As the School District of Philadelphia labors to make its digital student-information system accord with expanding progressive concepts of gender, a right-leaning nonprofit is urging officials to refocus on academics.
In 2016, the district adopted a policy allowing students to pursue their “gender identity” and therein defined the term as “a person’s deeply held sense or psychological knowledge of their own gender, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth.” The new rule allows students of one biological sex identifying as another to access restrooms, locker rooms, gym classes and athletic programs consistent with the former rather than the latter. In 2020, several school employees reportedly asked Sarah Galbally, the district’s lobbyist, to push for recognizing a broader variety of gender identities in the student tracking system, something that couldn’t be done without tweaking state-education policy.
Galbally has boasted of using “back channels” to sidestep the Republican-led General Assembly, instead working with Gov. Tom Wolf (D) to secure permission to let students identify as “nonbinary” in the district’s student-data system, Infinite Campus. Last month, city education officials announced that “transgender” and “gender nonconforming” students thenceforth had the right to appear in that system as nonbinary.
“This is an important step forward in our effort to become a more equitable and inclusive school district,” Superintendent William Hite wrote on Dec. 9 in a message to students and families.
Yet as Philadelphia’s public schools celebrate their sexual variegation, they’ve had much less success fulfilling their central purpose (i.e. teaching), a reality the recently formed national Citizens for Conservative School Boards (CFCSB) wants to thrust back into public attention.
“Students can’t read or do basic math,” CFCSB Executive Director William Hillman told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “The failure to educate is denying a huge number of students the ability to follow the American dream. And the school-district leadership thinks the problem is kids don’t have enough genders to select from on a computer form? Clearly the problem is the school district leadership.”
For many of the 198,645 children now enrolled in Philadelphia’s public non-charter schools, present statistics are discouraging. Only 37 percent of students in all grades have scored as either proficient or advanced on the Pennsylvania System School Assessment (PSSA) standardized test in English language arts. On the PSSA mathematics exam, a mere 21 percent tested at either the proficient or the advanced level.
Meanwhile, only 56 percent of students showed up to class for 95 percent or more of the days at which they’ve been enrolled – a problem that schools have made it difficult for themselves to address as they’ve shifted between in-person and remote learning at the behest of the powerful Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.
And while the city’s education system can boast of nuance when it comes to noting students’ avowed genders, gaps exist in its compilation of academic data. The district does not, for instance, calculate the number or percentage of children in secondary-education programs who have failed at least one course during a grading period; at least it has never made such information publicly available, according to a report by the Philadelphia-based Broad + Liberty.
Despite all this, when it comes to education policy, the district, its teachers’ union and allied politicians have focused principally on partially defunding and more stringently regulating public charter schools. A massive segment of Philadelphia’s families—with about 70,000 students—have flocked to these non-district schools in recent years for brighter educational prospects.
A spokesperson for the School District of Philadelphia could not be reached for comment.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “School District of Philadelphia” by School District of Philadelphia.
