Meek Mill, Kevin Hart, and Michael Rubin miss the point with $15 million scholarship donations | Opinion

By now, there has been a bunch of coverage of famous Philadelphians Meek Mill and Kevin Hart, along with Sixers co-owner Michael Rubin, making a $15 million donation to scholarship funds for underserved youth in the city. While this donation is being framed as a gift “to Philadelphia schools,” it is anything but.

These dollars are instead funneled into the coffers of private and parochial schools, while at the same time undermining public schools by simultaneously siphoning off students and sending the message that the only path to a decent education is to abandon your classmates and community.

Meek and Hart should know better. Meek Mill graduated from Strawberry Mansion High school, a school full of underserved students with its own recording studio donated by Drake (a shame that we have to rely on out-of-town rappers to keep it real more than our own alums). After graduating from George Washington High School in the Northeast, Hart briefly attended the Community College of Philadelphia, also a public institution.

Moves like this only continue to undermine public schools and contribute to the plethora of foundations and nonprofits around Philadelphia that purport to “help schools” while merely creating a layer of money that moves around and never makes its way directly to students.

Numerous educational non-profits — most notably the Philadelphia School Partnership, which supports school privatization and gives the majority of its funding to non-district schools — have sprung up around the city to fulfill missions that should be within the district’s purview, but instead each has its own layer of administration costs and back-slapping.

What would help the most underserved students? There are 213 private schools serving 45,658 students in Philadelphia, mostly wealthy. Meanwhile, there are 198,645 students enrolled across 216 District-Operated, 85 Charter, and 22 Alternative Education schools. This donation only helps 5,000 students for one year.

Our schools shouldn’t have to rely on charity in the first place. But the fact is that most of the schools that Philadelphians discuss as “good schools” got that way through copious private fundraising.

Masterman raises between $200,000-250,000 a year to support its operations. Central has a powerful alumni association with $10 million in assets and raised $225,000 in a single day last Giving Tuesday.

Even elementary schools must get in the game, if they want to provide adequate instruction. Well-regarded neighborhood schools are often built on donors’ largesse, whether it’s Penn propping up Sadie Alexander School or wealthy residents aggregating their donations in the six figures at schools like Meredith or Greenfield.

Meanwhile, the schools with students like Meek Mill and Kevin Hart were when they were coming up are fundraising for things like paper and classroom books. The underfunded school my children attend is full of kids that look up to Meek and Kevin Hart and wore their Sixers jersey shrieking with delight when one of Michael Rubin’s players made a visit. These men just effectively turned around and told them their school isn’t good enough.

This money could have built 100 school libraries, no small feat in a city where only 6 schools have a library with a full-time librarian. It could have built a recording studio like Strawberry Mansion’s in every high school in the city, or endowed a music or drama teacher in perpetuity at one of their alma maters. Instead the money will flow like water right through the hands of a small number of students on its way to a private or parochial school’s bank account.

I’ve been listening to Meek since back when every car window was blaring “Make Em Say” when I was pregnant with my now-sixth-grade public school student. It’s sad to learn that some of our local idols are throwing dollars in the wrong direction instead of helping kids who need it most.

Stephanie King is the president of Kearny Friends, the community group supporting Gen. Philip Kearny School in Northern Liberties, and is a member of Parents United for Public Education.