A parent activist in Philadelphia sent me this astonishing story about how hard it is ( impossible?) to close a charter school.
In 2009, an employee filed a whistleblower complaint with the US Department of Education about financial misdeeds at Community Academy of Philadelphia, the city’s oldest charter school. When federal investigators arrived to confiscate records, they asked her to identify herself. She did and was fired the next day.
She has sued the school, but can’t get a trial because the charter school says it is the subject of a criminal investigation and has won delays. Meanwhile the School Reform Commission is determining whether to close the school because of low academic performance.
The criminal investigation drags on.
Here is the nub of the whistleblower’s complaint:
“Harper alleged that Joseph Proietta, Community’s founder and chief executive, and other officials ran Community Academy and One Bright Ray “like personal fiefdoms or family businesses rather than the publicly funded school and nonprofit entities that they are.”
“A month later, more than a dozen federal agents appeared at Community Academy and One Bright Ray and spent the day collecting boxes of documents and copying computer hard drives.
“According to Harper’s suit, when the agents arrived, an agent from the inspector general’s office approached Anna Duvivier, the school’s chief operating officer, and asked: “Where is Adorable Harper?”
“Harper raised her hand. The next day Proietta and Duvivier fired her.”
Harper is a graduate of the school.
The school has 1,235 students, K-12.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“When I debated Geoffrey Canada at Education Nation in 2011, I asked him why he kicked out the class, and he denied it. He said that he had closed the school because its performance was not good enough.” ?
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This has already been noted on this blog, but it bears repeating: the quote you reproduce [originally from Gary Rubinstein’s blog, and from yesterday’s discussion on this blog re Geoffrey Canada] is a damning indictment of the educational establishment, above all the leading lights of the charterite/privatizer movement. Disappearing a class, shutting a school down: these are, first and foremost, a profound failure of leadership and demonstrations of mind boggling incompetence.
But what happens to school staffs, students, parents, and communities? Do these Most Excellent Innovators of School $ucce$$ learn their lessons, clean up the messes they have made, take personal responsibility and face accountability? Not at all. It’s just as Bill Gates said, except it applies to the “impatient optimists” and “education reformers” themselves: 98% of them just get one word of evaluation, “Satisfactory,” and then fall upward.
Teacher evals and VAM, anyone?
🙂
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You might get more traction if this were pitched less to the “professional educator”. I simply gather information and remark inconsistencies, because this interests me. The “bears repeating” part, I agree with you, but I also think you need to appeal to a much wider audience. Why is it so easy for the “reformers” to shut down a charter school, but then so hard for citizens (i.e. Philadelphia) to shut down a charter school?
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Diane: Check today’s issue of LOUISIANA VOICE John White and Jindal are being forced to release DOE records they have been trying to hide, most notably those related to Teach for America and related groups.
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Frustrating for all concerned. Having been a public school administrator who was involved a few times with assaults by students, I have experienced first hand how slow the criminal justice system can be.
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Having tracked news stories about problems at charter schools for over three years now, I will attest to the difficulties involved with their closure. When threatened, the management will rally parents and students to attend board meetings on the school’s behalf. It doesn’t seem to matter if the school is grossly low-performing or if the operators are outright crooks, the begging will often result in a new charter, esp. when there are enough charter-friendly board members who are willing to ignore a recommendation for closure that was made by their own district’s charter school office.
Sometimes the hearings for the charter school and the determination of the final decision goes on for months.
Any rejected charter school can go authorizer-shopping if they are in a state with multiple authorizers. Each which accepts a submitted proposal will spend a new set of hours evaluating it and arriving at its own recommendation.
If the school is finally closed because of financial mismanagement, debts are never paid. Sometimes stranded employees never get their paychecks. In the case of embezzlement and fraud, most of the stolen money is never recovered.
Then there are the cases that end up with multiple appeals or civil lawsuits. For lawsuits, the public foots the legal bills for both the defendant and the plaintiff because the funding for BOTH comes directly from taxpayers. Another thing to add to the time and money burned up during this process (both in front of AND behind the scenes) are the courtroom costs (judges, necessary court personnel, etc.).
So as for closing schools, it’s much easier for a controlling entity to make a top-down decision that can never be contested, as with the case of closing a Catholic or a public school. Those decisions are made long in advance and only presented to school communities when they are a done deal. There is no recourse for public school parents and staff because they don’t have their own independent source of public money that will cover the legal costs of defending their school in time-consuming, expensive lawsuits and appeals.
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Sharon, in my experience, charter laws and school district decisions vary. In some states, charters are not allowed to go “shopping” for different authorizers if they have been closed.
In some school districts, parents have successfully challenged decisions to close schools. I agree that in some school boards made decisions are made about school closings without much public input, and that in some districts, despite public input, schools are closed.
More than 1,000 charters have been closed. It is possible to close them. Some deserved to be closed.
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Here’s the issue why people don’t want to invoke the whistle-blower’s protection when they witness corruption/mismanagement or any egregious behavior from an administrator within a school, whether it’s a charter or public school. The whistle-blower is not protected. The law is there in name only but the protection for the whistle-blower is sans once the corruption is exposed of a well-protected, financially endowed “deformer”.
I’m sorry to hear this about Ms. Harper, but it’s also happening to Francesco Portelos. He reported thief of service by his principal and yet OSI and SCI could not pin anything on Mr. Portelos. Yet, the DoE wants to proceed to fire him. He filed for whistle-blowers protection. Will he be protected? A law that cannot be enforced to protect those who seek justice is a law that was written to enable those empowered to scoff the law.
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Just out of curiosity, I looked up Adorable Harper, and found out that she went on to found a charter school. I couldn’t find any information on New Leaders Vo-Tech Charter High School, however.
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