Last week I got an email from a parent asking some questions about our enrollment process and her daughter’s chances of being admitted through our lottery. I get these emails pretty frequently during our two month open enrollment period each winter, but this email was different. This was from an email address that I remembered and a parent I knew, who I’ll call Ms. Winters. She had originally signed up her daughter, Cherese as a founding student at KPEA in July of 2010, she had completed all the required paperwork, and I had gone to her home for a home visit where I spent 90 minutes getting to know her and her daughter and explaining what our new school would be like. Both mom and daughter were super excited.
Then on August 4th, just two weeks before our doors were to open, there were complications with our facility and we had to quickly find new space for the school. The only option that would allow us to open the school on time was moving from our first location in West Philadelphia to a temporary space in Center City, about an hour away on public transportation from where most of KPEA’s future students, including Cherese, lived. Even though Ms. Winters wanted to send Cherese to KPEA, her work schedule and the commute made it impossible. I talked through some possible options with her, but it just wasn’t going to work. Ms. Winters reluctantly gave up Cherese’s spot and enrolled her somewhere else for kindergarten.
Fast forward two years and Ms. Winters is unhappy with the education her daughter is getting at her current school. Like most students in Philadelphia, and like most students living in poverty, her school is not giving her a good enough education. Her mom has been following our progress, and wants to see if she can get Cherese in for 2nd grade next year. In her email, Ms. Winters asked if I remembered her and Cherese and of course I did, because it breaks my heart that Cherese (and a few other students in a similar situation) couldn’t come to KPEA through no fault of her own. Unfortunately, the odds of Cherese getting in to 2nd grade are basically 1 in 100.
Why are her odds so low? Like all charter schools in Philadelphia, KPEA is a public school that is open to any child in the city. Other than sibling preference for current students, there is no other requirement or preference – no admissions test, interview, review of grades, or anything else. We randomly pull names in our lottery to see which students get a spot. We’re going to be taking in roughly 80 new students (75 in kinder, and 1-2 for both 1st and 2nd grade) next year and less than halfway through our enrollment season, we have about 380 families who have completed an enrollment form. To make sure families in our neighborhood know about us, we do targeted recruitment at local childcare centers, libraries, and public housing projects, as well as going door-to-door in the school’s immediate neighborhood. But we don’t do anything fancy like buying billboards, producing radio spots, or advertising on city buses. Yet we’re going to finish with well over 500 enrollment forms for 80 spots, with the odds being particularly low for students trying to get into 1st or 2nd grade like Cherese where we only take in 1-2 students to replace those who might move over the summer.
Cherese and her mom are fighting for something pretty basic, the chance to get her an education that will put her on the path to success in life. But the odds are against her; whether it’s her small chance of getting into KPEA or the 8% chance that poor students in big cities have of graduating from college. Her mom is trying to get her the basic right of education that many Americans take for granted, but that has often been ignored if you’re poor, Latino, or African-American. To be blunt, the crappy education of poor, minority students didn’t much trouble most people for much of America’s history, but I firmly believe that is now changing. Attention is being paid to this issue like never before and new ideas are being tried, some of which are working (far from all however). But we’re nowhere near the goal of giving each child a great education.
When I get depressed that this goal seems really far away, I try to remember that the history of the United States is a history of a gradual increase in the rights and privileges of the formerly underprivileged that once seemed impossible. It’s not just that African-Americans won their freedom, women won the right to vote, or gays are winning the right to marry, it’s that they weren’t even seen as rights much before they were won. To make the obvious point, the right of freedom for Americans of all races was still in so much doubt in 1860 that hundreds of thousands of men died to contest it. But they failed. As little as 20 years ago it was crazy to think civil unions, let alone gay marriage would gain broad acceptance, yet the number of states granting this right seems to increase weekly.
So it’s not 1865 or 1920 or 1964, but there is an emerging consensus that what Cherese is going through is not ok and is in fact a failing of us as a country. Now everyone in education must continue to take on the incredibly hard challenge of making sure that a great education for every child is not just a hypothetical right, but one that is real.
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