Staff Editorial

It has been 70 years since the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, and to say that the conversation on how to fix academic segregation needs to continue is sickening.

Nonprofit A+ Schools implored Pittsburgh Public Schools to redesign districts where students are no longer racially and economically segregated.

Since PPS’ last massive desegregation effort, James Fogarty, executive director of A+ Schools, told 90.5 WESA that the district is more segregated now than it was in the 1980s.

“Last school year, 82% of students at the district’s high-poverty schools — where more than 75% of students come from low-income households — were students of color, according to A+ Schools’ 2024 Report to the Community,” 90.5 WESA’s article said.

A+ School’s report also found that the Pittsburgh Gifted Center was just one example of Black and economically disadvantaged students being neglected, with just 17% and 26% of students identified as academically “gifted.”

While communities come in and out of wealth and racial demographics change, we need to do a better job stopping academic segregation, which limits an impoverished child’s ability to learn and contributes to the undeniable achievement gap seen in Pittsburgh public schools.

In order to distribute district resources better, Fogarty told 90.5 WESA, that PPS could mirror a model used in other schools such as Grandview PreK-5 and Dilworth PreK-5, where gifted students received additional learning opportunities in their own building rather than a separate building or location.

This strategy was proposed by consultants at Education Resource Strategies, which recommended closing 10 buildings and reconfiguring the others so that the district could integrate the gifted program into its neighborhood K-5 and 6-8 schools.

Last month, district leaders announced that there would be no school closures until after the 2025-2026 school year to allow time to see how feasible the plan would be, according to 90.5 WESA; however, this seems like vacillation from PPS.

“Poverty affects a child’s brain development, inhibiting their ability to learn and understand. In addition, lower-income students go to schools with insufficient funding and resources: quality teachers or the lack thereof increase the inability to provide for these students adequately,” according to BYU’s Ballard Center for Social Impact.

Students who come from lower income households struggle to access the academic resources needed to help them adapt to learning, and pushing off a solution will continue to leave Black and economically disadvantaged students abandoned by PPS’ education system.