Is Chester-Upland School District the frog in the boiling pot of water that is a warning to every other school district in the state of Pennsylvania?
The Chester Community Charter School is a subject of endless fascination. It has absorbed 70% of the elementary school students in the impoverished district of Chester-Upland in Pennsylvania. Its scores are low, lower even than the district schools. It is owned by an extremely wealthy suburban lawyer, who is a major campaign contributor to Republicans in the state. He receives a healthy profit every year from the charter school in Chester-Upland, despite the fact that the school is low-performing. Meanwhile, the school district has been in receivership since 2012, while the charter school is thriving. The district has been bankrupted by payments to the charter school and to cyber charters. That is the way the state law was written by charter-friendly Republicans in the Legislature.
The Chester-Upland School District is a majority-minority district: It is 18% white; 67% African American; 11% Hispanic; the remainder, other groups.
Peter Greene writes here about this district.
The school district is Chester Uplands, and they’ve been in the charter-related news before. Specifically, they were the poster child for how a careful gaming of the charter system in Pennsylvania could result in huge charter profits. As I wrote at the time:
The key is that while all CUSD students with special needs come with a hefty $40K for a charter school, they are not all created equal. Students on the autism spectrum are expensive to teach; they make up 8.4% of CUSD special ed student population, but only 2.1% at Chester Community Charter School, and a whopping 0% at Widener and Chester Community School of the Arts. Emotionally disturbed students are also costly; they make up 13.6 % of special ed at CUSD, 5.3% at Chester Community, and zero at the other two. Intellectual disabilities make up 11.6% for CUSD, 2.8% for CCCS, and zero for the others.
Speech and language impaired, however, are pretty inexpensive to educate. CUSD carries 2.4% of the special ed population in this category, but the three charters carry 27.4%, 20.3% and 29.8%.
Back in 2015, this helped put CUSD in the astonishing position of giving more money to charter schools than it received from the state.
In 2015, the district made a deal to cut its payments to cyber charters (which are among the lowest performing schools in the state).
Greene writes:
In 2015 the district made a deal for charters to accept less money for students with special needs, but the cyber charters went to court to be exempted– and the court eventually agreed, giving CUSD a huge retroactive bill to pay cyber charters.
The district has long been attractive to worst of charter vultures. Not just the cybers, but for-profit management companies like CSMI, founded by the infamous Vahan Gureghian, charter school multimillionaire and generous GOP donor.
Currently, charters enroll about half of the 7,000 student district population. CSMI would like to have a larger piece of the pie and run all of the elementary education in Chester Uplands, and it has asked the court to hand them over (because the district itself has no say in this). CSMI runs some charters elsewhere, including a school in New Jersey that is the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit. The suit was filed by a former principal who says she was fired for making a fuss over CSMI’s policy of cutting corners to make a buck. Cutting corners didn’t just mean cutting services; it also meant falsifying records and misappropriating funds. Great company.
Open the post to see beautiful pictures of the charter owner’s gorgeous estate in Pennsylvania and his recently sold mansion in Palm Beach.
The lesson, says Greene, is that there is no real difference between for-profit and nonprofit charters. The Chester Community Charter School is “nonprofit.”
It is unclear how much money CSMI would make on the Chester Uplands deal because, as a private business, it doesn’t have to account for its financial activities– even though they are funded by trhe taxpayers. Do you see why, when someone like Cory Booker or Pete Buttigieg starts talking about how only for-profit charters are bad, they are just selling thinly sliced baloney. Chester Community Charter School is a non-profit school–that generates profits for the CSMI management company that runs it, and runs it like a business and not like a school.
The Inquirer quoted the CUSD school board president–his primary concern isn’t the charter takeover of the elementary schools as much as it is the inadequate funding from the state. “Ask them what they have done for 25 years in Chester Upland.” He has sort of a point, but the fact is that this non-weathy non-white district is in danger of losing all local control and voice.
This is what chartering as a tool of privatization looks like. Gut the public schools. Chase the students into profitable charters. Strip every last asset from the public school and strip all the power from the voters and taxpayers. Operate charters like businesses; every dollar you spend on students is a dollar you don’t get to keep. Make some guy a multimillionaire while stripping public education and democratic voice from the members of a poor community.
This chart comparing the charter school to the district’s four elementary and middle-schools was prepared by the Keystone State Education Coalition.
This chart summarizes the PA Dept. of Education’s Future Ready Index reports for the Chester Community Charter School (CCCS) and the four Chester Upland School District elementary/middle schools.
| Indicator Name | CCCS | Main Street | Stetser | Sch of Arts | Toby Farms |
| Percent Proficient or Advanced on ELA/Literature (All Student) | 16.3 | 31 | 52.3 | 18.2 | 12.5 |
| Percent Proficient or Advanced on Mathematics/Algebra 1 (All Student) | 6.4 | 7.6 | 13.8 | 10.2 | 2.3 |
| Percent Proficient or Advanced on Science/Biology (All Student) | 22.8 | 36.7 | 59.5 | 59.6 | 13.7 |
| Meeting Annual Academic Growth Expectations (PVAAS) ELA/Literature (All Student) | 63 | 78 | 94 | 76 | 50 |
| Meeting Annual Academic Growth Expectations (PVAAS) Mathematics/Algebra 1 (All Student) | 78 | 100 | 77 | 81 | 54 |
| Meeting Annual Academic Growth Expectations (PVAAS) Science/Biology (All Student) | 50 | 69 | 70 | 97 | 50 |
| Percent Advanced on ELA/Literature (All Student) | 1.2 | 1.9 | 15.6 | 1.2 | 0.6 |
| Percent Advanced on Mathematics/Algebra 1 (All Student) | 1 | 0 | 1.8 | 3 | 0.6 |
| Percent Advanced on Science/Biology (All Student) | 2.8 | 8.3 | 16.2 | 7.7 | 0.9 |
| Percent English Language Growth and Attainment (All Student) | 22.9 | IS | IS | IS | IS |
| Percent of Students with Regular Attendance (All Student) | 48.7 | 59.2 | 59.8 | 53.4 | 42.1 |
| Percent Grade 3 Reading (All Student) | 14.5 | 24.4 | 37 | 20.7 | DNA |
| Percent Grade 7 Mathematics (All Student) | 6 | DNA | DNA | DNA | 1.7 |
| Percent Grade 5, Grade 8, and/or Grade 11 Career Standards Benchmark (All Student) | 98 | 98 | 98 | 98 | 98 |
Lawrence A. Feinberg of the Keystone State Education Coalition writes:
Flooding from Katrina precipitated the charterization of NOLA schools. Will a historical flood of campaign contributions do the same for Chester Upland SD? PA Department of Education Future Ready Index reports show that 3 of the 4 Chester Upland school district’s elementary/middle schools are outperforming the Chester Community Charter School. Why would the charter school operator want to charterize all the elementary schools in the district? There is no Right-to-Know requirement for private charter management companies like Vahan Gureghian’s CSMI, but the 990 for Chester Community Charter School for last year alone lists $18 million in management fees.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“This is what chartering as a tool of privatization looks like. Gut the public schools. Chase the students into profitable charters. Strip every last asset from the public school and strip all the power from the voters and taxpayers.”
End stage privatization is when the parasite tries to consume the host. This is what is happening to Chester Upland. The laws in Pennsylvania are skewed to favor the charters, not the public schools. There is no educational reason why Chester Upland students should be sent to a charter chain that tries to cut corners, and it has been accused of falsifying information and misappropriating funds. The public schools actually have staff that can provide appropriate services to diverse students.
The charter lobby in Pennsylvania is strong. Most of the charter supporting members of the lobby are from heavily gerrymandered districts so it is difficult to vote them out. It is sad that the former Corbett administration still hold the purse strings in the commonwealth.
Nearly 20 years ago, the for-profit Edison Schools charter chain was hailed to the skies as the miracle that would save public education and transform the lives of low-income children by applying the efficiencies of the private sector. I co-ran a website devoted to research and information about Edison and followed it as best I could via the Internet. As I recall, Edison ran something like 9 of the then-10 schools in Chester-Upland (I don’t recall if it was ever clear why not all 10, if I’m remembering the numbers correctly).
Edison fizzled out all across the land, and we don’t know what happened with the Chester-Upland schools in the meantime. The number of schools has obviously shrunk drastically. But I’m just noting that Chester-Upland has a long history of being ravaged by the charter sector.
I think Diane, in her former life among the think tankers, probably hobnobbed with some of the Edison folks (Terry Moe, John Chubb, that crowd), so maybe she has insights?
Caroline,
I was on a board with Chubb, Moe, and Finn. Two of them were part of the founding Edison group. But they didn’t talk about it. The definitive source on Edison is Samuel Abrams’ book @Education and the Commercial Mindset.” He knows more than anyone else. This was his dissertation research and everything is documented.
The notion of taking money from schools serving low-income kids as “profit” and paying it out to shareholders is so outrageous that I can’t believe how much gushing and puffery there was about it, including in the mainstream press, including people I’ve socialized and dined with. It didn’t actually happen, since Edison never made a profit, but the concept is so unbelievable. No wonder they didn’t talk about it. (Also, they must have known how much nonstop lying Edison insiders were doing, about everything possible — test scores, “long waiting lists,” number of schools they ran, falsely attributing their lies to the RAND organization…) I have Abrams’ book and haven’t read it yet. Will get it out and read it!
“The district has long been attractive to worst of charter vultures. Not just the cybers, but for-profit management companies like CSMI, founded by the infamous Vahan Gureghian, charter school multimillionaire and generous GOP donor.”
I would quibble with this in MI, OH and PA because those states don’t just passively “attract” the worst of the charter vultures.
Ed reformers captured the state legislatures in those states and drafted and passed lousy charter laws. This is 100% the work of the lobbyists in the “movement”. They were wholly ideologically driven – which they trumpeted at the time but no longer do because political winds have shifted. This is ed reform “governance”- the garbage that all those university departments and thinks tanks churn out and export to our states.
It wasn’t an accident. They dumped the junk here. Ten years ago you could read articles in Ohio newspapers where ed reformers bragged about “flooding” communities with charters. It was a deliberate strategy. They were riding high and they rolled right over our states and lawmakers, who were too weak and lazy to question ANY of it.
The charter lobby passed laws giving charters preferential treatment, and current students, teachers and communities are still paying for the dirty dealings of the Corbett administration.
Heartbreaking that we know it to be true: “It wasn’t an accident. They dumped the junk here.”
No school is a “failure” as long as one rich Republican donor gets even richer.
A school is not a “failure” if Republican donors and the people who help promote the Republican agenda were able to wring every last penny of profit out of it to enrich themselves, even if it is a non-profit that just happens to use the profits to generously overpay their complicit administrators.
A school is only a failure if someone with no scruples can’t get rich from running or promoting it.
Charter schools meet that very important criteria, but public schools never will.
The only way this will change is if the majority of voters in that state kick out every Republican running for governor and the state legislature.
The GOP is no longer a political party. It is an elected, criminal mob of white-collar criminals.
A political party is an organized group of people who have the same ideology, or who otherwise have the same political positions, and who field candidates for elections, in an attempt to get them elected and thereby implement the party’s agenda.
A criminal organization is an organized national and/or international body of criminals, that have a complex and ruthless behavioral code. Trump’s mafia or Republican Party is now a closed group of people having a controlling influence.
I posted a link to Peter’s article at Oped https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Who-Ripped-Off-the-Public-in-General_News-Education_Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis_Public-Money-191208-932.html#comment751469
With this comment ( which has embedded links at the above address)
“The corruption never ends…and with 15,880 separate schools systems…it is open season.
Thomas Ultican writes here https://tultican.com/2019/12/02/wealthy-white-elites-attacking-little-rock-school-district/. about the Walton-funded effort to control the public schools of Little Rock. Given the Walton love of charter schools, we can safely assume that they hope to eliminate democratic control of the citizenry and impose charter schools. Ultican follows the money, where it comes from, where it goes.
Here– Rhode Island: State Commissioner Approves Renewal of Failing Charter School
Here is– Indiana: Karen Francisco on Shady Charter Real Estate Deals
and we ask– Pennsylvania: Why Did This Charter School CEO Pay Himself $11 Million Without Board Approval?
Then, in –New Orleans: Nearly Half of the District’s Charter Schools Receive a D or F from State