One of the hats I wear outside of my practice is that of a board member for a public charter school that specializes in design education. The Charter High School for Architecture and Design is pretty amazing. Its mission is to educate inner city youth in Philadelphia and expose them to architecture, design, and related fields.
The Charter High School for Architecture and Design (CHAD) was started in 1999 by a group of architects in Philadelphia in connection with the AIA National Convention that took place in the city that year. Each national convention has some type of legacy project, like repainting a recreation center or assisting on building a house in the community. So these Philadelphia architects decided to do something incredibly ambitious.
Back then, and still today 17 years later, the percentage of minority participation in design fields was disproportionately low. At CHAD, 90 percent of the kids are minority students who come from all over the city of Philadelphia. They learn architecture, fashion design, product design, and other fields that the public schools don’t have the resources to teach. Our success rate at getting kids to graduate and go on to a trade school, or two or four year colleges is much higher than the city public school average. What a lot of people don’t understand about CHAD is that, because it’s a public charter, we have to abide by all the same regulations that other public schools do.
We are required by law to accept any and all students who choose to enroll. We have the same curriculum standards and testing. At least in our case, we offer a unique design curriculum that isn’t available elsewhere. We feel strongly about our mission and there’s a ton of stats to show how we’re doing. The school does an amazing job of giving kids opportunities for post-high school education or employment, even if it’s not in the design field; these are opportunities they wouldn’t have had without the school. I’ve felt an obligation to contribute as a board member for the past 10 years, to do my very small part in helping introduce minority kids to the design fields.
In 2016, the national convention returned to Philadelphia, so we had a celebration of the school’s 15th anniversary. We took a group of the students to the convention. They attended an all-day program, met with architects from the National Organization of Minority Architects, which has an active chapter in Philadelphia, and connected some of the students with its leaders.
Underneath it all is the fact that the lack of quality public school education is the biggest single issue facing large cities, particularly ones like Philadelphia.
In Pennsylvania and probably in many other states, the funding formulas create an inequality in public education because they are based on local property taxes. The higher the percentage of poor families in a school district, the lower the funding per student. At the same time, poorer school districts have a lot more issues to contend with, including everything that comes with poverty.
–JK