WILKINSBURG, Pa. — The high school in this tiny, impoverished Pittsburgh suburb has long been among the worst in Pennsylvania. Now the school board has decided to close it, along with the town’s only middle school.
Board members say that giving up on the schools is the best thing they can do to give their students a shot at a better education and a better life. But two neighboring school districts declined to take the students before a third, Pittsburgh Public Schools, found room at one of the city’s lowest-performing high schools, located in one of its poorest neighborhoods.
So in a deal approved this week, Wilkinsburg students are headed for a school that is similar to the one they are leaving behind.
Both have a history of chaotic classrooms and academic failure. Students at both schools are overwhelmingly African American, and many suffer from the twin traumas of living in poverty and in violent neighborhoods. Both schools have seen enrollment dwindle as families with wherewithal have fled.
Some see Wilkinsburg’s plight as evidence of a brokenschool funding system that shortchanges children from poor families, while others see it as an argument for investing in charter schools instead of trying to turn around dysfunctional school systems.
But there is widespread agreement on one thing: The story unfolding here shows the distance that remains between the ideal of public education as a great equalizer and the reality that many of the nation’s children are still consigned to schools that limit their futures.
“It’s a real parable of contemporary American schooling,” said Linda Darling-Hammond , an emeritus education professor at Stanford University and founder of a new national education policy think tank, the Learning Policy Institute.
Read the entire article on the Washington Post website.
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
