As Philadelphians we must stop treating schools as a cost center and start treating them as the center of the city’s wealth strategy. A city is not truly wealthy because a few neighborhoods are attracting capital. A city is wealthy when its children are safe, literate, loved, challenged, healthy, and surrounded by adults who have enough stability to help them imagine and build a future.
When I started teaching in 1993, I made around $26,000 a year. What made the math work was housing support from my Aunt Rosie — free rent for a year, then significantly discounted rent after that. That support did not just help me survive. It helped me serve children and stay in the work. Too many of today’s teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, and youth workers do not have an Aunt Rosie who can close the gap between what the work pays and what life costs. That is not just their problem. It is the city’s.
The math we can’t avoid
The School District of Philadelphia has warned of a $300 million structural deficit rooted in historic underfunding and the loss of federal pandemic relief. Children’s First’s reporting on the District’s successes and struggles puts Philadelphia’s underfunding at nearly $1.25 billion. The 2023 Commonwealth Court ruling tracked by the Education Law Center found that Pennsylvania’s school funding system violates the state constitution. Meanwhile, Pew’s 2025 State of the City findings reported by WHYY show Philadelphia’s poverty rate at 20.3 percent in 2023, with Black and Hispanic residents experiencing poverty at significantly higher rates than white residents.
A city that wants to grow its economy cannot keep asking a starving institution to educate its future workforce, civic leaders, scientists, builders, and caregivers. When children sit in classrooms without enough teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians, arts, music, or safe buildings, the city is not saving money. It is accumulating debt — a debt that will raise its head year over year.
Make schools the center of the wealth strategy. Fund them like infrastructure. Staff them like children matter. Treat every neighborhood school like a community anchor.
Where the money actually is
As Philadelphians we should be willing to name the obvious. According to an Inquirer analysis of City records, roughly $29.6 billion of Philadelphia real estate is exempt from property taxes — about 17 percent of the city’s total real estate value — with combined tax breaks of roughly $414 million a year. The University of Pennsylvania alone owns at least $3.2 billion in property in the city and holds a multi-billion-dollar endowment while paying no property taxes on those holdings. Penn’s $100 million commitment over 10 years for environmental remediation in District buildings is the largest private contribution in the District’s history. It is also a small fraction of what Penn would owe annually if its tax-exempt holdings were on the rolls.
That gap is not a rounding error. It is the math of a city that needs its largest institutions to be civic partners, not just landlords.
Other cities have shown another arrangement is possible. Boston’s PILOT program asks large tax-exempt educational, medical, and cultural institutions with more than $15 million in exempt property to contribute 25 percent of what they would pay if taxable, with credits for qualifying community benefits. Yale’s latest voluntary agreement with New Haven commits more than $230 million through fiscal year 2033, with annual payments rising from about $13 million in 2021 to more than $30 million under the new plan. Philadelphia should not copy any city blindly, but we should continue to ask why our largest institutions cannot be part of a more ambitious civic compact for children.
Philadelphia’s growth sectors belong in the same conversation. The city is becoming a serious bioscience hub, with development clustering at the Navy Yard, Schuylkill Yards, and uCity Square. The 76ers’ new arena agreement in South Philadelphia includes an average PILOT and Use and Occupancy payment of $6 million a year over 30 years, more than double any previous local arena or stadium deal, along with a $50 million community benefits agreement, with the School District projected to receive roughly $153 million in new tax revenue over the life of the deal. That is the right direction. It also sets a standard the city should apply broadly. If a new arena can pay $6 million a year, the older sports facilities should be revisited. If bioscience is the next chapter of the city’s economy, the institutions building that chapter should be part of funding the schools that produce the workers and innovators they will eventually want to hire.
What FY27 got right, and what it didn’t
City Council partially took up Mayor Parker’s revenue ideas. The cell-tower change to the Use and Occupancy tax made it into the preliminary budget. The rideshare tax did not. In its place, Council added a one-time $48 million allocation to the District, bringing the total City contribution to the school district to $332 million — definitely a real gesture, but falling short of a critical recurring revenue stream. Even with the cell-tower revenue and the one-time allocation, Philadelphia still faces a structural school funding problem that city government’s creativity alone cannot solve.
This is the moment for a clear commitment. A coalition of advocates, labor partners, families, and educators is asking members of City Council to sign a pledge affirming that the FY27 funding level becomes the floor, not the ceiling, for Philly’s support of public education. The pledge acknowledges what is plainly true: that Philadelphia’s public schools are unconstitutionally underfunded by the Commonwealth, and that the City’s FY27 increase of $48 million was a serious and welcomed step.
A city is wealthy when its children are safe, literate, loved, challenged, healthy, and surrounded by adults who have enough stability to help them imagine and build a future.
It then asks elected leaders to keep going — to work with the Mayor, fellow Councilmembers, labor unions, advocates, and partners in Harrisburg to increase the pace of adequacy funding and secure new capital funding for the district; to identify local sources of recurring revenue; to demand that the School District immediately restore the 340 staffing positions Council funded in FY27; and to commit that in FY28 and beyond the City Grant, or other new sources of revenue, will not fall below $332 million, with current tax rates and shares held steady so the district can plan.
We are not asking Council to reopen the budget it just passed. We are asking for a clear statement of intent that this year’s investment is a baseline, not a one-time gesture. Sustained, recurring local revenue is the outcome. The mechanism can be debated. The destination cannot.
What the district is already doing right
A city serious about wealth-building treats academic opportunity as infrastructure, not as a lottery. The School District of Philadelphia has begun this work. Its $70 million investment in new core instructional resources, including the move to Illustrative Mathematics as the primary high-quality math curriculum, is exactly the kind of systemwide grounding that turns good intentions into consistent learning. The District’s proposed Facilities Master Plan names the goal directly: delivering access to Algebra I for every middle school student, investing in career and technical education at neighborhood high schools, and reinvesting in those neighborhood high schools as community anchors. These are wealth-strategy commitments, even if they are not usually described that way.
This is also where Philadelphia has to be honest with itself. For decades, the city’s school conversation has centered on a handful of magnet and special-admission schools, while the neighborhood schools that serve most Black and brown children have been treated as the schools families settle for. Selective schools have a place. They are not the whole story, and they cannot stand in for equity. A real wealth strategy elevates the neighborhood school every child can walk to — with algebra by eighth grade, AP and dual enrollment at every comprehensive high school, librarians and counselors and nurses in every building, arts and music as standard rather than supplemental, and rigorous, consistent academic opportunity for all students, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners.
A city that wants to grow its economy cannot keep asking a starving institution to educate its future workforce, civic leaders, scientists, builders, and caregivers.
Helping the people who already live here
A wealth strategy worth the name also helps the residents who already make this city work. Philadelphia has long used tax abatements to encourage development. It should be willing to use similar imagination for teachers, paraprofessionals, childcare workers, social workers, nurses, school counselors, librarians, youth workers, first responders, and sanitation workers — the people who turn buildings into neighborhoods.
Mayor Parker’s Housing Opportunities Made Easy initiative, a $2 billion plan to build, restore, and preserve 30,000 units, can play a real role here if early-career educators and other service-oriented professionals are kept at the center of how it gets built out. City Council has approved the bonds and the first-year budget, including expanded funding for Turn the Key, which builds homes on public land for first-time homebuyers and has been explicitly described as serving teachers, firefighters, and other city workers. Council has already passed a workforce-housing preference for income-qualified city employees through the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative, and that same logic should be applied generously inside H.O.M.E. A young teacher who can afford to stay is a child’s stability, a school’s continuity, and a neighborhood’s future, all at once.
The same principle applies to longtime residents. Philadelphia’s Homestead Exemption now reduces the taxable portion of a primary residence by $100,000, saving most homeowners up to $1,399 a year. The city should keep expanding tools like this, alongside the LOOP program for longtime owner-occupants and stronger protections against displacement, so the families who built these neighborhoods can stay in them as the city grows.
A different way to measure wealth
Philadelphia needs to fight for full constitutional school funding from Harrisburg while also acting big and innovatively locally as if children’s lives cannot be paused while adults negotiate. That is what Thurgood Marshall meant when he told his clerks to do what they thought was right and let the law catch up.
The city should measure its wealth differently — not just by jobs created, buildings built, or revenue projected, but by whether children are reading well, schools are fully staffed, families are housed, youth have paid opportunities, Black educators are being recruited and retained, and vulnerable students receive the services they deserve. A budget is a moral document. It is also a lesson plan. It teaches children what the city values.
Make schools the center of the wealth strategy. Fund them like infrastructure. Staff them like children matter. Treat every neighborhood school like a community anchor. Build a civic compact with the institutions that benefit most from being here. Help the people who teach, care, build, protect, and serve afford to stay. Do what is right. Let the law and policies catch up.
That is how a city becomes wealthy in a way that matters.
Sharif El-Mekki is the founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development.
The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who stipulate to the best of their ability that it is fact-based and non-defamatory.
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