Vavan Gureghian runs a successful charter school called the Chester Community Charter School. The school is nonprofit, but Mr. Gureghian supplies its good and services through his for-profit company and collects millions of dollars as a management fee. Meanwhile the local Chester Upland public schools–whose funds pay for the students in the charter school–is in bankruptcy and under the control of a Governor-appointed “chief recovery officer.” Poor Chester Upland has been controlled by the state for most of the past decade, yet gets blamed for the fiscal insolvency that the state has deepened and may now use as an excuse to eliminate its public schools.
The following is copied from the newsletter of the Keystone State Education Coalition, which sends out a daily newsletter with news from Pennsylvania:
“Vahan Gureghian was Governor Corbett’s largest individual campaign donor at $384,000. His Charter School Management Company runs the Chester Community Charter School, Pennsylvania’s largest brick and mortar charter. Chester is one of Pennsylvania’s poorest urban school districts.
Does the $28.9 million noted below represent taxpayer funds that were NOT spent in the classrooms of Chester Upland? We don’t know, because Mr. Gureghian has been fighting a Right-to-Know request for the past several years. A controversial provision that would have exempted him from the Right-to-Know law was removed from SB1115, the charter school bill that was defeated last Wednesday.
Please open the link, here too.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beyond shameful…criminal theft of taxpayer funds. Lawyers, where are you?
LikeLike
This theft from the public sounds like something to be handled by a special prosecuter.
LikeLike
What does successful mean? Is it producing desirable academic outcomes, serving a heterogeneous student population… or are we talking financially “successful” (which it seems to be)?
LikeLike
Diane,
I believe that Chester Upland has been under state control since 1994 till 2010 and has now just been taken over again by a chief recovery officer. Many of the fiscal mishaps took place during that state control period.
LikeLike
So what’s the problem? If the school is successful and generating favorable learning outcomes, then this is PRECISELY why public charter schools need to exist, especially when many public school monopolies are burning through dollars wastefully and then begging the state for more dollars to waste.
Seems you’re trying to find something to bolster your tirade about charter schools being the “greatest threat to our nation.” Blah blah : )
LikeLike
If you google the school, you will find that successful is very loosely defined.
LikeLike