This is incredible but true. Tricked by aggressive marketing, some parents in Philadelphia are putting their five- and six-year-old children on a two hours plus bus ride to a low- performing charter school. The Chester Community Charter School is owned by a major Republican donor.
“Imagine waking your 5-year-old kindergarten student before 5 a.m., walking him to a street corner in the city’s Far Northeast, then watching him board a bus for a 2½-hour ride to a school more than 30 miles away.
“Then, imagine he endures the same trip in reverse each afternoon. Five days a week.
“For some parents, it’s not just a bad dream. Such a routine is customary for an increasing number of Philadelphia students enrolled at Chester Community Charter School…
”As enrollment grows, so do the profits of CSMI LLC, a for-profit education management company that operates Chester Community, and was founded and is run by Vahan H. Gureghian, a lawyer, entrepreneur, and major Republican donor.
“CSMI’s books are not public – the for-profit firm has never disclosed its profits and won’t discuss its management fee. State records show that Gureghian’s company collected nearly $17 million in taxpayer funds just in 2014-15. At that time, the school had 2,911 students, and CSMI was paid $5,787 for each. At that rate, more than 1,000 additional students from Philadelphia might mean nearly $6 million in new revenue…
”Results from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams released in September showed that Chester Community had some of the lowest scores among charter schools in the region: 15.6 percent of Chester Community students passed the PSSA reading test in the last school year; 6 percent passed math. Those scores are similar to those of Khepera Charter School in North Philadelphia, which the School Reform Commission has voted to close in June because of poor academics and financial woes. At Khepera, 15.8 percent of students passed reading; 2 percent passed math.”
Marketing pays off handsomely.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beware of Marketers!
I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t blame the victim, but…. Sometimes when you get scammed perhaps you should look in a mirror. Who on earth thinks this is a good idea? I get marketing and all, but if you’re invested enough in your child’s education to go through all that, you’re invested enough to check out the school in the first place. It would have to be one hell of a school to justify a four hour commute. Very few adults even have that much of a commute.
One of the commenters on the linked article suggests that parents like the four hour commute because it gives them an extra four hours of free babysitting. These days, I’m getting cynical enough to believe that could be the case.
That is a really depressing story.
Here’s a good companion piece to the story:
http://www.philly.com/philly/education/chester-community-charter-school-renewal-extension-under-scrutiny-20171222.html
The for-profit owners of the school are politically connected. That’s why Pennsylvania has thrown tens of millions into this terrible school.
Pennsylvania charter corruption is under-rated. They are as bad as Ohio and Michigan, they just don’t get the same amount of media coverage.
OH, MI, IN and PA are ed reform disaster zones. That whole slice of the country. Soon we’ll be able to add Wisconsin to the list. Very soon. Ed reformers now own Wisconsin.
I would say this is “Pennsylvania’s ECOT” (a comparable scandal to Ohio’s ECOT) but Pennsylvania actually has their OWN giant rip-off online charter, so Pennsylvania already had an ECOT.
You wonder why the state treasurer in PA doesn’t get any traction. He has been screaming about PA’s charters for what seems like a decade.
One can understand it in Ohio- the whole state apparatus is captured, but PA has a treasurer who dares to talk about this. Why can’t he get anything done?
What happens when the public system completely collapses? What’s the “choice” then? This for-profit operator or nothing? Wow. Some “choice”.
Everything else aside for now…WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE PARENTS???
David Osborne is the country’s ;leading charter cheerleader.
Look at what he does here:
“It’s no accident that where authorizers regularly close failing schools — in Boston, New York, Newark, Indianapolis, New Orleans, and other cities — charters vastly outperform district schools. Where many authorizers abdicate this responsibility — in Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Texas, Florida, and other states — they don’t.”
He cites 5 cities to promote charters, and discounts the effects of privatization in 5 huge states.
This goes beyond cherrypicking. They have to ignore the VAST majority of charters to promote charter schools. Osborne insists we forget about MI, OH, AZ, TX and FL and instead look at….Boston.
How could anyone look at this honestly and promote privatization? Is is failing in the VAST majority of places!
Charter success is the outlier. Charter failure is the norm. God I hope lawmakers aren’t actually listening to these privatization salespeople. If they are we’re all screwed.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2017/12/20/clean-charters/108801470/
To give you a reference for the scale of the problem, I am going to give you some geographical references. The far northeast is about thirty minutes away from Trenton, New Jersey, while Chester County, PA, is almost to Delaware. Market based education invites flim flam marketeers to capture students through glossy brochures and empty promises. Unfortunately, the fact that the school is geographically a two and a half hour trip away is ignored during the pitch. By the way, it would be longer in heavy traffic. Many charters are pay to play schemes that leave families with buyers’ remorse after their child has signed up. With market based education, parents have to be informed consumers before signing on the dotted line.
“Many charters are pay to play schemes that leave families with buyers’ remorse after their child has signed up.”
A charter school is not a prison, nor is signing your child up an enduring binding commitment. After all, the school is certainly free to chuck your kid out the back door, so the family, in turn, is free to leave. The door to the real public school is, after all, always open.
Also, by the way, what part of “the bus leaves at 5:24 a.m.” did these parents not understand upfront?
Out here in rural Missouri 1-1 1/2 hour public school bus rides are not that uncommon. 2-2 1/2 hr rides? No.
DeVos claims that parent choice is the “right” choice. How is sitting on a bus for two and a half hours good for a five year old? What do working parents do if their child gets sick?
There are many decent public schools in the northeast, mostly a middle/working class white part of the city. I am certain that these schools provide a better education than the disappointing results of The Chester County Charter School without subjecting young children to such a grueling schedule. By the way, the title of the school should have been a red light to parents, if they knew where Chester County was!
I have no idea if Chester Community Charter School is a good school but it is completely disingenuous of Ms Ravitch to write “Aggressive Marketing Fools Philly Parents into Sending Children to Low-Performing Charter Two Hours Away” and “Tricked by aggressive marketing, some parents in Philadelphia are putting”
There is no evidence or even an anecdote presented in the article to support this claim. Apparently the reporter could not find ONE parent to comment on the long bus ride or whether they were ‘fooled’ or ‘tricked’ by the marketing.
Chester Community Charter School may be a bad school but Ms Ravitch should at least be fair about what is covered in the linked article.
The state says that Chester Community Charter School is one of the lowest performing charters in the state. A parent in Philadelphia told me about the aggressive marketing.
“The state says that Chester Community Charter School is one of the lowest reforming charters in the state.”
Not my point but since you brought it up, how does it compare to the schools where these kids are coming from?
“A parent in Philadelphia told me about the aggressive marketing.”
Aggressive marketing is no proof of tricked\fooled parents.
Dianne is being kind by calling these parents “tricked’ or “fooled.”
From the article, “A spokesman for the charter school credits those moves with increasing Chester Community’s appeal for Philadelphia parents. A Philadelphia district administrator says the growth says more about slick marketing by a school with a record of substandard performance.” So, as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the district administrator did, one can read into the professional marketing language used by the company spokesman, “increasing appeal”, that aggressive marketing is swaying parents to a charter that does not show the signs of a “high performer”. It was marketing. The charter spokesman said so. Couple that with the torturous, physically unhealthy, mental-social developmentally detrimental bus rides, and it’s obvious that these parents have made some very poor decisions (as long as the Philadelphia public schools are not doubling as nuclear waste and explosive ordnance dumps), decisions so poor they’re indefensible unless advertising can be blamed. It was aggressive marketing. I rest my case.
From the LA Times: “For more than a decade, California air quality officials have warned against building homes within 500 feet of freeways. And with good reason: People there suffer higher rates of asthma, heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and pre-term births. Recent research has added more health risks to the list, including childhood obesity, autism and dementia.”
I don’t think Pennsylvania has freeways nearly as crowded as L.A., but still, spending 4 hours on a bus is not healthy. Have you smelled bus exhaust? Not healthy. Then, there’s the added environmental cost of long commutes. Not healthy for the environment. Philly is looking into the increased financial burden of busing due to this charter. There’s more to it than that. This is all wrong, and should possibly be outlawed, in my humble opinion.
This links to several articles about the Charter Effect in PA. http://www.publicsource.org/series/the-charter-effect/?platform=hootsuite
This is sad for the children. Please note that the Chester Community Charter School is not in Chester County as indicated in the first paragraph but in Chester, PA, which is in Delaware County.
If your minimum wage job starts at 6 am, this unfortunately might be the least terrible option you have for your child. A living wage, affordable child care, and a well funded school in your neighborhood not everyone’s reality.
As to your last sentence, Lara–& that’s precisely the problem.
I saw a REALLY sad news program, narrated by Diane Sawyer, several years ago (or perhaps just last year), where families had their kids in SLEEPOVER care (that’s right, not just daycare, but OVERNIGHT care), because the parents worked two jobs. So how are these parents able to raise/spend time w/their children? Just barely, or not at all.
This is a sick, sick country.
Agree… Our wealthy nation is very sick when we leave working families to make these kind of decisions. Seems like it’s only going to get worse…
I want to clarify that I am NOT criticizing the parents.
I detest the selfish billionaires, corporations, “elected” politicians (people such as Orrin Hatch, who have forgotten what the term “public servant” means) & everyone else who has sucked the blood out of the majority of adult Americans & their children.
Note: just saw that Southwest & United Airlines were using their tax breaks from the tax “reform” to give each of their employees a $1,000 bonus.
“Note: just saw that Southwest & United Airlines were using their tax breaks from the tax “reform” to give each of their employees a $1,000 bonus.”
Whoopee! I read an article this morning that noted that companies are not giving raises, just one time bonuses. Could they give their employees a raise of $1000–something that would have a lasting impact on their employees bottom line?
The Chester story sounds like it needs a deeper dive. I have total sympathy with parents who are desperate to have their children under someones watchful eye and have limited resources to do so.