We noted, last Friday, the waste case that Martin Luther King High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has become. MLKHS at least has the ‘excuse,’ if it can be called that, of being a school in the depressed East Germantown neighborhood, with 100% of students coming from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families.

But what about a case like this?

One of Philly’s premier high schools is in turmoil, staff, parents, and students say

Enrollment issues, staff divisions and other problems are troubling Philadelphia’s storied High School for Creative and Performing Arts, those inside say.

by Kristen A Graham | Monday, May 12, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

One of Philadelphia‘s top magnet schools is in disarray, those inside it say — shedding enrollment, losing teachers, and facing issues with safety and school climate.

Make no mistake: The Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, in its historic, columned building on South Broad Street, continues to produce shows, concerts, a musical. But it has changed, and continuing problems with internal politics and personnel threaten its stability.

“There’s all this positive stuff going on, but underneath all of that is a lot of toxicity,” one teacher said.

More than a dozen CAPA staff and former staff, students, and parents described to The Inquirer a school roiled by internal strife. Most of those interviewed declined to be publicly named for fear of reprisal.

Naturally, I checked the school’s rankings, and again have the obvious question: with only 60% testing at grade-level proficiency in math, and just 44% in science, how does the school have a 98% graduation rate? A quarter of the students are behind in reading, in a school geared to the performing arts, yet 98% are still being graduated.

I do have a question about the statistics. It was no surprise that 100% of MLKHS students were from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families, but the rankings indicated that 100% of CAPA students were from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families as well, and that 100% were on the free school lunch program. That makes no sense in a magnet school like CAPA, which leads me to suspect that the city simply records all students as being poor, to give them a free lunch.

Concerns about problems at CAPA have been brought to the Philadelphia School District for years, to the school board in recent weeks, and, most recently, to City Council. The teachers union is also aware.

Assuming that reporter Kristen Graham’s statement is completely accurate, it would mean that the School District administration has known about problems at CAPA for “years,” but only reported these to the city’s Board of Education — nine members appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the City Council — “in recent weeks.”

The Board of Education is the governing body responsible for overseeing all policies and budgetary decisions of the School District of Philadelphia.

How, exactly, can the Board take any informed decisions if the School District’s administration doesn’t give the Board the information it needs?

“At this point, it‘s pretty bad in there,” a second staffer said. “CAPA has always been an ‘everyone’s family’ kind of place, and now there’s all this division, and it‘s spilled over into so many things, into enrollment, into teacher retention. Morale is very low, and I suspect that the enrollment is going to be affected for several years to come.”

Because of the projected enrollment drop, CAPA was initially slated to lose five teachers — including those in key roles in the arts school — but district officials said they would restore some of those positions. But no official notice of the restoration has come, and many teachers have accepted other positions or are actively interviewing.

One would think that the Board, “responsible for overseeing all policies and budgetary decisions,” would have noticed an enrollment drop leading to the reduction in teachers. Were the Board really in the dark about CAPA?

Perhaps they weren’t in the dark, but didn’t want anything to do with the problems, because Miss Graham devoted over a dozen paragraphs telling readers that the problems are racial. Assistant principal Kimberly Byrd is black, but has initial problems with then-Principal Joanne Beaver, a white woman. Miss Graham noted a succession of leaders who then just up and left, though Miss Byrd has remained.

The Inquirer story noted that CAPA’s student body is “diverse”: 50% black; 27% white; 12% Hispanic; and 6% Asian. This differs significantly, though not dramatically, from the city’s overall population, which are 39.9% black, 33.6% non-Hispanic white, 15.2% Hispanic of any race, and 7.8% Asian.

Miss Graham stated explicitly that CAPA has “too few Black teachers”, but also noted that both nationwide and in the Philadelphia School District in particular, blacks make up a significantly smaller percentage of teachers, just 6.2% in Philly. Yet, as we noted on Friday, Miss Graham reported that the School District is understaffed by almost 300 teachers, which means that the School District ought to be able to hire about 300 new teachers as long as those teachers were qualified, and could pass the background check and drug test. Are there simply not enough black — or other than black — applicants for those jobs?

The Inquirer story was a long one, and neither CAPA nor the School District wanted to be available to talk to the reporter, but Miss Graham was able to plenty of staff who would talk anonymously:

Byrd, more than a dozen staffers said, often labels CAPA as an “inherently racist institution” to faculty, staff, and students, a notion that those interviewed by The Inquirer — both Black and white — dismiss.

Reporter Graham was careful with her words, and gave plenty of space to Veronica Joyner, education chair of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, who was speaking on her behalf, and Barbara Ransom, Miss Byrd’s lawyer, to defend the Assistant Principal, but as I read the article, it certainly seems as though Miss Byrd was the source of much of the tension. If that’s the case, it’s little wonder that the School District and Board of Education don’t want to get involved; can you imagine the reaction in the City of Brotherly Love if a black school administrator was disciplined or removed for stirring up racial problems?

In a 2021 story — we were unable to find anything more recent — the newspaper reported that Philadelphia was second only to Chicago as the most internally segregated major city in the country between blacks and whites, and sixth most segregated between Hispanic and white residents. We reported, two years ago, that internal segregation was more likely to increase, as much of the new housing being constructed was in the more expensive areas of Philly.

The district declined to make CAPA administrators available for an interview.

Translation: the School District administrators were told by the Inquirer about the story on which Miss Graham was working, and they wanted no part of it. We have written many things critical of the newspaper, and those were deserved, but in this instance, Miss Graham did as good a work as was possible under the deliberate silence of the School District’s high muckety-mucks, and Publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ instructions that the Inky would be an “antiracist news organization.” Telling an uncomfortable truth does not come easily to the Inquirer, but Kristen Graham came close.