Margie Wakelin
"There’s no reason that students who attend schools in low-wealth communities should not be able to obtain an adequate education."
For Margie Wakelin ’97, a reading assignment in an Exeter religion class her senior year was the springboard to her life’s work. The book: Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a striking 1991 analysis of the U.S. education system’s race- and economic-based disparities. “Sitting in this beautiful room around a Harkness table, reflecting on schools in Detroit and Chicago where there were massive [water] leaks and books that weren’t in any way teaching contemporary education, was the first time I had looked at that,” Wakelin, a Maine native, recalls. “And I thought, OK, we need to do better.”
And she has. Today, Wakelin is senior attorney in the Education Law Center in Philadelphia, where she played a pivotal role in the 2023 overhaul of Pennsylvania’s approach to school funding. In a landmark fair-funding case against the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the ELC asserted that legislators, education officials and the governor had violated the state’s constitutional obligation to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of public education. The state, they argued, should ensure that all students have the opportunity to meet its rigorous educational standards.
“We also said that it violated the equal protection clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution because there’s no reason that students who attend schools in low-wealth communities should not be able to obtain an adequate education in comparison to their peers who are in either high-wealth or not-low-wealth school districts,” Wakelin says. A 786-page decision on the heels of a four-month trial made it clear that the Commonwealth Court (one of the state’s two intermediate appellate courts) concurred.
Wakelin has long sought ways to help others. At Exeter, she was an active member of the Exeter Student Service Organization and read to children who were waiting for their mothers at a nearby WIC clinic. As an undergrad at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she organized students in a successful protest against an increase in in-state tuition that would have most negatively affected first-generation college students and students of color. “It was a great time and place to learn about advocacy,” she says. The recipient of a Morehead Scholarship at UNC — a four-year merit scholarship for which she was nominated by Exeter — Wakelin took advantage of the associated opportunities to look more closely at educational equity initiatives happening internationally and spent a summer conducting research in India.
She quickly realized she wanted to see what educational equality — or inequality — looked like closer to home and took a post with Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta after graduation. “Kozol wasn’t looking at Mississippi, but he could have been,” Wakelin says, describing her two years teaching self-contained special education in a post-Brown v. Board of Education high school in Indianola. The school had been neglected so long, she says, that a plaque stating it was the city’s “high school for colored students” still greeted visitors in 2002, when she arrived.
With most white students enrolled at segregated Indianola Academy, Gentry, the only public high school in town, had a primarily Black population that did not accurately reflect the city’s demographics. Every day, regardless of whether her students seemed aware of the deficits, Wakelin saw them. “My classroom was filled with nonfunctional computers, and I had to say, ‘Try not to look at the half of the classroom you can’t use. We’re going to huddle in this other half.’”
