Lisa Haver, Parent Activist in Philadelphia, writes here about how it takes years and millions of dollars to close failing charter schools. The public must pay the cost of challenging the charter and pay the cost of defending the charter. The charter operator gets a free ride for failing. Only the taxpayers and students lose.
Why is it easy to close a public school but hard to close a charter school? One guess: charter lobbyists wrote the state law.
Lisa Haver writes:
“This is an unbelievable story about what it takes to shut down a failing charter in Pennsylvania.
“Aspira charter operates 5 schools in Philadelphia, 2 of which are Renaissance charters–Olney High School and Stetson Middle school. The Renaissance program is the one where the district hands over management of struggling district schools to people who are not educators in the belief that they can bring up test scores–which Aspira has not done. The Renaissance program has been a very expensive failure in Philadelphia.
“This Aspira renewal process is now in its 5th year–since 2014. There have been numerous stories, including many in the Philadelphia Daily News–about misuse of taxpayer funds and other evidence of mismanagement.
“The District finally voted in 2017 not to renew these charters.
“For some reason, it took almost 18 months to begin the hearings.
“The District has to pay its own lawyer and hearing examiner AND for the charter schools’ lawyers.
“APPS members including me have attended the hearings every day for the first two weeks, and it is obvious that the charters’ lawyers are running up their own legal fees by asking the same questions over and over to a succession of witnesses.
“This is going to cost the District well over $150,000. That is a lowball figure.
“When the district closed 24 schools in 2013, there were NO legal hearings at all. The state requires a long legal process for revoking a charter that may have been around for 5 or 10 years, but none for neighborhood schools that have been around for decades–like Germantown high, which was closed one year before its 100th anniversary.
“A disgrace.”
From the article:
“One of the city’s charter-school operators has moved money from one account to another without explanation: no loan agreements, no signatures — “a shell game,” in the words of a Philadelphia School District auditor.
“Now the School District is shelling out money to try to pull two charters from Aspira — whose school bills are paid by the district — in a legal fight that could end up costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s really the district paying for both sides, which is kind of insane,” said Temple University law professor Susan DeJarnatt.
“Welcome to Pennsylvania charter school law,” said Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. “It’s unbelievable.”
Parent advocates have called on school officials for years to investigate these failing charters but were ignored.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
“Now the School District is shelling out money to try to pull two charters from Aspira — whose school bills are paid by the district — in a legal fight that could end up costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.”
This is exactly what happened with ECOT in Ohio. There was a decade of litigation.
No one was accountable at all in ECOT- no one was indicted, the 400 million was never recovered. Ohio is so captured by ed reform the attorney general didn’t even bother to pursue 400 million in missing funds. That money will go the heirs of the ECOT founder.
Us Department of Education is spending yet another work-week promoting ed reform’s 5 billion dollar private school voucher program.
Another week where none of these public employees put any effort into the PUBLIC schools 90% of children attend.
What’s the stats on private schools? 3% of US students? Why is this federal agency working exclusively on behalf of 3% of students?
Ludicrous. We have federal employees who are ideologically opposed to public schools, and refuse to lift a finger on behalf of 90% of students. We’re all paying them for this.
Here’s how the “portfolio” approach works in practice:
“The Indianapolis Public Schools commissioner board voted to partner with a soon-to-open charter school Thursday night.
KIPP Indy Public Schools will open a high school in north-eastside Martinwood Brightwood neighborhood this summer. The partnership will allow KIPP to purchase services from IPS, such as transportation.
There was some division among commissioners on whether to bring KIPP Indy Legacy High School into the district.
“I cannot close three high schools in less than a year and open another high school for IPS to support,” Commissioner Elizabeth Gore says. ”
They disinvest from the public schools and then close them, and open exclusively charter schools to replace the closed schools.
It isn’t “agnostic” at all. It’s run and funded by ideologically-driven ed reformers who simply don’t support, expand, or fund existing public schools.
Close three public schools, open exclusively charter schools. In 5 years every single public school will be gone, which was the goal.
More false advertising from ed reform. No one mentions what’s going on in Indianapolis PUBLIC schools when they’re selling this scheme nationwide. There’s a reason public schools are omitted from ed reform analysis. Public school students always lose in these deals. Always.
A Gates Foundation job posting in February for an “officer” to “further
the Digital Learning portfolio’s impact” – fully expected from the oligarchy.
One problem is Pennsylvania is the leftover laws from the Corbett administration that leave the commonwealth with overly generous compensation for charters, even cyber charters, as well as other laws giving the charter industry preferential treatment. It is a challenge to change these laws when members of the legislature are still personally invested in privatization.
BTW I attended Stetson for two turbulent years when it was a junior high school. The shifting demographics of the neighborhood made it a school with lots of social unrest. I can only imagine what the school is like today as this neighborhood is ground zero for heroin in the Mid-Atlantic states.
For more on Philly’s big plan for the poor, read Wrench in the Gears. The city is jumping into social impact investing in a big way. Both Penn and Temple are contributing to this 1984 dystopia. https://wrenchinthegears.com/2019/03/03/philadelphias-5th-district-city-council-race-a-call-for-a-town-hall-on-social-impact-investing/
posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Philadelphia-It-Takes-Yea-in-General_News-Charter-Schools_Public-Disclosure_Public-Schools_Public-Trust-190325-178.html#comment728917
with this comment which has many links embedded at the above address.
Check former (ass’t) Sec’y of Education Ravitch’s blog for info on the enormous charter fraud being perpetrated across the 15,880 separate school systems in the US. And go to this link for more on the Orwellian “choice’offered by charter operators.
and here are some examples to the what is afoot when Charters are sold as educational choice.:
Here are but a few of the articles that will demonstrate the war on public education, put forth by those who steal taxpayer money to reward the power elite, by ending the civil rights of our students.
A crack investigative team at the Arizona Republic won the prestigious George Polk Award for their fearless expose of charter school corruption in the state .
California: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Charter Sector
North Carolina: “White Flight Academy” Turns into a Charter School to Get Public Funding
Oklahoma: Virtual Charter School is an EPIC Failure
Mercedes Schneider is a master at tracking down financial records. In this post, she shows the direct connections between the Sackler’s billions–derived from the sale of OxyContin–and the growth of the charter movement.The Education Law Center is one of the nation’s leading legal organizations defending the civil rights of students.In this important new report, it presents a critical analysis of Philadelphia’s charter sector and its indifference to the civil rights of students.
That ain’t workinThat’s the way you do it
You hit the public with a charter fee
That ain’t working, that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin and your trips for free
I was a teacher at Olney HS the year before it was converted into a charter under Aspira. They came in and presented us with the plan they had for the conversion, trying to recruit teachers to stay rather than go elsewhere in the district. At the time, I raised serious objections to their claims about funding and expenditures, since they were obviously based on wishful thinking and vapor (and I was one of the few to do so) but their takeover was approved anyway. Now, much of what I said at the time about Aspira’s finances have proven to be true. Yet they still have their charter. It’s long past time that Philly abandon this ill-conceived exercise in school privatization and got back to fully funding the real public schools.
If you had chosen to work for Aspira, would you have lost your rights to a job in the Philly public system? What happens to pension rights?
If you had chosen to work for Aspira, would you have lost your job and pension rights in Philly?
This question disappeared the first time I wrote it.
I commend you on your ethics.
Unfortunately, as bank fraud expert William Black has pointed out, control fraud creates an environment that is inimical to anyone who questions what is being done. The latter are either fired or leave of their own volition because, like you, their ethical principles prevent them from working in a fraudulent environment.
it is so psychologically difficult to sit back and watch the things teachers/parents/students speak out about, worry about, go a bit nuts about, still simply HAPPEN.
Oh it’s easy to shut down a charter. All the owner has to do is close the doors lock it up and abscond with the public monies. Easy peasy