A+ Schools, a local group that advocates for equity in education, released on Monday its annual “Report to the Community” on the Pittsburgh Public Schools.
The report shows that the district continues to grapple with long-standing inequities — often caused at least partially by outside systems — but also highlights bright spots where there has been improvement.
“When we talk about systemic inequities, what we’re really saying is that every system is perfectly designed to get the results they get,” James Fogarty, executive director of A+ Schools, said during a virtual presentation of the report.
The report examines the lasting impact of policies outside of the district’s control that has led to the de facto segregation of students at city schools and widened the achievement and opportunity gaps between Black children and white children.
The report looks at how redlining policies from the mid-1900s caused many neighborhoods to be deeply divided along racial and socioeconomic lines and concentrated poverty in certain areas.
“Those concentrated poverty areas line up in some ways with the feeder patterns for our schools,” Mr. Fogarty said. “Not completely, but in some ways they do, and that creates highly segregated schools.”
Fourteen out of the 50 city schools explored in the report were considered highly segregated, meaning that Black students account for 75% or more of the school population. Those schools tend to have higher rates of chronic absence, suspensions, and teacher and leadership turnover.
Despite systemic obstacles, the report highlighted schools and organizations that were rising to meet the challenges.
The PPS Early Childhood Program — which focuses on children as well as their families — has almost no gaps by race in student achievement by the time students leave pre-kindergarten, according to the report.
It credited the Black Girls Equity Alliance organization for providing reports about arrest data and helping identify policy changes that could help reduce school push-out, especially for Black girls.
Colfax K-8, the report said, saw third grade reading scores for Black students steadily improve from 35% reading on grade level in 2015 to 63% reading on grade level in 2019.
Tamara Sanders-Woods, the principal of Colfax, said she was able to draw from her own experience as a Black woman to help her students get what they needed to improve.
“I was a Black student, I’m a Black learner,” she said. “Our deficit was in Black students, so I had the advantage of knowing for me, qualitatively speaking, what did I need as a student sitting in a classroom.”
The examples these programs set can be used to help improve schools across the district, Mr. Fogarty said.
“In my mind, we have everything we need to be successful by our children and by the families that we have in this system,” he said. “It just is, are we willing to take the risk to build trust, to highlight what’s good and what’s working, and to learn from that to move forward rather than facing each other with recriminations or blame?”
Andrew Goldstein: agoldstein@post-gazette.com.
First Published: November 16, 2020, 11:27 p.m.
