The Problem With Our New Admissions Policies

When the news broke that five Philadelphia School District magnet schools would be switching to a lottery system, many parents were frantic. The new system works by choosing randomly from a pool of students who meet a minimum grade requirement, letting go of the old recommendation-and-PSSA-based method. Once the admissions decisions came out, stories of straight-A students being rejected from all of the high schools they applied to dominated the halls of Philadelphia middle schools. But, looking at the true makeup of the incoming freshman classes of three of the most famous of these schools sheds light on the sad truth of the situation: the attempt at increasing equity in the district may have failed. The school district publishes a 60,000-cell spreadsheet every year containing the admissions statistics for all Philadelphia public high schools, from which the following analysis was extracted.