What Were They Actually Trying to Do?

In October 2024, a federal district court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by three Philadelphia parents challenging the School District's new selective school admissions policy. The judge wrote, in essence, that no fair-minded jury could find that the district's stated goal of increasing racial diversity had been implemented with discriminatory intent. The parents had sued over the 2021 change — the day-the-cycle-opened change, the ZIP code automatic admission change — and the district won. At the district court level, it looked like the case was over.

Then, on February 2, 2026, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that dismissal and sent the case back for trial. The appellate court found that a reasonable factfinder could conclude the ZIP code preference policy "functioned as racial balancing" — that ZIP codes, in this context, were being used as an impermissible proxy for race. The district's own public statements about evaluating policies "through the lens of racial equity" and its explicit goals to increase African-American and Hispanic representation were cited as evidence of discriminatory purpose. The case is now alive again, and the district will have to defend its policy in court.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because the district's position deserves scrutiny that it has not received. The district changed its admissions policy — which had previously been based on academic criteria, teacher recommendations, and attendance — to a lottery system that gave automatic admission to students from six specific ZIP codes (19133, 19140, 19134, 19132, 19121, 19135). Students from those ZIP codes who met minimum academic thresholds were admitted automatically. Everyone else competed for the remaining seats via lottery. The district called this an "antiracist" reform. When challenged, the district's lawyers argued the policy was race-neutral — the preferences were based on geography, not race.

The Third Circuit was not persuaded. And the reason I think this matters beyond the legal question is that it exposes something about how the district operates: it will do a thing, claim it is for a social goal, and then argue in court that it is not actually doing the thing. The policy was designed to change the racial composition of schools like Masterman. That was the explicit goal. The district's own public statements say so. But when the lawsuit came, the district's defense was "we used ZIP codes, not race, therefore it's race-neutral." The Third Circuit found that a reasonable factfinder could see through that. Good.

Here is what I keep coming back to: the goal itself may have been defensible. More diverse representation at the city's best schools — more pathways for students from neighborhoods that had been historically excluded — is a legitimate public interest. If the district had said "we are going to use socioeconomic status as a factor in admissions, and here is what that means and why we think it will work," there would have been a real debate to have. But the district didn't do that. The district used ZIP codes as proxies, claimed race-neutrality while knowing the effect was racial, and then seemed surprised when the people affected by the policy noticed and sued.

Call the goal what it is. If you want more Black and Hispanic students at Masterman, say so, and defend it. If the goal is legitimate, it can survive scrutiny. But the doublespeak — "we are race-neutral, we just happen to have selected six ZIP codes that have the exact racial demographics we want" — is its own kind of corruption. The Third Circuit saw through it. The parents saw through it. The people who have been writing about this for three years saw through it. At some point the district needs to admit what it was doing and either defend it or stop doing it.

Now let me make the other argument, because it is the one that gets lost in the legal back-and-forth. The real problems in Philadelphia schools are not admissions problems. They are resource problems. They are the schools with no air conditioning in classrooms where temperatures hit 90 degrees in September. They are the teachers who are underpaid relative to collar county districts and who leave for better compensation after a few years. They are the students who arrive at selective high schools without the foundational preparation they need because the middle schools they came from didn't have the resources to teach them properly. None of that gets fixed by changing who gets into Masterman.

If the goal is to produce more Black doctors, engineers, and leaders — and I think that is a legitimate goal — the answer is not to change the admissions criteria at selective schools. The answer is to fix the pipeline: the middle schools, the elementary schools, the counseling infrastructure, the resource gaps that mean students from certain neighborhoods arrive at high school having had three years of science instruction in a trailer with a substitute teacher. The students who were given automatic admission under the new ZIP code policy did not suddenly become more prepared for Masterman's curriculum. They arrived with the same preparation gaps they had before, and the school has been left to manage the consequences — diluting curriculum, reassigning teachers, slowing pace — as documented in the Masterman Home and School Association's 51-page report.

And here is the thing about the students who are now attending Masterman under the new system: the ones who were admitted because they lived in the right ZIP code and met minimum thresholds, not because they were at the top of the applicant pool — many of them are from communities that have been under-resourced for generations. They are not unprepared because they lack intelligence or drive. They are unprepared because the schools they came from didn't have what they needed. Putting them in a building with students who have been preparing for years at well-resourced schools doesn't fix that. It exposes them to an environment where they will be measured against a standard they never had a fair chance to meet. And as the mismatch research shows — the research that the district apparently did not consult when designing this policy — that experience tends to push students out of the hardest subjects, not into them.

Which brings me to the last thing, and it is the part of this that I think is not being said. The policy change has a specific demographic effect that is rarely acknowledged in the public conversation. At Masterman before the policy change, the student body was roughly 39% white and 33% Asian. Across the district's special-admissions schools as a whole, and over multiple lottery cohorts, the Urban Institute's April 2024 analysis shows Black and Hispanic enrollment shares rising while Asian and white shares declined. The picture at Masterman specifically has been uneven year to year, because its incoming class is only about 100 students and small-cohort noise dominates: in the first lottery year, Asian enrollment at Masterman grew to 43% of the incoming class while white enrollment fell six percentage points. The Asian American families in Philadelphia who had invested the most in their children's education — who had allocated every available dollar to tutoring, to test prep, to the whole ecosystem of academic preparation that middle-class families in this city use to position their kids — found themselves competing in a lottery where the odds were explicitly weighted against them if they didn't happen to live in the right ZIP code. These are not wealthy families. Some of these communities — Cambodian, Vietnamese, Lao — have significant poverty rates and have been investing disproportionately in education as the primary pathway out. The policy that was supposed to help underrepresented students ended up penalizing, in the aggregate across years and across schools, a group of Asian American students whose families had done everything right, and who were now being told that geography mattered more than preparation.

Meanwhile, the families who have the option to leave Philadelphia for the suburbs when the city's best schools get drawn into political controversies — the upper-middle-class white families who have the financial flexibility to vote with their feet — mostly did exactly that. Masterman's white enrollment hasn't collapsed, but the families who were most able to exit a contested situation have been the most likely to do so. That is not a critique of those families. It is an observation about who has the option, and what that means for the schools that remain.

The Third Circuit gave the parents who sued a chance to get justice. The case goes back to the district court, and the district will have to defend what it did. That matters. But the larger answer to the question in the title of this piece is not going to come from a courtroom. It is going to come from fixing the schools that students at the bottom of the preparation pipeline come from — the schools that don't have AC, the schools that can't keep teachers, the schools that produce students who arrive at high school without the fundamentals they need. Until someone does that, the admissions reform is a theater set on a stage with no infrastructure behind it. The play may look different from the audience's perspective, but nothing underneath has changed.