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As noted in several earlier posts, “poor performing” districts or schools rarely if ever improve as a result of state takeovers, the injection of “competition” through charter schools, or privatization. If anyone ever wanted a poster child district to prove this point, look no further that Peter Greene’s recent Forbes article describing the sordid history of the Chester-Upland School district in PA. Two sections o the article explain what went wrong with the district and where it stands now.

Here’s what went wrong:

The Chester-Upland school system’s history is a history of U.S. segregation in miniature. Through the first half of the 20th century, the schools were segregated as a matter of policy (this is covered in some detail in John McClarnon’s portrait of civil rights leader George Raymond in Pennsylvania History). In 1946, the school board finally agreed to a plan to desegregate students (but not faculty). But then the board instituted a policy that allowed students to request transfer to a school outside their assigned boundaries. Most applications by whites were approved; most by Blacks were denied. By the 1953-54 school year five elementary schools had almost entirely Black student bodies, even though white students lived within the schools’ boundaries.

In 1953, the board floated a $3.5 million bond issue intended to finance a redrawing of school boundaries. “The bond issue was,” McClarnon writes, “in fact, a #3.5 million re-segregation project.” Shortly afterwards, the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but the school superintendent noted that the decision wouldn’t have any legal ramifications for the county “where segregation is admittedly a fact but not a policy.”

Now… if Chester-Upland was the only district in Pennsylvania or America “where segregation is admittedly a fact but not a policy” it MIGHT be possible to solve the problems. But as readers of this blog undoubtedly realize, racial and economic segregation IS a fact everywhere even though our purported policy is an equal opportunity for all. Chester-Upland’s particular story in unique… but the general outlines of its story are not. Which leads to the closing paragraphs that describe where Chester-upland stands now:

The district’s story is complicated—this long post skips over many other issues there—but the lesson is simple. When a district is segregated, abandoned, underfunded, and deprived of resources, it suffers. And when the state, rather than aiding it, allows it to be picked over and fed upon by private for-profit businesses, it suffers even more, creating the possibility of a community that is no longer able to fulfil the promise of a free public education for all of its children. Chester Upland seems less likely to have a happy ending and more likely to end as a tragic cautionary tale. Pennsylvania’s students deserve better.

Now… if Chester-Upland was the only district in Pennsylvania or America that was segregated, abandoned, underfunded, and deprived of resources it MIGHT be possible to solve the problems. But as readers of this blog undoubtedly realize, racial and economic segregation, abandonment, underfunding, and deprivation of resources is universal in our country… and so is the suffering that results.  The sad ending that Chester-Upland faces could be the sad ending that all of the racially and economically segregated district face unless some form of funding equity is put in place, equity achieved NOT by redistributing resources but by adding them to the districts that need them.