Education, the Great Un-Equalizer: School Building and Gentrification in West Philadelphia

• In Event: "Get Out": Disrupting Education via Space, Race, and Policy in the 20th Century

Abstract

This paper is a historical study of the creation of a university partnership K-12 school in West Philadelphia in the early 2000s, which resulted in gentrification and increased segregation. It draws on archival research and oral history of the experience of parents and students there. The study links the events of that period to the earlier history of university interventions in West Philadelphia going back to the 1950s. At that time, school-building was an integral part of a plan to replace one population with another. Following the conference theme, which urges us not just to critique the past, the paper offers thoughts on what could be done differently in a case like this.

Author

• Edward M. Epstein, University of Pennsylvania