The charter industry has lots of problems with stability. The charters open and suddenly close. Scandals and corruption are commonplace so much so that Carol Burris says there is a “crisis of corruption in the charter industry.”
Theft and fraud are predictable when non-educators, entrepreneurs and grifters get public money and can open or close their school without any accountability or oversight.
So in Philadelphia, the second-largest charter in the City is in trouble.
Philadelphia’s second-largest charter school has a large budget deficit, a CEO on leave, and some sort of problem related to the identification of special education students.
It’s the kind of financial and administrative turmoil that would draw major headlines at a large, traditional school district. But the K-12 school at the center of the tumult refuses to say much of anything — and only recently published a six-sentence letter on its website explaining that it had made a personnel change.
Despite repeated requests for comment, First Philadelphia Preparatory Charter School in Bridesburg has declined to explain why or how it found itself in, what one official called, a “difficult time of transition.”
Here’s what we know.
Longtime CEO Joseph Gillespie is on a leave of absence and has been replaced, on an interim basis, by Carleene Slowik. The 1,850-student school sent a brief note to parents Wednesday explaining the change — only after WHYY contacted the school and asked for clarification about the leadership situation.
Before that note, the school would not divulge whether Gillespie was still working at First Philadelphia — or even who was in charge of the school, which is affiliated with a charter management company called American Paradigm Schools.
A lawyer representing First Philadelphia said the school had no comment on the situation. Nor would he say who was currently running the campus. Several attempts to reach Gillespie were unsuccessful.
No oversight. No accountability. No transparency.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is from the charter management company site:
“American Paradigm Schools believes that strong relationships with stakeholders are based in part on transparency. Charter School Boards of Trustees are entrusted with public dollars to provide excellent educational experiences for our students. As such, we are public servants and strive to live up to the Mission and Vision of our schools and to be good stewards of public monies.
Transparency is a commitment to providing our stakeholders with the information that is necessary to gauge our stewardship at many levels:
a fully functioning and equitable lottery,
access to school board meetings,
compliance with local, state, and federal laws,
and fiscally responsible and balanced budgets.
We seek to deliver easy access to information about our schools, the lottery, board meetings, and our fiscal management of public dollars. We have in the past always provided access to board meeting information and vital information about lotteries. We are continuously updating stakeholders with additional information including board minutes, budgets, and audit information. Check our website for regular updates on this and other important information.”
https://www.ap-schools.org/transparency/
Here, ed reformers graciously allow that public schools may continue to exist alongside the private and charter schools they prefer:
https://citizen.education/2020/03/04/one-bad-charter-school-doesnt-mean-throw-the-whole-model-away/
They won’t support public schools or make any practical or useful contributions to them, but they WILL perhaps consider not eradicating them completely. After all, we’ll need the disfavored and unfashionable public schools to act as a backup to the choice system.
For this we’re supposed to hire thousands of them in government and accept their directives on how public schools should be run. No positive ideas or contributions to public schools or public school students, but they promise not to actively harm our schools and students.
Talk about low expectations.
With so little oversight or accountability. there are many opportunities for charter schools to mismanage their budgets. Pennsylvania pays $30,033 for each special education student. However, if students leave the charter school, the receiving school must be compensated which leaves a deficit. One of the problems with charter schools is that they fragment resources, particularly for specialized programs. These schools may not be able to hire a quality special education teacher that will be responsible for a few students. Public schools operate far more efficiently. They generally have a trained and certified staff that can be deployed where there is a need for the service.
and in so many cases the game does not just fragment resources used for the kids, but allows so many of the “fragments” to be sucked up into personal pockets
Opaque charter budgets make it hard to determine what is a real expense and what is manufactured.
“Wolf wants the state to change its charter school reimbursement formula so that charter schools receive more money for students with extreme special needs and less money for students with other types of learning disabilities.”
Seems reasonable. Probably isn’t necessary in tradl pubschs. They can’t sift out the extreme cases & find sub rosa methods for not accepting them or pressuring them out so as to plump profits. The $30k per-pupil is probably a number reflecting the average of the spectrum recd at tradl publicschs– a balance a charter finds ways to jimmy to their advantage.
All i can say is good on the Phil Sch Dist: apparently there’s sufficient monitoring of charters to uncover “overidentifying” SpEd students sans backup ppwk.