This race scholar studied 50 years of Philadelphia school reform. Here’s what she found.

When Tony B. Watlington Sr. became Philadelphia’s new superintendent in June, he joined a long list of leaders promising change within the school system, and recently named more than 80 volunteer advisers to help him scrutinize what’s working and what’s not.

One of the experts has a unique perspective.

Camika Royal, an education professor at Loyola University Maryland and critical race scholar, studied 50 years of district history for her new book, Not Paved for Us: Black Educators and Public School Reform in Philadelphia, which examines school reform efforts from 1967 through the lens of racism.

Royal, now 44, and her family lived some of the history her book covers.

Her mother was put in the commercial track of courses at Germantown High, where educators told Cassandra Royal she was not college material. And when the senior Royal was concerned about the pace of her daughter’s reading progress in first grade, the principal of Penrose Elementary questioned her education credentials.

So the Royals switched their daughters to a private Christian school in Delaware County — where a white second-grade classmate called Camika Royal the N-word, and where Black students were overrepresented in less academically rigorous classes and barely present in advanced classes. No Black staff were employed by the school.

She later attended Pepper Middle School and Central High.

Those experiences, Royal wrote, “made me a critical race theorist before I knew what that was.”

From early attempts to desegregate Philadelphia schools to recent and ongoing concerns over environmental conditions inside buildings, particularly those that educate large numbers of Black students, racism has permeated the district, Royal said. She provides examples in her book throughout the five decades she studied.

On desegregation: “No white students were bused to Black schools in Philadelphia for racial integration. ... Discriminatory testing was used to determine which students would be bused. Bused-in Black students were more likely to be taught by a substitute teacher,” Royal wrote.

On budget cuts: In 1988, Constance Clayton, the district’s first female and first Black superintendent, was forced to slash the budget. Explaining her choices — she proposed cutting some funding for busing for Philadelphia students who attended private school and closing five day-care centers in the Northeast, where parents were generally more affluent than in other parts of the city — Clayton said: “There are those among us who will always choose in favor of the historically privileged. That is a luxury the school district, this city and our society can ill afford. When compelled to choose, we must choose in favor of those children most at risk and most in need, even if they are not the loudest or most connected.”

Clayton was fiercely criticized for those comments, with some politicians, white Northeast residents, and even an Inquirer editorial bristling at the notion that some Philadelphians were historically privileged, and that those who were not — namely, Black children — should get equitable treatment.

David Hornbeck, the white superintendent who succeeded Clayton and whose departure paved the way for the district to enter a state takeover in 2001, framed funding as a moral issue and fought Harrisburg hard for the resources to advance Black children’s education. But he was, Royal said in an interview, “the turn-up king. He was ready to fight everyone. A lot of what he did, in hindsight, is right, the legislature was and still is racist. But at the same time, I don’t know that calling people racist gets them to say, ‘Well, let me write you a bigger check.’”

Philadelphia’s last two superintendents, Arlene Ackerman and Hite, were both Black outsiders without prior ties to Philadelphia, and chosen to oversee the “systematic defunding” of the district, Royal wrote in Not Paved for Us.

“Their presence gave a veneer of representation that made more palatable the state’s dismantling of Philly’s public schools as democratic institutions with the capacity to improve life conditions for the Black, the Brown, and the most vulnerable,” Royal said.

Royal’s research yielded some surprises. Namely, she found extremely candid accounts of uncomfortable moments in board minutes.

“Some of that stuff, I wouldn’t tell anybody,” Royal said.

To wit: In the 1970s, the school board attempted to abandon school desegregation plans because 80 white students threatened to drop out of school rather than attend Edison High, where most of the students were Black and Latino. School board member Augustus Baxter “was going off on them, saying: ‘How could you do this? How could you walk this back?’ I was just blown away at how it was captured in the minutes,” Royal said.

Early school board meeting minutes were voluminous, but when the state took control of the district and the School Reform Commission replaced the board, the tone switched, Royal said. Meeting minutes were terse, dissension largely absent from the pages.

“But having been in Philadelphia, I knew it wasn’t controversy free,” said Royal.

Royal is watching Watlington closely. She is cochair of his transition team’s Anti-Racist District Culture subcommittee but said in an interview she preferred not to discuss the work until its completion.

But she knows well what’s at stake.

“The district needs massive change because it hasn’t had massive change,” said Royal. “All change has been incremental and not always sustained, and not always good or useful. I would say some of the things that were problems in the 1960s still persist.”

Royal believes the changes to admissions policies for Philadelphia’s selective schools are a step in the right direction, as qualified students are now chosen through a lottery — instead of through recommendations — with weight given to students from certain neighborhoods.

She likes Watlington’s promise of transparency and his vow to be inclusive of all communities.

But she knows that “the superintendent has to walk a tightrope,” Royal said. “I want to see somebody come in and say, ‘We’re going to dismantle this, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that,’ but you can’t do that and maintain the job.”