Chester-Upland school district is one of the poorest in the state. Seventy percent of its students are black. One big charter school, owned and operated by a wealthy Republican lawyer from Philadelphia, already dominates the district with his Chester Community Charter School. The district has been in receivership and under state control for years. Even though CCCS is a low-performing charter, the state’s only idea is to hand over all the schools to charter operators.
This is an important story, well told by this reporter. It follows the template for charterization: Underfund a predominately African-American school district for years, then have the state take control because of financial issues. Strip the school board of all power and appoint a single “receiver” to make all decisions. Begin the charterization process with as little transparency as possible knowing that parents and community do not want it. Put out RFPs to charter companies. Hold one meeting at which parents, educators and community make clear their opposition but feel that the fix is in despite their wishes. Receiver, who is not accountable to the community or the voters, makes his decision.
https://whyy.org/articles/chester-upland-school-district-confronts-the-prospect-of-charter-takeover/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is end stage Jim Crow privatization. What is happening in Chester Upland will happen elsewhere if states continue to under fund public schools and policymakers continue to do the bidding of the charter lobby. “Jacquie Jones, solicitor for the Chester Upland district, said she believes neglect is the reason it is in this predicament in the first place.”
It is pathetic that attending a free, public school is not a right. It is pathetic that corporations can move in on local communities and, working with politicians, destabilize the common good for the benefit of private companies. It is pathetic that local taxpayers have little agency or say in the matter. Moreover, it is pathetic in an age of BLM that it is apparently legal for Black communities and students to be targeted for takeover so they can attend a separate and unequal school that will make money for investors, and the Education Law Center cannot protect them. It is pathetic that Biden can talk about supporting BLM, but he and Dr.Cardona can turn a blind eye to the greedy, ever expanding private charter schools and vouchers that cannabalize community public schools
Gov. Wolf attended a private boys boarding school. Tuition is around $64,000 a year. He graduated from the Ivy league, Dartmouth. If communities of the middle class and poor are looking for advocacy from people with backgrounds similar to Wolf’s, their best option is to hire one of Gates’ harvard guys or CAP’s ivy leaguers to talk to them…wait, that won’t work because Ivy League intellectuals who are for sale require big bucks to transfer allegiance.
The main problem is Pennsylvania not Gov. Wolf. The main problem is that the Pennsylvania legislature is made up of charter supporters and owners that voters keep choosing. Wolf has tried unsuccessfully to overturn the charter funding rules left in place by the corrupt Corbett administration. Maybe he is not a progressive, but I know he has tried to undo the charter funding rules that are negatively impacting Pennsylvania’s economy. Beyond that, I have no idea if he has tried to help the Chester Upland School District which has also been accused of mismanagement as well.
looks like Gov. Wolf fired the Charter Board
It is fantastic that Steven Singer is running for public office in Pennsylvania. The only way to change the system is to become part of the system.
Is the assumption then that Wolf’s appointment of Karen Farmer White and his nomination of Noe Ortega, means that they both also oppose charters?
Noe Ortega is described as one of Pedro Riviera’s top lieutenants. In 2015, Pedro Rivera photo’s was posted at the Milken Educator site giving the Milken Educator Award.
Who knows what political shenanigans occurred behind the scenes? We see the same types of manipulations in the federal government. Most of the members of the committee selecting the leader of the DOE were from the charter lobby. That is how we wound up with Dr. Cardona instead of Dr. Fenwick, who is a vocal supporter of public schools. It is hard to escape the reach of the billionaires.
Dr. Fenwick is a strong supporter of public schools and a strong critic of privatization and TFA.
Democrats like Biden and others take billionaires’ money, and they seem to easily forget the promises they made to public school teachers and parents. The Democratic party has been playing the same game for decades, but Biden’s pro union, pro women and pro people of color speeches, the most progressive messaging of the past forty years, mean little if his administration feasts on billionaire bucks and forgets promises Biden made to those that supported him.https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/11/09/heres-how-bill-gates-and-other-billionaires-are-reacting-to-bidens-election-victory/?sh=4b4c19ee1e3d
Biden’s WH administration- twice as many Ivy League appointments as Trump’s first iteration. (Politico)
Interesting content from a few webpages-
Karen Farmer White, appointed Chair of the Pennsylvania state Board of Education
Karen Farmer White, Board chair of Seton Hill University (private Catholic)
Karen Farmer White, Board member of the Urban League of Pittsburgh.
(Critics of the Urban League note its donors’ interest in an education agenda that differs from the NAACP’s)
This privatized system was designed by ed reformers. It’s a mess. They can’t even get a charter operator to commit to keeping a high school.
Where’s the criticism or analysis of what ed reformers have created in Chester? Why do we get zero analysis or mention of the low quality privatized systems ed reformers create? All we hear about are their chreey picked successes.
Some of these ed reform “analysts” are employed by public universities. Why are they working full time promoting and marketing privatized systems and doing NO substantive analysis of privatized system failures?
Go look for yourself. Try to find any mention of this on any of the national ed reform lobbying groups. They bury the failures and pretend they don’t exist.
Chester won’t have a public high school now. Do any of the ed reform cheerleaders want to explain how that happened in the system they designed?
This is a bit off topic, but I had to share this amazing story. It is about a high school in California that changed its name from Sir Francis Drake to Archie Williams who was a gold medalist in the Olympics, a Tuskegee Airman, a student and teacher at this high school. This is the feel good story of the week!https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/school-renamed-after-bay-area-hero-archie-williams/
Here’s another example of how the ed reform echo chamber does no real analysis of the privatized systems they create. Here’s the actual situation in Florida with the vouchers every ed reformer obediently promoted:
“As of last month, the Step Up for Students voucher marketplace shows 16 Polk County voucher schools have enrollments of at least 76 percent Black children. Twelve of the 16 schools are at least 95 percent Black. Six are 100 percent Black.
Not one of those schools has any accreditation. None of them have any state or local oversight. There is no elected board member or unelected bureaucrat to call when these schools defraud you. More than 800 Black children in Polk County attend these segregated, low-capital so-called schools at any given time.
Moreover, the Urban Institute’s 2017 study of Florida’s voucher marketplace, the only recent study of its kind, found that 61 percent of voucher recipients abandon their FTC voucher within two years. 75 percent abandon the voucher within three years. That’s an extraordinary record of failure and churn. Voucher advocates twist themselves into knots insisting this is not a 75-percent 3-year program dropout rate. But it is.
Many voucher schools resemble the worst of pre-Brown vs. Board of Education American schools — operating in strip mall storefronts with names like “Endtime Christian School of Excellence.” That is the name and description of a very real and very typical voucher school in Lake Wales. Yet, Florida is expanding the roughly $1 billion a year in direct tax money and corporate tax-shelter cash it spends each year to defraud black children and parents – and everyone else.
Runaway voucher spending with no oversight has built zero capacity to actually provide education. That’s because money alone cannot buy education capacity; only consistent, focused effort.
There are very few decent voucher products to buy. And decent private schools, almost without exception, do not rely on vouchers for survival or take many voucher kids. Vouchers do not cover the tuition of serious private schools, which have full-tuition paying customers and endowments and capital and accreditation. Such private schools are also very, very white.”
No mention of any of this among any of the ed reform groups. No substantive analysis of how their privatization initiatives played out, real world.
Gates and Broad and Walton hire and pay hundreds of ed reform analysts. They do NO criticism or real analysis of these privatized systems. 100% blind cheerleading of vouchers is the only permissible position. There are no dissenters.
The Florida “voucher schools” are cheap, low quality junk. This is garbage. They created an alternative school system that is much, much worse than the public school system.
One would think ed reformers would be up in arms about that. Instead? Silence.They’re not permitted to criticize voucher schools. That’s not what they’re paid for.
The presumed value of privatization is accepted as a given, and further study is rarely done. All the problems are mostly ignored unless there are policymakers willing to fight the status quo, and they do not work for the charter lobby.
Poor Chester-Upland — a playground for the predatory so-called “reformers.” Back in the day when for-profit charter operator Edison Schools was the miracle run by saints that would revolutionize public education by applying the efficiencies of the private sector, Chester-Upland turned all but one of its schools over to Edison. (Presumably Edison needed a school into which to dump the kids it didn’t want.) The experiment was a crashing failure (as was the entire Edison fiasco eventually), and the contract with Edison was severed. That didn’t get much notice at the time because of the billionaire-funded PR hype that kept Edison aloft for quite some time.