Rightsizing Philadelphia’s schools won’t be easy — or popular — but it must be done

Philadelphia’s public schools are in crisis. Five years post-pandemic, the Philadelphia School District is grappling with a 9.5% drop in enrollment, a $400 million budget shortfall, and stubbornly poor academic outcomes.

According to a recent analysis conducted by my organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, roughly a quarter of Philly’s public schools experienced enrollment declines of 20% or more between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years, with some schools losing almost half their students.

And, as Philadelphians know all too well, the pandemic-inspired exodus is only the latest chapter in a story that goes back more than a decade, when underenrollment prompted the district to shutter 30 schools in the 2012-13 school year, sparking understandable resentment in affected communities, but ultimately saving nearly $24 million annually.

Since then, district enrollment has declined by almost 20%, with about half of that decline occurring prior to the pandemic.

The result?

Just 116,000 students are enrolled in district facilities that were originally designed to accommodate 180,000 students. In other words, across all district facilities, more than a third of the space is going unused.

These vacancies come with a steep price tag. Due to the unavoidable costs associated with staffing and maintaining them, half-empty buildings are more expensive on a per-pupil basis. As a result, each empty seat quietly siphons taxpayer dollars and diverts scarce resources away from the students who remain enrolled. No one would intentionally design a school system this way.

Compounding the problem is the embarrassing fact that, according to the district’s own data, and despite declining enrollment, the number of staff who aren’t classified as classroom teachers has tripled in the last decade.

To be fair, perhaps a thousand of these new staff are teaching assistants, which might be a wise investment, given the challenges frontline educators face. But when it’s serving so many fewer students, how can the district possibly justify a 17% increase in the number of food service workers and a 38% increase in the number of administrative support staff?

Each empty seat quietly siphons taxpayer dollars and diverts scarce resources away from the students who remain enrolled.

In a system that’s also struggling to cope with learning loss, concerns about teacher pay, and other challenges, those numbers are difficult to defend.

Fortunately, there are signs district leaders are ready to act.

In September, the Philadelphia Board of Education tasked Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. with a politically fraught but long-overdue mission: to launch a comprehensive review of the district’s aging facilities and the schools that occupy them.

Drawing on lessons learned from the 2012-13 closures, the district has committed to gathering more community input this time. And to date, more than 500 Philadelphians have participated in 32 facilities feedback sessions, and nearly 6,000 respondents have provided feedback on facilities surveys. Still, common sense suggests the emptiest and lowest-performing schools should be closed first.

To guide that process going forward, the district might consider adopting a minimum school size. (For example, some research suggests that 600 to 900 students is optimal for high school learning.) But regardless of the details, some sort of rightsizing is essential, both to stabilize the district’s finances and to deliver better academic opportunities for Philadelphia’s students.

To meet those goals, the district should publicly commit to placing any students displaced by closure in higher-performing schools — and to reinvesting the additional resources closures generate back into classrooms.

For example, tutoring or mentoring programs can help smooth transitions for displaced students. And schools “receiving” displaced students might benefit from additional academic and social supports that aim to minimize disruption and build community. As Watlington himself has said, the ultimate goal of closures is to enable the district to “give our families more, not less.”

No, it still won’t be popular. Nor will it be fun. But as we head into a new school year, the costs of inaction are clear: fewer resources for classrooms, lower-quality schools, and a system that fails the very children it’s meant to serve.

David Griffith is associate director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a K-12 education policy think tank.