Chester Community Charter School is the largest brick-and-mortar charter school in Pennsylvania, with more than 4,000 students. It is a for-profit charter school owned by a wealthy lawyer named Vahan Gureghian, who was the largest individual contributor to former Governor Corbett. It is hard to know how much money CCCS makes, because its books are not open to the public. It must be doing very well, because his 36,000 square-foot oceanfront house in Palm Beach was recently sold for $60 million.

But his profits are less important than the fact that CCCS now enrolls 70% of the primary students in the Chester-Upland school district. And it is not because the charter is an academic success. Its test scores are very low. Only 16.7% were proficient in English language arts, compared to a state average of 63%. Only 7% were proficient in mathematics, compared to a state average of 45%.

By most metrics, this charter school is a failing school, yet it gets preferential treatment. The scores in the charter school are below those of the remaining public schools in the district.

The district, one of the poorest in the state, is in receivership, and the receiver—who exercises total control over the district—decided in 2017 to take the unprecedented step of extending the charter to 2026. No charter in the state has ever had a nine-year extension. The receiver said he did it in exchange for a promise by the charter that it would not open a high school to compete with the Chester High School, but would remain satisfied to enroll 70% of its primary students. Why might the receiver make this unusual decision? Surely it would not be because he was treasurer of Governor Corbett’s campaign.

So, from 2017 to 2026, there is no accountability for this low-performing for-profit charter school. The charter corporation is now recruiting young students from Philadelphia with an aggressive marketing campaign. Currently, more than 1,100 students from Philadelphia ride a school bus that takes from 2-3 hours to reach the school in the morning and another 2-3 hours to return home each day. Most of these students are in kindergarten through third grades. I wonder if their parents know they are riding a bus 5-6 hours a day to attend one of the lowest performing schools in the state?

Philadelphia officials also say that Chester Community has mounted an aggressive marketing campaign and distributed glossy fliers that don’t include information about the charter’s academic performance.

“It is fundamentally a marketing strategy,” Monson said. “The lure is how you sell yourself,…We all have plenty of examples of advertised products that don’t live up.”

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.