Category: Charter School Accountability

Board Must Deny All New Charter Applications from Global Leadership, Aspira and Perseverance

by Deborah Grill, Lisa Haver and Diane Payne

This district opened its first charter school in 1998.  Every year, those lobbying for and profiting from the privatization of public schools have promised to improve education for the city’s children.  They said that the district had an obligation to create charters for the good of the children and the community.  Twenty-five years later, we can see that the charter experiment foisted upon the city and its families has failed.  Because of the backing of well-funded PACs and special interest groups, with their increasing political influence, charters have avoided accountability to the same communities they made 6their promises to.  

The district has had many years to learn that the aspirational language of charter apps is rarely achieved.  Charter renewal evaluations don’t measure whether the schools have fulfilled their promises of innovation; they cite standardized test scores and other data. 

To read the reports on the applications click here

Board Addresses Possible Charter School Conflicts of Interest

Ears on the Board Of Education: January 26, 2023

by Diane Payne

FINALLY! 

Before the vote on the three Charter School renewals appearing on this agenda, President Streater made a statement about his concerns surrounding the interrelatedness of Charter School Boards, Charter Management Operators, and attorneys.  He made clear that overlapping Boards and attorneys do not provide the adequate protection needed to be good stewards of public funds.  This is one of many aspects of charter operations that are never publicly discussed except by APPS.  It is almost impossible to follow the money funneled into charter schools and know who is benefitting from public funds and whose pockets are being filled with the many interconnected groups. (More detail on this will appear in the voting section.)

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Board Must Reject All New Charter Applications

New Charter Applications Hearing:  December 20, 2022 

by Lynda Rubin

Four charter applicants, all of whom are currently operating charter schools that have failed to meet academic and other standards, have applied to the School District of Philadelphia to operate more. The opening hearing is a pro-forma “public” event in which charter representatives are each given 15 minutes to explain the mission of their proposed schools, with the district providing technical support for the on-screen presentations.  Members of the public, on the other hand, are given only two minutes each to state their positions for or against the creation of new charter schools.  The Board of Education seems to have gone out of its way to exclude the public from this hearing. They posted the legally required notice, in very small print, in the classified section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, but they posted no notice on the district’s website in any banner on the board’s page nor the charter schools page. APPS members and others with previous knowledge of this process hunted through the website, finally locating a small notice in the board’s calendar. Despite the fact that all board meetings have been held in person for over a year, and that all district schools and offices are open, the board is holding all charter hearings via zoom. Why?  In-person meetings have always been considered more informative, since presenters to a live audience are more engaging for all. They also provide an opportunity for people on both sides of the issue to organize and bring a unified message, as members of the Kensington Health Sciences Academy did in 2019. Their actions garnered community support and media attention. When the Board decides arbitrarily not to have fully public hearings, they are using yet another means to impose their speaker suppression policies.  Our December 15 letter to the Board asked for fully public hearings: “Consideration for charter applicants and operators should not take precedence over the rights of the community to be fully present and to express their support or opposition to new charter applications as both individuals and organizations.” The Board has not replied. 

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Board Renews Charters without Public Hearings

The Philadelphia Board of Education is just days away from renewing several charter schools, many of which have not met the basic standards set by the Board. The Board’s policies and practices ensure that the public has fewer opportunities to testify on how renewing the charters affect their neighborhood schools. The Board will also be voting to expand the enrollment of Keystone Academy Charter by over 40%, again with no public review. At its May action meeting, the Board added a Charter Schools Office presentation to the agenda just hours before the meeting convened and after they closed the window to sign up to testify. The Board holds no renewal hearings as other districts in the state do. Yet the Board will be voting to renew most of the twenty-two schools in this year’s cohort. Anyone who spoke at the May meeting–not knowing that the Board would be voting on the renewals next month– may be barred from speaking in June.

by Lisa Haver

To read more, click here.