{Reproduced from the Philadelphia Inquirer}

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it will invest roughly $5 million over five years in West Philadelphia’s Lea Elementary School. This is the university’s second investment in a nearby elementary school, creating a relationship similar to the one with Penn Alexander in West Philadelphia, which the university funds to the tune of $1,330 per student.

Penn’s investment is wonderful news for Lea Elementary, its students, families, and teachers; they will now receive the financial, political, and collaborative partnership of an Ivy League university with a $20 billion dollar endowment. It is also a reminder of just how broken the city, and indeed the nation’s, education system remains.

Consider the following. Penn has the sixth-largest endowment in the country, behind only Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. And yet, as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt institution, the university is exempt from paying property taxes. While Penn’s $5 million investment in Lea Elementary sounds generous on paper, it falls short of the $36.4 million per year that activist groups Philadelphia Jobs With Justice and Penn for PILOTs argue would be appropriate for Penn to contribute to Philadelphia’s schools.

Other 501(c)(3) tax-exempt institutions such as Lincoln Financial Field and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is worth noting, also pay zero dollars in property taxes.

Penn is not the only local institution that has decided to give financial support to individual schools. Drexel University, an institution with an endowment of over $1 billion, has also given $42 million dollars to support Science Leadership Academy Middle School and Samuel Powel Elementary School. To be sure, this gesture benefits families, students, and teachers in those schools, and Drexel should be applauded for its efforts. And yet, as an educator, it’s hard not to think of all the students in Philadelphia who aren’t lucky enough to go to these schools.

When universities cherry-pick the communities that they want to invest in, gentrification follows, and low-income families lose out. This happened already in the area around Penn Alexander. After the university invested in the elementary school, the values of surrounding houses went up, meaning that the people who had lived there could no longer afford to live in the school’s catchment area.

To be sure, Penn Alexander is a wonderful school that does fantastic work for its students and families. It is also a school whose racial makeup does not reflect the city’s overall population. Of Penn Alexander students, 43% identify as white, 21% as Asian, and 20% as Black. In comparison, the Philadelphia School District’s overall demographics are 13% white, 7% Asian, 52% Black, 22% Latino, and 5% multiracial. Lea Elementary and Drexel’s partner schools — Powel and SLAM — are, at least for now, more closely aligned with the city’s overall demographics.

Within an education system that aligns property tax wealth with public school funding, poor neighborhood schools scratch and claw for every dollar. Schools in wealthy communities — or those with deep-pocketed backers — have the resources to provide top-quality education for a select few.

A system this broken requires more than one-off investments from billion-dollar institutions. In addition to Pennsylvania radically revising its school funding formulas, local institutions that don’t pay property taxes need to step up for all Philadelphia students. Investing their fair share would close the opportunity gap between the rich and the poor in our city and benefit all students, not just those lucky enough to live in the coveted catchment zones near Penn and Drexel.