In the emotionally charged story of the Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania, several observers have seen the bogeyman with great clarity. Critics from Dennis Van Roekel to Valerie Strauss have set aside the history of financial troubles that took root in the district a generation ago and have asserted that “privatization” and the emergence of the Keystone State’s largest charter school have quickened the district’s pending death.
No storybook ending is imminent. The school district says it’s broke and can’t pay its teachers past the end of the month. Gov. Tom Corbett has assured students they will be able to finish the year at Chester Upland, but no one knows where the money is coming from. And the New York Times has identified another problem: the Chester Community Charter School, which claims it’s owed nearly $7 million in past-due payments from the district and the state.
One shouldn’t expect a state judiciary to demand budget cuts from the charter before it can expect to get paid the money it’s owed.
Chester Community Charter School has grown to enroll 45 percent of the district’s students, and its presence has led commentators to declare that the school choice policies of the Corbett administration, and the governor’s relationship with the charter school owners, are to blame for Chester Upland’s financial woes. That’s to be expected. But one shouldn’t expect a state judiciary to demand budget cuts from the charter before it can expect to get paid the money it’s owed.
Yet the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania said exactly that in a January 30 ruling when denying a preliminary injunction to the charter school. If the district met its obligation under the charter school law and paid what it owes Chester Community Charter School, the school district likely would shut down by mid-February, Judge James Gardner Colins wrote. The school system already has fired a quarter of its staff and furloughed 180 teachers. “The Charter School,” Colins added, “has not discussed the possibility of layoffs or cutting educational programs.”
According to the school, it hasn’t had to. Chester Community Charter School opened in 1998 with 97 students. It’s now the largest charter school in Pennsylvania serving about 3,000 students in grades K-8. Its chief executive, David Clark, wondered aloud in a statement following the court’s ruling whether he and his team should jettison its best business practices and “suffer the negative effects of program reductions and layoffs” so that it can establish enough credibility to receive the funding due to them.
This might be a little tone deaf. Public opinion will decide whether the charter school should have pursued relief in the courts so aggressively. Clark and other leaders at Chester Community, which is managed by the profit-making Charter School Management, Inc., have blundered in claiming that the charter’s own closure is imminent without the district’s payments, even though it has $4.2 million in reserves and the district’s own staff had pledged to work without pay to ensure minimal disruption to the children’s educational experience. Moreover, Judge Colins admonished the charter for turning to the courts before exhausting all “administrative remedies.”
But Clark can be excused for his frustration. The problems at Chester Upland preceded the birth of his charter by several years, and many entities, public and private, have gotten their hands dirty. The state took over the district’s finances in 1994. At one point, Edison Schools was brought in to turn around its academic performance to no avail. The state gave control of the district back to the school board two years ago. Between 2010 and 2011, the board lost about $18 million in revenue.
It might be politically expedient for Van Roekel and the National Education Association to suggest that charter operators see the money for public education in Chester as nothing more than “a treasure chest ripe for plunder.” But it does nothing but fan the flames against a charter that has successfully scaled up to educate nearly 1 in 2 students in a community ravaged by poverty. And while it has yet to decide on the merits of the charter’s legal claim, the Commonwealth Court already has taken a heavy hand in determining just how much success Chester Community should exhibit.
A lot of negative forces contributed to Chester Upland’s present circumstance, and it will take an equal or greater number of positive forces to turn it around. That should include a successful charter school.
