Thank you for this very informative and insightful article into the dark and shameful operations of the Philadelphia Public Schools System. I myself, lived in South Philadelphia as a child. Living in a black neighborhood,my elementary school was a segregated school. Upon going to a junior high with a large gang population,my parents appealed to then Congressman Bill Barrett,to arrange for me to go to Vare Junior High,which was located in the mostly Italian part of South Philadelphia. It was my first contact with white students. I did observe that a lot of other black students also attended Vare. This was in the early’60′s. It seems that unless black parents made the effort to send their kids to a more integrated school,the majority of the black children were shipped en masse to the targeted black junior high schools. This situation became more fluid by the mid and late ’60′s. Students in my neighborhood,could attend pretty much any school their parents wished to send them.