We agree with the current proposal that our existing school system does not equitably distribute resources, all too often leaving the privileged with much more available to them than the more marginalized of our city. We must create equity of resources through a rich and robust educational offering at every school. This is in alignment with the current proposal from the administration.

School Choice Equity

While we agree that every school needs that robust offering of core educational opportunity, we also recognize that the local/feeder school is not the best fit for every student or family. We believe it is not beneficial to any family of any socioeconomic status, race, etc to assume we know what is best for them. Students and families choose schools for a wide variety of reasons that we cannot anticipate for all of them, and we shouldn’t try to. Allowing our students and families to pick the school that is best for them, because grandma picks them up after school and lives by a different school, or an after-care program works with that school, or the student loves the theme, or you love the principal, or you want to be close to home and choose the feeder school… whatever the reason may be, it is equitable to allow all of our families to make the best choices for themselves, rather than be told what is best for them.

Diversity

Diversity was the original intent of the magnet system. At the time, adding thematic learning was more of a means to keep people who didn’t like desegregation from abandoning the district (thematic learning has taken a different role since, while still being somewhat of a carrot to help slow attrition for various reasons). Pittsburgh is not quite as segregated as it once was, but is still highly segregated by socioeconomic status, race, etc across our neighborhoods. Attendance zones focused around schools with virtually no other options drives re-segregation in our city. Magnets have become abused by the privileged and in many ways countered their original intent due to inequality of accessibility to the application process. We can retain the benefits of desegregation while fixing the accessibility issues.

Attendance Zones Drive Inequity

When the privileged can buy a zip code to get the school they desire, the system will always be manipulated to concentrate the privileged into a few schools while everyone else cannot afford to buy their way into that attendance zone. By gerrymandering attendance zones to try to achieve more diversity, the public will inevitably change their buying preferences etc, and you alter the neighborhoods in significant ways, but you always end up back at the same starting problem. Then the only “solution” is to do it again. Each time disrupting the city and families, and causing more to choose to leave PPS.

Montessori/CAPA

Keeping Montessori as a magnet is not equitable. While the learning style is a bit different, it does not need to be a magnet program to be able to teach in that method. It is also a method that is absolutely NOT a good choice for all kids, so its inequitable to make it a neighborhood feeder school. It is equitable to make it one of the options available to students and families the way our Regions of Choice model handles it.

CAPA has a unique position in that it is performance based. The community proposal sees schools like this as an acceptable and equitable reason to have an application/performance-based admission process. However, we advocate that it should only be so for grades 9-12 in the current building. This allows for more kids to be able to get spots in the high school program. To further expand equitable access, we advocate creating a much less specialized CAPA 6-8 as a typical Regions of Choice middle school with no performance requirements or magnet system. This allows a multitude of kids to gain access to this programming, and build the experience needed for many without the economic resources for private lessons etc, to gain admission to CAPA 9-12.

Weights

We propose adding weights to the school admission process, that give an advantage to historically marginalized and under-resourced communities. Read more about that process and details HERE.