Chalkbeat

Philadelphia’s school selection process postponed to October

2026-08-31T21:50:50+00:00

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Philadelphia’s school selection process this year will begin later than usual as the district waits for state officials to finalize standardized test scores.

The process will now open on Oct. 5 at 4 p.m. and close on Nov. 24, according to a statement from district officials late on Monday.

The selective admissions process was originally scheduled to open on Sept. 8, Superintendent Tony Watlington told families as much in his back-to-school letter just last week. The district’s subsequent decision to postpone the admissions process was done to ensure “families have access to official, verified 2026 assessment data when making their school choices,” according to the district statement.

Delays in releasing scores from the 2025-26 PSSA and Keystone exams have left educators and school leaders scrambling this year, and created uncertainty for families. District officials did receive preliminary PSSA score information in June but have opted not to release those scores to educators and families. Instead, they’re waiting for the state to review and release official results, which officials expect sometime this fall.

Criteria-based schools in the city usually rely on the most recent PSSA exams as part of their admissions requirements. District officials had previously said students would take an “alternative assessment” that could replace the PSSAs.

Monday’s statement said students will use both their 2025 assessment results and the official 2026 data as part of their applications this year.

“Once the verified 2026 PSSA and Keystone results are released … later this fall, District staff will contact all applicants to assist them with submitting their scores,” the district said. “Families do not need to take any action regarding their 2026 assessment scores at this time.”

There are several other important updates to the selective admissions process this year:

The district will only consider final grades in English Language Arts (or reading), math, and science. Grades in social studies, writing, or any other class won’t be used to determine a student’s eligibility for school admission.
Students who attended the district’s summer career and technical education program will get priority if they are applying to such a program for the 2027-28 school year.
ZIP code preference is still a factor in the admissions system. Families whose home address is within one of the following eligible ZIP codes may receive priority consideration when applying to Masterman, Central, Carver, and Palumbo: 19132, 19133, 19135, 19138, 19140, 19141.
Prekindergarten students seeking to enroll in the same school for kindergarten will get lottery preference.
The individualized review process has been expanded. This process is used for students who are English learners and those with disabilities or 504 plans. Those students will receive an individualized review regardless of whether they meet the eligibility requirements for any criteria-based school to which they applied. District officials said this is designed to allow more qualifying students applying to criteria-based middle and high schools to be considered.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Only 8% of Philly voters say public education is headed in the right direction

2026-06-23T19:35:35+00:00

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Only 8% of Philadelphia voters think that public education is headed in the right direction according to a new poll released this week.

The data shared with Chalkbeat on Tuesday of 1,029 registered Philly voters found that more than half of the respondents think the state of public education is worsening. Voters said they are unhappy with the condition of buildings, want to see more advocates pushing to improve the city’s schools, and want Mayor Cherelle Parker to be more engaged in education issues.

The online survey was commissioned by Philly for Great Public Schools, and conducted by Change Research. Philly for Great Public Schools is a new coalition led by Tamir D. Harper, a longtime education proponent and former district teacher, that advocates for traditional public, charter, and magnet schools in the city. The poll went out to voters via a series of Facebook and Instagram ads and text messages between May 27 and June 3, 2026.

The results show Philadelphians’ opinions about their public schools have soured over the last year. In a similar survey conducted by the same company in May 2025, 44% of voters said they were “very concerned” about the state of public education in the city, according to a statement from Philly for Great Public Schools. This year, 57% said the same. Overall, 81% of respondents said they are at least somewhat concerned about the state of public education, up 4 percentage points from a year prior.

The poll’s timing came during a particularly tense period for Philadelphia schools. The mayor-appointed Board of Education had just voted to close 17 schools at an explosive April meeting that drove City Council members to call for board members’ resignations and a switch to an elected board. The district had adopted a budget with millions in cuts and hundreds of teachers were being transferred to other positions — in some cases leaving the district altogether.

Harper said the poll results weren’t surprising after the year the district has had, but he said decisionmakers should take the data as a sign that they need to engage more meaningfully with parents and city residents.

“People feel like they don’t have a voice in how their children are being educated,” Harper said in an interview. “Families are scared. They wake up one day and their school may be on the list to close or it may be on the list one day and not on the list the next day.”

The poll found support for charter schools is high in the city. Among parents who responded to the survey, 63% said they support allowing new charter schools to open. Support for opening new charters was especially high among Black and Latino poll respondents (61% and 54% respectively) and those without a college degree (61%).

In the wake of the city’s budget fight about school funding, the survey found strong support for an audit of the school district at 86% of voters.

A slight majority of voters (52%) also said they opposed school closures, with 30% in support of the board’s vote to close some schools and modernize nearly 170 others.

“We have a city that is prepared to work together to address the issues. We have a city that is invested in public education, and now we need our leaders to listen,” Harper said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Billionaire and Republican megadonor is funding scholarships for students at closing Philly schools

2026-05-15T17:20:33+00:00

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An organization funded by Pennsylvania billionaire and Republican megadonor Jeffrey Yass is offering scholarships for Philly students displaced by school closures to enroll in private schools.

This week, the Yass Prize — an organization founded by Yass and his wife Janine — announced new “Opportunity Knocks” scholarships. The scholarships will award $8,000 each year through high school graduation for 500 students whose schools are being closed under the district’s recently approved facilities plan.

Caroline Allen, director of the Yass Prize, said the scholarships are intended to provide families with stability during a time of uncertainty in the district.

“We’re really capitalizing on this time,” Allen said. Though no schools will close until 2027, Allen said “we don’t want to wait for two years for these schools to close down to do something.”

Allen said students who are deemed eligible and receive the scholarships could attend any of the 16 private schools in the city that have received the Yass Prize and have been “vetted” as “sustainable, transformational, outstanding and permissionless.” Those private schools are already preparing to receive an influx of students from district schools that are closing or merging, Allen said.

Yass is the richest person in the state and is well known for his support of charter schools and school vouchers. Yass critics in the public education advocacy space have condemned the scholarships as attempts to lure students away from the public school system.

Aly Shaw, senior research analyst at the LittleSis Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit research firm, said she’s been tracking Yass’s political spending and was not surprised to see his name on scholarships aimed at drawing students away from public schools.

“This is the disaster capitalism playbook exactly,” Shaw said, referring to the exploitation of crises for profit. She pointed to Yass’s public support for school privatization and aversion to paying taxes as actions that she said have drained funding from public schools. The scholarships are evidence of Yass “taking advantage of a disaster that he created to promote private schools,” Shaw said.

The scholarship applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis and awarded on a first-come, first-served basis to the first 500 students who complete all required steps, including an “eligibility review” and school enrollment applications, Allen said.

Through the Center for Education Reform, a group that supports vouchers and similar policies, the Yass Prize has awarded over $60 million to more than 225 organizations across 45 states since 2021.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Supporters of the new federal school choice tax credit pressure Pennsylvania Gov. Shapiro to opt in

2026-03-12T19:44:47+00:00

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School choice advocates and two Philadelphia lawmakers are urging Gov. Josh Shapiro to opt into a federal tax-credit scholarship program that would pay for private school tuition and other education expenses.

But Shapiro is delaying his decision until President Donald Trump’s administration releases rules laying out how much control and accountability states will have over the federal program.

The strategy from Shapiro and other Democratic governors to put off making a yes-or-no decision on the tax credits reflects the barrage of political pressures they are facing.

Supporters of the tax credit say that governors who spurn the program are simply losing out on funding that will go to other states, instead of helping their students. But embracing a measure backed by the Trump administration that promotes private school choice might clash with the ideological preferences of Democratic officials and many of their voters.

Pennsylvania already authorizes two tax-credit scholarship programs, the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and Educational Improvement Tax Credit. Both give tax breaks to businesses that donate to organizations that provide private school scholarships to students.

But the federal program doesn’t rely on state funding. The new federal tax credit, which passed last summer as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, would reimburse taxpayers for donations of up to $1,700 annually to scholarship-granting organizations.

The program allows donations to pay for more than just private school tuition. Proponents say those scholarship funds could be put toward tutoring, after-school programs, education technology and other educational expenses for both private and public school students.

But there are still many questions unanswered.

The U.S. Treasury Department is developing rules outlining how much authority states will have over the program. Those rules could spell out how public school students could benefit alongside private school students, or whether states could require that scholarship granting organizations serve only low-income families or prohibit them from discriminating against LGBTQ students and teachers.

The rules could also outline how the federal program may or may not stack with existing state tax-credit scholarships.

A spokesperson for Shapiro said in a statement Thursday his office is “awaiting federal guidance to address key questions about how this program would work, including which students will be eligible, how this federal initiative will interact with existing programs.”

Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican supporters of the tax credit made their case at a press conference Thursday.

“If Pennsylvania does not opt in, residents here can still claim the [tax] credit, but their donations will go to scholarships in other states,” state Rep. Martina White, a Republican who represents parts of Philadelphia, said at a press conference on Thursday. “In other words, Pennsylvania taxpayers will help fund scholarships elsewhere while our students miss out.”

Democratic state Sen. Anthony Williams, who represents Philadelphia, was not in attendance on Thursday, but sent a statement in support of the federal program.

“If Pennsylvania chooses to opt out, then we can say with certainty that the first $1,700 of every single Pennsylvania taxpayer’s federal taxes will leave the state, and it’s going to go to the U.S. Treasury, to the IRS,” Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, said at the press conference. “Who knows what’s going to happen with the money when it gets there?”

But Susan Spicka, executive director of the public education advocacy group Education Voters PA, told Chalkbeat it is “wildly irresponsible for anyone to call for Pennsylvania to opt into the federal voucher program before Treasury issues rules delineating how the program will work.”

Spicka said without those rules, it’s unclear how much it will cost taxpayers for the state to implement and oversee the program.

Without clear accountability measures, Spicka worried the program could open the door “for extraordinary opportunities for waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philly families say they have enough school choice. What they want is help navigating the system.

2025-10-02T19:33:55+00:00

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Shonique Hennigan attended Philadelphia district schools as a young person. There weren’t many other choices at the time, she said.

But her kids — like other Philadelphia students — have hundreds of possible options, one advocate estimates.

The challenge now, says Hennigan, is figuring out what school to choose: Which is the right fit? The right location? Which will offer her kids the safest, best chance of succeeding academically?

Those are the questions facing not just Hennigan, but families across the city as school selection season gets underway. Parents and experts say Philly families are often overwhelmed by their choices and the complicated systems necessary to choose a school — and they want more help navigating the process.

That means stress and anxiety for parents and students, and the potential to miss out on opportunities because the system can favor those with the resources, time, and means to fully engage with it.

At this year’s K-12 School Fair at the Philadelphia Convention Center on Sept. 20, Chalkbeat spoke to more than two dozen families about school choice in the city and what it feels like to go through the school selection process. The district’s application process — which allows pre-K through 11th grade families to choose a school outside their designated neighborhood catchment school for the 2026-27 school year — closes on Thursday, Oct. 23 at 11:59 pm.

“The reality of it is we have lots of options,” said Stacy Holland, executive director of Elevate 215, a nonprofit education advocacy group in the city. Between traditional neighborhood schools, charter schools, magnet schools, citywide schools, cyber schools, and private schools, Philly has “over 400 options for kids,” she said.

And for scholarships and tuition assistance at private schools, Pennsylvania already has two tax credit scholarship programs. Still, lawmakers in Harrisburg remain deadlocked over the state budget, driven in part by a lack of agreement over school choice policies. State Senate Republicans have repeatedly pushed for a new taxpayer-funded voucher program for private and parochial schools.

“This choice conversation has almost just gotten totally commandeered by the politics of vouchers,” Holland said.

Holland said it’s time for officials and experts to stop looking at choice as a “political issue and more about just a user issue.”

“We need to build a system where parents have an ease of access,” she said.

This month, Elevate 215 launched a new tool called Philly Schools Compass designed to simplify the selection process by allowing families to compare schools and search by grade level, neighborhood, and school type — district, charter, private, and virtual.

The school district also launched its own new Explore tool this summer that allows families to see each district school’s academic and extracurricular offerings.

But even with the tools available, many families told Chalkbeat they’d like the process to be simpler and more straightforward.

Ninth grader Cherish Davis said the school selection process has been “kinda stressful” to go through so far, even with her dad Damon Davis doing his best to support her through the process.

She said she feels like she “partly” has an understanding of what factors would make a good school for her, but she knows there are a lot of options and schools she has never heard of or considered.

School choice process is demanding and complicated

From start to finish, Holland said, the existing school choice process asks a lot of families.

First, parents have to explore “what are the questions you should be asking” to determine what type of school environment would help their children thrive. Are they interested in environmental science? Do they prefer a big school or a small school? Do they want to be close to home or use SEPTA public transit to travel? Do they want to play basketball, join a bowling league, or take up robotics?

Once parents figure out “what I think my kid needs,” Holland said the next step is to determine “how do I go about educating myself” as a parent. That can mean connecting with an organization like Elevate 215, contacting the school district with questions, building a detailed spreadsheet, talking to fellow parents, or visiting different schools in-person. But all of that takes significant time and energy — for working parents and those with fewer resources, those barriers can be prohibitive.

After a family has a list of schools they like and fit their needs, they can apply through the district’s school selection application where they rank their top five choices of district schools. For charter schools, families can use the Apply Philly Charter application system and apply to up to 15 schools through that process. Both applications rely on a lottery system but have different deadlines.

Most private schools have their own, separate application process and may require a parent interview. Neighborhood catchment schools do not require any application and families can simply go to that school to enroll.

Once the application process is concluded, accepting a seat can be an additional challenge. Students can be waitlisted or receive multiple offers from various types of schools and tight deadlines to accept.

At the school fair, parents Stacey and Brock Marshall said Philly offered a good variety of choices for their two sons in the ninth and fifth grade, but they wanted help navigating the system.

One thing that could be useful, they said, is more “bullet-pointed information” in an easy-to-digest format.

Nicole Marion, who has a ninth grader, said she definitely feels overwhelmed by all of the options. She said the pressure to make the right choice for her child led to her feeling “a lot of anxiety” this year.

Parents also told Chalkbeat they worry about school safety, low reading and math scores, and crumbling facilities — all of which adds to the stress and pressure to choose a “good” school.

Philly families are looking for more clear-cut information

Some of that anxiety has been ramped up by conservative messaging from local groups and the Trump administration.

The conservative Commonwealth Foundation has lobbied aggressively for expanding Pennsylvania’s school choice policies in recent years, saying in several press releases that students are “trapped in failing schools” across the state.

Last year, the Commonwealth Foundation debuted digital billboards over major highway routes in Philly urging Pennsylvanians to support a proposed state-backed scholarship that eligible students could use to pay for tuition and fees for attendance at participating private schools.

Philly families already have access to the Children’s Scholarship Fund of Philadelphia, a privately funded program that gives scholarships to low-income families to attend tuition-based schools via another lottery process.

But the families Chalkbeat spoke to say they’re not looking for an escape from the current school system — they’re looking for help navigating it.

Holland said to help relieve some of the stress and uncertainty from parents’ shoulders, the city’s number one priority should be improving the quality of schools currently available to families, as well as making the system more user-friendly.

“We have work to do,” Holland said. “But it doesn’t mean there’s not options for families to choose from.”

Parents Jessica and David McDermott said the school choice process can be overwhelming. They want to give their daughter agency in the decision-making but they said they’d appreciate more clear-cut information.

The McDermotts said they’re “still confused” about the district’s ranking process. They feel like there is “plenty of choice” but not enough transparent information about all of the offerings.

“No one can say which school is going to be good,” Jessica said. “You have to think about your core values and what’s important to you.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia Board of Education approves city’s first new charter school since 2018

2025-05-29T21:39:42+00:00

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The Philadelphia Board of Education voted Thursday to approve the city’s first new charter school in nearly a decade.

At a tense board meeting in a packed room, board members said they were “obligated” to approve the Early College Charter School of Philadelphia — since the application met all of the standards set by the state charter school law. Still, several members expressed serious reservations about the new school’s impact on the district’s budget.

The board approved the school in an 8-1 vote. Early College Charter is the first new charter school the board has approved since it regained local control in 2018. The vote represents a turning point for education in Philadelphia and a big win for the city’s charter school community and its supporters, who have criticized the board’s resistance to new charters and other ways it’s approached the charter sector. Charter critics counter that the publicly funded and privately run schools have fallen far short of their promises to students.

The board previously rejected Early College Charter’s application in February. That decision drew the attention of elected officials and others who questioned the move. The group behind Early College Charter subsequently submitted a revised application before Thursday’s vote.

Board President Reginald Streater remained unsure about his vote until the last moment.

He ultimately voted to approve the application, but cautioned the school’s founders that he hoped this vote would be the “beginning of a constructive relationship” between the school and the district.

“You spoke of excellence,” Streater said to those in the room who applied to open Early College Charter. “Please prove it.”

Before casting his vote, Streater also said Pennsylvania’s charter school law does not address the complexities that the Philly school district is facing, including historic underfunding and a persistent teacher shortage.

More than a dozen charter advocates, parents, politicians, and community activists told board members the school is highly desired and would provide new opportunities for students in need.

“We know what we have submitted meets the intent of the law, and we’ve gone above and beyond what the application asks for,” said Keshema Davidson, who’s on tap to be Early College Charter’s CEO.

Board member Joyce Wilkerson was the lone no vote on Thursday. She said there are empty charter and district seats across the city, and that many schools lack certified special education teachers.

“It is inconceivable to me” that the board would vote to approve a new school amid the district’s “already stressed resources,” Wilkerson said.

The applicants behind Early College Charter say it would be Pennsylvania’s first open-enrollment middle and high school to focus on early college attainment. Students would graduate with a high school diploma, as well as some college credits or an industry-recognized certificate or both, according to the application.

The founders also say their proposed school is built on successful models in other states but has been meticulously tailored to Philly. They say the school would focus on educating underserved students, and that their vision adheres closely to the intended values of Pennsylvania’s charter school law.

But charter critics remained unconvinced on Thursday.

Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, Teamsters Local 502, which represents school principals and other school officials, warned that the district has heard promises from charter school leaders before that “seemed too good to be true,” but that resulted in “carnage” for the district.

And LeShawna Coleman, chief of staff for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, also pointed to looming district school closures and teacher shortages, telling the board: “It is irresponsible and outrageous that this board would even contemplate authorizing any new charter.”

Early College Charter is now scheduled to open in the fall of 2026.

Critics say Philly’s charter sector rife with broken promises

In the leadup to Thursday’s meeting, one question loomed: If a charter school application meets all of the technical requirements of state law, are board members obligated to approve it, even if they have concerns about the impact on the district?

Thursday’s vote may have answered that question.

At their February meeting, board members said there was a lot to admire about the school’s application, only to reject it.

Before Thursday’s vote, Davidson and Anna Winter, who was also involved in Early College Charter’s application, told Chalkbeat that vote to reject the school’s application galvanized families, as well as political players from both sides of the aisle.

The district’s charter school office told board members Thursday that the school’s revised application addressed all of the concerns that had been raised with the original application.

Although Philly’s school board has not approved a new charter school since 2018 when it regained local control from the state, it has voted to renew charters and expand the number of seats at schools that were already operating.

In the intervening years, the charter sector has experienced scandals, poor academic performance reports, and broken promises. The aspirational Renaissance Charter turnaround program did not result in significant progress. And on the whole, student performance in charter schools is on par with student performance in traditional district schools.

District payments to charters also limit the district’s “ability to manage its expenses,” Fitch Ratings, a credit ratings agency, reported recently.

Since the district can’t raise tax revenue on its own, it has limited power to control its budget. One lever of local control that board members have exercised over the years is denying several charter school applications.

“In this time of uncertainty,” creating new charter schools would be “an imprudent risk for us to take,” Wilkerson said in February when she voted to reject Early College Charter’s application.

But some charters have stood out as models for citywide programs beloved by families and students. And thousands of Philadelphia families continue to enroll their children in charter schools.

Of the district’s roughly 198,300 total students, roughly 64,000 are enrolled in 81 brick-and-mortar charters, and another 14,250 are in cyber charters, according to the latest available district data.

Mayor Cherelle Parker hasn’t explicitly encouraged charter growth, but she has stated she wants to see an end to the “competition” between the school district and charters.

The school board is also revising its process for authorizing charter schools, through an initiative dubbed Project RiSE. The board approved a $300,000 contract with the National Charter Schools Institute on Thursday to “research charter authorizing best practices,” Streater said. But critics have claimed this process has largely taken place behind closed doors.

Some say innovation is crucial for Philadelphia education

Davidson and Winter cast themselves as atypical charter school founders.

They both served in administrative roles at Cristo Rey High School, a well-respected private Catholic school in the city, and don’t have extensive experience in the charter school world.

“We’re brand new, we have no baggage in this game,” Winter said in an interview.

Davidson said she and Winter felt “very strongly” that the school should operate as an open-enrollment public school with no selective criteria.

Philly already has a district school dedicated to programs in which students can earn associates degrees and professional certifications: Parkway Center City. But as a selective admissions school, not everyone gets in.

Early College Charter plans to use the city’s lottery application process for charter schools. But its backers say it will “focus its outreach, recruitment, and marketing” on reaching middle and high school students who live in 17 ZIP codes in which the average income for one adult with no children is below $46,363 before taxes, according to the application.

Davidson said for her and Winter, their intention is not to create a network of charter schools akin to Universal, ASPIRA, or KIPP, which have all been frequent targets of charter critics in Philadelphia.

“Our goal is to bring forth this one, high-quality school” that could serve as a blueprint for any traditional district schools, Davidson said.

Winter and Davidson said they empathize with the board’s position: they’re contemplating school closures while also being asked to approve a new school, but they still believe there is room for a collaborative relationship between Early College and both entities.

“We believe the bar should be very high, and that we should be held accountable to fulfilling the commitment we’re making to families,” Winter said.

Early College Charter’s application also shines a light on bigger questions for Philadelphia education, Winter said.

“Are we open for collaboration? Are we open for innovation? Are we ready to be at the table to talk about how we can improve and offer high-quality schools in our public district?” she said.

At one time, Philly had its own Innovation Network that produced district schools like SLA Beeber, Building 21, and The U School.

But that network no longer exists, district spokesperson Monique Braxton said.

That left Davidson and Winter with one option to open a new public school, they said: start a charter school.

Davidson said concerns about school closures and other budget worries are precisely why new public school models like Early College are needed to help families. She said Philadelphia parents and students should not simply be forced to wait for officials to improve the current system.

“Waiting while we fix things will mean that we have an entire generation of children that have not gotten access to a high-quality education,” Davidson said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania Republicans resurrect school voucher plans as state budget talks heat up

2025-05-20T17:04:21+00:00

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As Congress considers establishing a national school choice program, Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to revive plans for a statewide school voucher program.

State Rep. Martina White, who represents parts of Philadelphia, organized a Republican policy committee hearing on Monday to examine the School District of Philadelphia’s finances, staffing, and possible “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But no school district leaders were present at Monday’s hearing to answer lawmakers’ questions.

White and at least one fellow lawmaker said they came away from the hearing with a renewed belief that private school vouchers would benefit Philadelphia families who are unhappy with the condition and performance of their city schools. White told Chalkbeat on Monday that schools in her Northeast Philly neighborhood are overcrowded, and she would like to see “basically a school voucher” be made available to those parents “to be able to use that for the child to go to the school of their choice.”

Earlier this month, the state Senate education committee approved legislation to create a new voucher program called the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success — or PASS — Scholarship.

The bill would establish state-backed scholarship funds that eligible students could use to pay for tuition and fees for attendance at participating private schools. This year’s PASS legislation is nearly identical to last year’s proposal and very similar to a program called Lifeline Scholarships from two years ago.

Republicans’ support for private school vouchers is important because, as lawmakers decide on the state budget and how much money to provide public schools, state GOP leaders also say they are unconvinced that increasing funding to school districts will improve student outcomes. While Republicans control the Pennsylvania Senate, Democrats control the House.

When schools get more money, students tend to stay in school longer and score better on exams, according to a 2023 review of dozens of studies.

Vouchers have a questionable track record regarding their ability to improve student outcomes. But private school choice programs have proliferated at the state level in recent years. President Donald Trump supports vouchers. And a Republican budget bill in Congress would establish $5 billion in annual tax credits to fund private school scholarships, although the future of that provision of the bill is also unclear.

Pennsylvania Republicans have tried but failed for years to create a new voucher program at the state level. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, at one time supported legislation to establish vouchers, but he subsequently backed off that position and vetoed the Lifeline Scholarships proposal in 2023. State Sen. Anthony Williams, a Philadelphia Democrat, has also supported state GOP voucher proposals, including this year’s PASS legislation.

Pennsylvania already has two programs that use tax credits to fund scholarships: the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and the Education Improvement Tax Credit.

Philadelphia school leaders say district needs more funding

The Pennsylvania House policy committee, which White convened Monday to discuss Philly schools, has no legislative or administrative power over the school district. But White said what she and other lawmakers need to see in Philly are “real results for kids and families.”

Though White said school district representatives were invited to the hearing, none were available to answer lawmakers’ questions in person and submitted written testimony instead.

Superintendent Tony Watlington and Board of Education President Reginald Streater wrote in their testimony that the district has made “significant” progress improving student attendance, decreasing the number of students who have dropped out, improving third graders’ reading scores, as well as students passing their career and technical exams.

They also wrote that the district has “stabilized its finances,” received a positive credit rating affirmation, and are in need of more funding — which state lawmakers are in a position to provide or withhold.

“Despite making academic gains and appropriately managing our finances, decades of chronic underfunding continues to be a critical challenge for the district,” Watlington and Streater wrote.

White expressed disappointment that no district officials appeared in person to testify. District spokesperson Monique Braxton said in a Monday email that officials have invited White to meet with district leaders.

The policy committee did hear testimony from one Philadelphia parent as well as Christian Barnard, a policy analyst with the libertarian Reason Foundation think tank who criticized the district in several ways.

For example, Barnard (and White) said they were unhappy with the level of fiscal transparency publicly available for individual schools. However, school-level budgets are on the district’s website and include line-item descriptions of funding allotments for staff, extracurriculars, special education, and more.

Barnard also said the district is being inefficient by not reapportioning staff to account for school enrollment changes. Though the district recently ended the controversial practice of reassigning teachers once the school year has begun, Braxton said that staff are still moved around according to school needs and budgets. And Barnard said he was “skeptical” about the district’s assertion that it is underfunded, a claim backed up by a Commonwealth Court judge’s 2023 opinion that found the state system of funding schools was unconstitutional.

The Philly district, which is facing a growing annual deficit, is also undertaking a “rightsizing” process that the school board has warned will likely result in some school closures, colocations, or repurposing buildings.

Ultimately. White said the district is working through its challenges, but she would like to see the district embrace more choice for families — starting with approving additional charter school proposals or seat expansions. The school board has not approved a new charter school since 2018 but it has added more than 2,000 charter seats over the same period of time.

White also said that lawmakers “need to know that taxpayer funds are not being wasted or misallocated.”

She said she hopes to collaborate on that effort with the school district and bring that message to the state capitol.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia school board rejects 2 charter applications

2025-02-28T03:08:21+00:00

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The Philadelphia Board of Education voted to deny applications to create two charter schools Thursday — despite board members’ positive comments about one of them.

The board adjourned to go into executive session and deliberate in private before voting no on the applications to establish Early College High School and Pan American Academy High School.

The votes dashed charter supporters’ hopes, at least for now, that the board appointed by Mayor Cherelle Parker would finally be ready to expand the charter sector. The school board hasn’t approved a new charter since it regained control of the district from the state in 2018.

The proposed Early College Charter School went down by a vote of 6-3. The vote against the proposed Pan American Academy — Pathways High School, was 8-0, with one abstention.

Board members said the primary reason they voted to deny Early College’s application was financial uncertainty caused by the Trump administration’s threats to withhold federal funding, although they did not spell out those concerns.

“This was a very strong application. I am very close to wanting to approve it, but I don’t feel comfortable based on the funding piece,” said Board Vice President Sarah-Ashley Andrews. “I can’t gamble with our babies on that.”

On Pan American, the members said they objected to the applicant’s decision to apply for a new school rather than for an expansion of their existing K-8 school. They were also concerned about its funding and its high suspension rates of students, especially Black students.

The denials came as the district is engaged in a facilities planning process that is likely to result in several school closures. And in 2023 one charter school closed unexpectedly, and another one, West Philadelphia Achievement Charter Elementary, is now in a protracted fight with the district over $30 million the state says it owes the district for overenrolling students.

The application for Pan American Pathways High School was affiliated with K-8 Pan American Academy. The applicants sought to offer a bilingual International Baccalaureate program for grades 9-12 and focus on four pathways: health sciences, technology, business and human services.

The other denial was for Early College High School. Keshema Davidson, one of several founding Early College board members who are associated with Cristo Rey, a Catholic high school in the city, told board members in advance of the vote that a school was needed that would give students “the opportunity to succeed no matter their pathway” for either college prep or career and technical education.

After the vote, the Early College founders issued a statement saying they were “disappointed in the outcome of tonight’s vote” but said there is a “long road ahead.”

The city’s deputy chief education officer Sharon Ward was present for the votes. She told Chalkbeat after the meeting that Parker is “concerned about all students” regardless of where they go to school. During her 2023 campaign for mayor, while not explicitly calling for the charter sector to expand, Parker repeatedly said she wanted to see an end to the “competition” between the school district and charters.

Ward emphasized that the board, though appointed by Parker, is an independent body that “has to be guided by state law,” on this front.

Charter schools office flags enrollment, suspension stats

Peng Chao, the director of the district’s charter schools office, offered evaluations of the applications but no recommendations, as is the district’s policy.

He said Pan American’s K-8 school has a high student suspension rate, especially for Black students. Chao said that 17% of all students — and 34% of Black students — were suspended at least once, compared to 5% in other schools.

Chao shared data showing that third through eighth graders at Pan American scored far behind students in comparable schools and the district as a whole in standardized tests.

Meanwhile, Chao raised concerns about Early College’s planned reliance on foundation support, and noted that it had not yet identified its future principal and other leaders. He also raised concerns about whether it could meet its projected enrollment targets.

The last new charter, Hebrew Public in East Falls, was established in 2018 under the School Reform Commission, which governed the district when it was under state oversight for 17 years starting in 2001.

Over the past seven years the board has approved multiple charter renewals, adding some 2,600 seats to existing charter schools.

During that time the board has also denied several charter applications. Last year, it voted four times to deny the application of Global Leadership Academy, a K-8 school in West Philadelphia, to add a high school.

More than a dozen speakers, including several students, spoke in favor of the new charters. “It’s hard to watch friends from higher grades leave,” said Pan American student Yediel Huertas, supporting the addition of a high school.

Board member Wanda Novales was the founding principal of Pan American’s K-8 school and led the school from 2008 to 2018. Before that, she was a teacher and principal in the district. She abstained from the vote.

Brick-and-mortar charters in Philadelphia now educate about 64,000 students, compared to 118,000 in district-run schools.

Around 25 charters are now operating with expired agreements. Yet under state law, they can stay open even without a new signed charter. Pan American, citing concerns about accountability, failed to sign their charter renewals in 2018 and 2023.

The board is revising its process for authorizing charter schools, through an initiative called Project RiSE, in an effort to “reimagine charter school excellence by refining the performance framework.” But it has done so largely out of the public eye.

Earlier Thursday afternoon, several hundred people from Philly for Great Public Schools and the African American Charter Schools Coalition rallied in front of school board headquarters to support the charter applications.

Participants said that they want more choice for parents, especially of schools focused on the Black experience, but they also think that city schools should get more funding from the city and state.

“We need both public and charter schools,” said Stephanie Roberts, an artist who works with students.

Bureau Chief Carly Sitrin contributed to this story.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania denies AI cyber charter school application

2025-01-29T20:42:40+00:00

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Pennsylvania’s Department of Education issued a scathing denial on Wednesday for a controversial cyber charter school built around artificial intelligence.

The department determined the application for Unbound Academy “provided no evidence of sustainable support” for the school and said it “lacks the capability, in terms of both support and planning, to provide comprehensive learning experiences to students” and “fails to substantiate that it will serve as a model for other public schools,” among other concerns.

“There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs will enable students to meet academic standards,” the denial reads. The application “failed to provide even a list of courses that would be offered to students.”

The founders behind Unbound Academy promised the school would educate students twice as fast by giving them two hours of individually crafted lesson plans and academic work designed by AI tutoring software. In their model, teachers would shift from their traditional roles to instead become guides tasked with motivating and supporting students rather than doing the instructional work of teaching.

Founder MacKenzie Price told Chalkbeat she believes the model will revolutionize education.

Pennsylvania’s Interim Acting Secretary of Education Angela Fitterer determined this week that Unbound’s promises were largely without sufficient proof and did not provide adequate plans to serve students with disabilities or other vulnerable student populations.

“The artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards,” the denial letter reads.

The denial letter further assails Unbound Academy’s application as failing to “reflect an understanding of cyber charter school finances.”

The state also said the school demonstrated little interest from Pennsylvania families and submitted no petitions or letters of support from parents, students, or educators.

Pennsylvania teachers’ unions celebrated the denial on Wednesday.

“There is no way that two hours of AI-guided learning in core subjects could replace direct instruction from a certified teacher or meet state academic standards,” Pennsylvania State Education Association President Aaron Chapin said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Price, Unbound Academy, and its affiliated private schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Unbound can appeal the state’s decision within 30 days.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Two AI-powered charter schools could soon open in Pennsylvania

2025-01-24T18:44:53+00:00

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Student lesson plans built and personalized by artificial intelligence. Just two hours of classes daily. Frog dissections, defusing bombs, and ascents of Mount Everest — all in virtual reality. And teachers who transform from traditional instructors into “guides.”

That’s the vision MacKenzie Price has for a new cyber charter school in Pennsylvania. In Price’s telling, her AI-powered model turbo-charges students’ academic performance so much that they — and their guides — are free to spurn traditional classes for several hours of the school day and pursue other enriching activities instead. The tech entrepreneur says her program will revolutionize education, and she says she has the numbers to back it up.

But several other states have reviewed her pitch and rejected it. She’s already had to clarify perhaps her most startling claim about whether her schools really employ traditional teachers; in Pennsylvania at least, they would. Critics say what she’s selling is based on selective data from expensive private schools. And they’re deeply skeptical that the core teaching method holds up to scrutiny.

While schools nationwide are trying to incorporate AI-powered instruction into the classic teacher-in-front-of-the-classroom format, Price wants to blow that format up and put AI in the lesson-planning driver’s seat. It’s perhaps no surprise she’s zeroed in on Pennsylvania — it’s become the cyber charter capital of the nation, with 60,000 students enrolled full time in cyber charters in 2023-24. Yet the schools’ often lackluster academic track record and other concerns have led to calls for more accountability and pressure on Gov. Josh Shapiro to place a moratorium on new cybers.

Price told Chalkbeat she’s determined to expand, and she thinks Pennsylvania could be the key. “I want this to impact millions of students,” she said.

The backbone of Price’s schools is 2 Hour Learning — a model she co-founded that relies on a mix of proprietary AI tutoring software and third-party apps like Khan Academy, IXL, and Amplify. She also co-founded the Alpha School in 2014, a group of affiliated private schools which are built around 2 Hour Learning. The platform is also used at several other specialized schools Price is associated with that serve gifted and talented students, students pursuing sports, and refugees.

In fact, Price has sought to start not one but two charter schools in Pennsylvania. By the end of the month, the Pennsylvania Department of Education is slated to decide on whether to give Price’s plan for a cyber charter, Unbound Academy, the green light.

Recent news might not augur well for that application: On Tuesday evening, the Lancaster school district administration advised their school board to reject a proposal to open a brick-and-mortar charter school called Valenta Academy that would use 2 Hour Learning.

The school board is scheduled to vote on the school’s application “at a later date” according to a spokesperson. (Valenta Academy is also operating as a private microschool in Bastrop, Texas.)

Can AI-powered learning ‘help everybody’?

Both Unbound and Valenta would run on the 2 Hour Learning model, although it’s Price’s cyber charter school that’s drawing a lot of the attention.

According to the school’s Pennsylvania application, Unbound Academy would launch in the fall of 2025 with 500 students in grades 4-8 and only four teachers. By its fifth year, Unbound plans to enroll 2,500 students and 76 teachers. And the application projects a 90% student retention rate each year — much higher than other cyber charters have projected in their applications.

In year two, Unbound Academy projects it’ll be ranked in the top half of all Pennsylvania schools, according to the application.

Price said with AI driving each student’s learning, all lessons will fit individual needs. A fifth grader who struggles with reading but excels in math may receive AI instruction for reading at a fourth grade level but 25 minutes later may be doing pre-algebra work. That’s something traditional grade-level schools aren’t set up to do for every student, she said.

“I really believe that this method of educating people is something that can help everybody,” Price said.

As her model has drawn national attention, Price has changed her tune when it comes to perhaps her most dramatic claim.

“We have removed the teacher from the front of the classroom. No one has ever dared to do this before,” reads a promotional booklet on 2 Hour Learning. “Imagine starting a school and declaring, ‘We won’t have any academic teachers.’ We did exactly that!”

But Price acknowledged that what the school does is not quite “exactly that.”

“We have teachers. Teachers are critical to any education system,” Price said. “What we are doing is transforming that role of teachers so that we can allow them to focus on doing what they really do best, which is being able to positively impact students and build connections with them and provide motivation.”

Indeed, the application for Unbound Academy says candidates for the “guide” role must have a bachelor’s degree and hold a valid Pennsylvania teaching certificate to adhere to state teacher certification requirements.

Nevertheless, Price’s model is getting an icy reception in some quarters.

“Just as we do not accept students using AI software to write their essays or complete homework assignments for them, we will not accept districts using AI to supplant the critical role of teachers, specialists, and support staff in the classroom,” said Arthur Steinberg, who’s president of both the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers’ Pennsylvania affiliate. “There are far too many examples of AI products failing badly for states to do anything less than exercise extreme prudence when considering new AI-based models and schemes.”

AI-powered school makes big test score claims

Unbound’s application repeatedly cites results from the Alpha private schools showing their students not only learn content “twice as fast” as their peers, but can also rapidly learn any grade-level content they may be behind on.

To support this claim, Price points to scores from MAP, a suite of standardized assessments from NWEA. She said that on average, students in the 2 Hour Learning model “experience 2.4 times the academic growth compared to their peers in traditional education settings.”

Alpha schools also promote remarkable numbers, saying for example that its students rank in the 99th percentile of academic performance. Alpha’s website notes that it relies on the Pomodoro technique for time management, a reference to using a kitchen timer to increase productivity.

“The results that I’ve been able to get from our schools have been absolutely phenomenal,” Price said.

Her work doesn’t stop with American students. The 2 Hour Learning Model has been used in a virtual setting by Ukrainian refugees, Price said, and those students are also demonstrating accelerated learning. But those results are not public.

Reactions by other states to Price’s educational model have been mixed.

Late last year, Arizona — where the policy landscape is very receptive to disparate schooling models — approved an application from Unbound Academy. But Arkansas, North Carolina, and Utah have rejected it. Price said she also has an Unbound application pending in South Carolina.

Officials from the North Carolina Charter School Review Board shared several questions and concerns about the school, according to the meeting minutes from their review of Unbound’s application last September.

One official, Alex Quigley, said that Price had made a “compelling” case, and that Unbound’s model could be piloted in schools before scaling up. Yet he also noted that at least one of the Alpha Schools charges $40,000 a year for tuition. While Alpha schools in Texas and Miami do charge thousands for tuition, Price said many of the students at Alpha’s Brownsville, Texas location come from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds and attend on scholarship.

Another North Carolina official, Bruce Friend, said he “wasn’t clear about the role of the teacher compared to the role of AI and the parent.” Board officials also expressed worries about whether the school could meet the mandated academic calendar, student accessibility, and whether it was appropriate for young students to do a “massive” amount of learning online.

Then there’s skepticism about using in-person private school test results to project success with a cyber charter school.

Cyber charter operators in Pennsylvania have told Chalkbeat their students’ test scores “can’t and shouldn’t be compared to brick-and-mortar school scores.” Cyber charter students frequently move in and out of virtual learning environments. Many may be dealing with bullying, mental health issues, family instability, or physical health constraints. In short: They’re different from typical tuition-paying private school students.

Yet Price said she’s undaunted by the differences between students at Alpha schools and those who may enroll in a cyber charter school in Pennsylvania. She believes her 2 Hour Learning technique can work for anyone and can work in traditional public schools too.

“The great news about public charters is we’ve got to report our results. We’ve got to be able to show how we do on standardized tests compared to other students in Pennsylvania,” Price said. “So the proof is going to be in the pudding.”

Many cyber charter teachers ‘struggle to help students’

But supporters of traditional public schools say there’s too much uncertainty embedded in Price’s proposals.

Unbound’s cyber model is unproven and “does not have a track record,” said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, a group that is critical of charter schools.

Burris also said she was struck by the large number of Unbound cyber charter applications despite the group only having experience with brick-and-mortar private schools.

“I have never seen this phenomenon before,” Burris said of a group pursuing so many different types of schools at the same time.

Susan Spicka, executive director of the Education Voters PA advocacy group, said she rejected Price’s idea that the day-to-day work of being a classroom teacher is something that can be minimized by or subordinated to AI.

“There are a lot of very highly qualified, excellent teachers in Pennsylvania who teach at cyber charter schools, and they struggle to help students succeed when they are sitting at home on a computer in the online environment,” Spicka said. “It’s hard for kids to learn at home. The level of frustration my kids felt with stuff like that when they were forced to do it [during COVID] was off the charts. They hated it.”

Spicka also questioned how Price’s model serves students with disabilities if there’s no classroom teacher assigned to monitor them while they learn.

Unbound’s application says the school will adhere to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and “will offer a variety of special education programs and related services, delivered both directly by specialized staff and through contracts with external providers” via “in-person visits” or online teletherapy sessions.

For English language learners, “adaptive online programs like Duolingo” will be incorporated into their lessons and parents will have access to translated documents and “real-time interpretations during virtual sessions.”

Regardless, Spicka and others are lobbying for more scrutiny on cyber charters.

For example, they’re looking for lawmakers and Shapiro to add more funding and staff to the state education department so it can increase Pennsylvania’s monitoring of cyber charter schools.

State Sen. Lindsey Williams, a Democrat, has promised to introduce legislation for a moratorium on all new cyber charters until the state is better able to monitor the ones currently in operation.

In a December memo to her colleagues in the state Senate, Williams pointed to research showing the schools “consistently under-perform both brick and mortar charters and district schools,” and “every one of Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools has been identified as needing some level of support and improvement under the state’s accountability system.”

Williams wrote that it’s not surprising that private operators like Price “perceive our state as ripe for profiteering off of Pennsylvania’s children and taxpayers and apply to open new cyber charter schools.”

As for Price, she’s already thinking bigger than Pennsylvania.

She said if the Trump administration “called me up and said, ‘what would you do if you were in charge of K-12 education’?” she’d tell them to embrace “personalized learning technology” — like 2 Hour Learning.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia Mayor announces new committee to guide school closure plans

2024-12-09T21:21:45+00:00

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Philadelphia’s city leaders want to weigh in on the district’s school facilities planning process that will likely result in school closures, co-locations, and building repurposing.

Mayor Cherelle Parker announced Monday that in the next two weeks, her administration will be formally introducing a new “interdisciplinary facility planning committee” to review the school district’s facilities plan and give guidance and feedback.

Representatives from Parker’s office, City Council President Kenyatta Johnson’s office, as well as real estate developers, labor union leaders, and members of the “finance industry” will sit on the committee, in addition to Superintendent Tony Watlington, Parker said.

Parker told City Council members that the committee will give the district advice on how best to rebuild schools and raise funds.

“We are boldly moving ahead with our plans to improve public education in Philadelphia, even as our school district continues to be underfunded,” Parker said.

The district’s school closure and “rightsizing” process has gripped Philadelphia’s education community and surfaced wrenching memories of closure meetings in 2013. Families, teachers, and advocates have been sharing their concerns and pleas for improved facilities at public meetings across the city this month and last month.

Oz Hill, the district’s interim deputy superintendent of operations, said the district is facing a growing building maintenance backlog: His office receives some 650 new work orders for building issues every week, he said.

Watlington told Chalkbeat last week that he recognizes how painful school closures can be and the persistent negative impact closures can have on students’ academic performance and mental health. He said it’s his intention to minimize the harm to students even as they consider closing and combining schools.

School board members also teased a new initiative at the city council meeting they’re calling Project RISE (reimagining school excellence) to revise the district’s performance framework for charter schools.

School officials have been talking about reimagining the charter school authorizing process for nearly a decade. Pennsylvania’s charter school law has remained mostly unchanged since 1997. Some charter leaders and representatives have come before the school board arguing that the current process is confusing, burdensome, inefficient, and rife with systemic inequities. Pennsylvania’s Auditor General meanwhile has concluded that Philadelphia’s process complies with all relevant state laws.

The board has not approved a new charter school since the city regained local control of its schools from the state in 2018, but it has renewed several existing schools’ charters.

“The board knows that strong accountability systems must evolve over time,” Board member Whitney Jones (who used to work for the KIPP charter school network) told City Council members. Project RISE, he said, will “determine how the charter school performance framework should evolve to best support the needs of our students.”

The three-phase process will involve gathering feedback, putting out a request for proposals for an outside group to review the existing charter school performance framework, and eventually developing updated administrative procedures.

Board members said they’re in the process of considering four applications for new charter schools. Hearings on these applications will be held Dec. 19 and sometime in January.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Why thousands of Philly families are switching to cyber charter school

2024-10-01T13:13:47+00:00

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Sameerah Abdullah sends her three school-aged kids to a cyber charter school for some of the same familiar reasons that other families across the nation do, including the flexibility and personalization. For financial literacy class, they go to the bank to open an account. For science class, they head to a museum. On nice days, they try to get out of the city and into the woods.

But her motivations are also deeply personal, cultural, and, in some ways, unique to Philadelphia. Abdullah was an intern for a school guidance counselor in West Philly before having children and was struck by the exhausted teachers, the unappetizing cafeteria food, and the students’ cursing and bad behavior.

The city’s gun violence epidemic has only strengthened her resolve. Her nine-year-old son, Musa, was separated from his father during a mass shooting in a West Philly park during an Eid al-Fitr celebration in April and has struggled with loud sounds ever since.

Another reason, Abdullah thought, to keep her kids home.

“The shooter actually brushed through him when he was running,” said Abdullah, whose children attend Reach Cyber and Commonwealth Charter Academy. “At that moment, it made me realize, I had to teach my kids what to do in a crisis situation.”

Dawud (left) and his brother Musa listen to their Muslim studies instructor. The ability to incorporate religious and cultural practices into their education was a major reason why their mom enrolled them in cyber charter school.

Abdullah is part of a growing number of Black, brown, and low-income Philadelphians turning to cyber charters because they see them as a safe and flexible educational option for their families. Nearly 15,000 of Philadelphia’s more than 197,000 students attended a virtual cyber charter school last year — a 55% increase since the 2020-21 school year.

In fact, Pennsylvania has quietly become the “cyber charter capital of the nation,” according to a report from the education advocacy group Children First PA. Nearly 60,000 students statewide were enrolled full time in cyber charters in 2023-24, according data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Children First researchers found Pennsylvania enrolled more full-time cyber students than any other state — including ones like California, Texas, and Florida with much larger K-12 student populations.

Like traditional charter schools, cyber charters are publicly funded but independently run schools approved by the state Department of Education. There are 13 cyber charter schools operating in Pennsylvania, as well as a smaller virtual academy run by the Philadelphia school district for the past decade. School districts across Pennsylvania collectively send those 13 schools an estimated $1 billion a year, including almost $270 million from the Philadelphia school district last fiscal year.

Philadelphia families like Abdullah’s told Chalkbeat they are increasingly choosing virtual schools for the schedule flexibility, smaller class sizes, and safety and bullying concerns at their childrens’ traditional schools. Gun violence fears in particular have driven some of the demand for online options, according to families who spoke with Chalkbeat.

While gun violence overall is down in Philadelphia, 40% of gun violence victims this year were younger than 18, according to city data. Though the majority of Philadelphia’s gun violence does not take place on school property, as the Trace recently reported, five Philadelphia schools were among the top 10 nationwide in experiencing shootings near their buildings in the last decade.

But as more families in Philadelphia withdraw from the traditional district in favor of these cyber charter schools, the charter operators have come under fire from public education advocates for failing to improve student performance. The state has acknowledged in its decision letters renewing several cyber schools’ charters that some of the organizations are not performing up to their standards, but has stopped short of revoking their charters.

With cyber charter enrollment rising as traditional district enrollment shrinks, education advocates say the state should be taking a more hands-on approach to ensuring the operators are delivering a quality education — and holding accountable those that don’t.

“These schools are failing to ensure that the kids they bring in are learning and will be able to graduate, ready for a productive career or higher education,” said Susan Spicka, executive director of the public education advocacy group Education Voters PA. “That is a huge problem.”

Asiyah Jones, 6, works on her laptop at her home in Philadelphia. Asiyah likes to draw, and her mom Sameerah said she can incorporate artistic opportunities into Asiyah’s English and math lessons.

Parents on remote learning: ‘I felt it was safer’

Remote learning was thrust into the public eye during the pandemic, when school closures shuttered buildings and students across the country learned online. But parents like Shawna Hinnant enrolled their children in cyber charter schools long before COVID.

A resident of the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia — a community that has grappled with a thriving open-air drug market and concentrated gun violence — Hinnant said she didn’t feel comfortable having her kids walk to school on sidewalks littered with discarded needles and other drug paraphernalia.

Additionally, her two sons had experienced bullying at both traditional public schools as well as brick and mortar charter schools.

“That’s why I decided to go with the online school because I felt like it was safer,” said Hinnant.

Hinnant said she was also drawn in by the resources the cyber charter schools offered: Free printers, gift cards to Target for school supplies, and computers.

Many Spanish-speaking Philadelphians are also choosing cyber charters run by Latino-led organizations because of gaps they say persist in the traditional district’s language and cultural services. And Muslim families like Abdullah’s likewise are moving online to incorporate more spiritual, cultural, and religious teachings alongside the traditional curriculum.

Musa and Dawud look at their schoolbooks.

“Now that the whole COVID thing has dwindled down a little bit, it’s kind of like, ‘hey, you know what my kids did really well,’ or ‘I liked having my student at home’ … or ‘I’m not home and I don’t want my child to walk to school.’ It’s a safety issue,” said Lisette Agosto Cintrón, principal at the district-run online school, the Philadelphia Virtual Academy, and a former principal at ASPIRA bilingual cyber charter school in the city.

Agosto Cintrón said she has also worked with families of students with chronic illnesses or are homebound. Her students also come from households that have been disrupted due to domestic violence, refugee situations, or threats of gun violence against families stemming from “neighborhood beefs.”

“Transiency doesn’t matter in my world,” Agosto Cintrón said. “The school travels with the child.”

Some cyber charter schools struggle to perform

Though families told Chalkbeat they’re mostly happy with the education their children are getting online, cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania have reported lower standardized test scores and graduation rates than all schools statewide.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis of 2023 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test score data, 36.8% of cyber charter school students scored proficient or better in English language arts, compared to 53.5% of students statewide, and 13.7% scored proficient or above in math, compared to 33.4% statewide. (Their results are mixed when compared to the Philadelphia school district’s scores — 34.2% proficient or better in English and 20.4% proficient or better in math.)

Sarah Cordes, an associate professor and education researcher at Temple University, has researched cyber charter high school students and found that they tend to have worse test scores and higher rates of chronic absenteeism than traditional public school students, even when controlling for the differences in student population. Students who enroll in a cyber charter school are 9.5 percentage points less likely to graduate in four years, Cordes found, and are 16.8 percentage points less likely to enroll in a postsecondary institution.

“What really stood out is just how consistently negative the results were, and that it was across populations,” Cordes said. “It didn’t seem to matter if you came from an urban district or a rural district or a suburban district, it seemed pretty equally bad.” Cordes said her results were consistent across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, “which is unusual in education research.”

The state has considered cyber charters’ lagging test scores when authorizing or renewing the schools, but, in most cases, has stopped short of revoking their charters.

Take Reach Cyber, the school that Musa and his brother Dawud attend. In July, Pennsylvania Education Secretary Khalid Mumin wrote in a letter to the school that for the past few years “students in all grade levels and all subjects have significantly underperformed on the PSSA and Keystone Exams, specifically when compared with traditional public schools.”

Still, despite these concerns, the education department granted Reach a five-year charter renewal.

The state education department included identical language in the renewal decision letters for PA Distance Learning Charter School and Insight PA Cyber Charter School.

To be sure, test score data comes with complexities. Unstable home situations don’t often create ideal test taking environments, cyber charter operators have said. What’s more, many families who choose cyber charter schools because of their nontraditional outlook on education are more likely to opt-out of standardized testing.

And cyber charter operators argue that students perform better on state tests the longer that they attend the schools, but their student populations tend to move in and out of virtual learning. (Cordes’ analysis, though, didn’t back up that assertion at the high school level.)

Jane Swan, CEO of Reach Cyber, said in an email that “cyber charter school student scores can’t and shouldn’t be compared to brick-and-mortar school scores.” Swan said the school conveys the importance of state tests to families but “many families invoke their right to refuse testing due to philosophical, health, or logistical reasons.” She also noted that students arrive at the school “significantly below grade-level proficiency.”

Parents like Abdullah said they look beyond test scores and overall school performance when choosing cyber charters.

“I think that with my children, the testing is important, but at the end of the day, character building is important, being responsible is important, being a good neighbor. Community work, that’s important as well,” she said. Abdullah is also an experienced educator herself and is pursuing her doctorate in education online with a focus on student safety and mental health.

Beyond performance, critics of cyber charters accuse them of drawing vital funding away from struggling traditional public schools, since district schools send cyber charters the same per-student tuition it would spend educating a child in one of its classrooms, minus some costs for transportation and facilities. Districts must send this tuition payment for every student who lives in the city but is enrolled in a cyber charter, regardless of whether that child was ever educated by the district.

Advocates have called foul on the state’s four largest cyber charter schools for using those funds to amass nearly $500 million in real estate, such as office space and parking lots, and more than $20 million on advertising and gift cards. Cyber charter leaders have defended their spending, saying their schools retain physical assets to protect their finances from instability. Furthermore, the operators say they need buildings to house technology infrastructure like servers, office space for school staff, and “family service centers” where parents can get in-person assistance.

Dawud spends some time on his laptop for class, but his family also makes sure to build in time for recess and playing outside.

Pennsylvania lawmakers seek education reforms

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Harrisburg has put forth efforts to reform the way cyber schools are funded and monitored, but the boldest changes haven’t gained much traction.

The most recent state budget Gov. Josh Shapiro signed in July included $100 million to reimburse school districts for payments they make to cyber charter schools and some alterations to the way special education students are counted and funded. But the wholesale reforms some lawmakers had proposed did not make it into the final budget.

Calls by local school boards for more oversight cross party lines, according to Lawrence Feinberg, director of the Keystone Center for Charter Change, who has been following the growth of cyber charter schools.

“I know public education is far from perfect, but theoretically, there’s accountability built into it. It seems to me that for 20 some years, accountability has been missing from the cyber charter arena, both fiscally and performance-wise,” Feinberg said.

Despite the drawbacks, parents are still seeking online learning

While advocates fight for more oversight of cyber charters, some families in Philadelphia say they’re not happy with their traditional neighborhood schools and don’t have time to wait for the district to improve.

Still, for some students, the adjustment to online learning can be hard.

Starlynne Santiago, 18 and an engineering technology student at Drexel University, said making the switch to a cyber charter was “scary” at first for herself and her brother, Skyler Rodriguez, 12. But she forged close bonds, even over the computer screen.

“Overall, I think the education was the same, and I feel like the connections I had with the teachers were way closer than what I had in-person school,” she said.

Ultimately, Santiago was able to graduate a year early from Reach Cyber by taking summer classes and working with career coordinators to focus her studies on engineering.

Her brother said it’s been harder for him to make friends in online school, and while he wants to finish middle school virtually, he’s not sure it’s the right fit for him long term.

Sameerah Abdullah is an experienced educator herself and has been supporting her kids through their online classes.

Musa, active and gregarious, and his mom have different philosophies about his future as well.

Though he loves going to school with his siblings, “once I get to middle school, I would like to go to a real school,” Musa said. “I don’t want to be in middle school and have my whole life be on a laptop. … I like to talk and help others.”

Abdullah said she recognizes her children are outgoing and need friends, socialization, and time outdoors. She said she works hard to tailor their online school experience so that they can travel, meet up with other online families, take field trips, and play with their friends in the neighborhood.

Her goal, she said, is to one day create a space where families like hers can join up, and do online homeschooling together.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Students will get more power in Philadelphia’s revamped school admissions process

2024-08-13T19:33:41+00:00

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The Philadelphia school district is revising its selective admissions lottery process yet again by giving students the ability to rank several choices, adjusting waitlists, and employing a widely used algorithm.

Officials are instituting the changes after a survey by the consulting firm Accenture found widespread dissatisfaction among students and families with how the system worked in its first year in 2022-23.

The new system “will allow us to do a better job extending more offers and when we have vacancies we can more quickly fill those vacancies with qualified students,” said Superintendent Tony Watlington at a back-to-school event on Tuesday.

The district decided to change its high school admissions process three years ago in order to expand access to the district’s citywide and selective middle and high schools. Historically, those schools enrolled relatively few Black and Hispanic students from low-income families living in certain parts of the city.

But so far, the new system, which also prioritizes certain ZIP codes, has made slow progress in reaching its goal. And last year, the lottery left many other citywide admissions schools with hundreds of unfilled seats, sparking anger and causing staff cuts. After the 2023 audit, the district tweaked its admissions process for the 2024-25 school year, but has decided another overhaul is warranted.

The school selection process for the 2025-2026 school year opens on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024 at 4:00 p.m., and closes on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.

These are the major changes to the selective admissions process that will take effect for the 2025-26 school year:

Students will rank their schools and waitlists will operate differently. Students will be able to rank their top five choices. If they are accepted into their third choice, for instance, they will remain on a waitlist for their first and second choices, but dropped from consideration for their fourth and fifth choices. Currently, students submit five schools in no particular order and might be accepted into all five or none of them, even if they meet the qualifications. In a statement, the district said that “offers will be made based on the order in which an applicant ranked their five schools, the applicant’s eligibility, and seats available at the school/program.”
The district has changed the priority ZIP codes: From its inception, the lottery system prioritized students from certain ZIP codes, most of them in North and West Philadelphia. They are 19121, 19140, 19133, 19136, and 19124 and 19134. For the coming year, it is dropping 19132, and adding 19134, based on data showing which ones have the lowest representation of students at the most highly selective schools.
Offers to qualified middle school students who want to stay at their school are guaranteed. Students in five selective schools that start in fifth or sixth grade and go through high school will be assured a ninth grade seat if they rank their school as their first choice and meet all admissions requirements. The schools are: Girard Academic Music Program (GAMP), Carver High School of Engineering and Science, Hill-Freedman World Academy, Masterman, and Science Leadership Academy at Beeber. Before, these students had to enter the lottery like everyone else.
The district is using a different algorithm to match students with their choices. It will now use a version of an algorithm that previously won the Nobel Prize and is known as the “deferred acceptance” algorithm. It’s been used for everything from matching medical students with residency programs to connecting potential dating partners on the Hinge app. A version of the new algorithm is already in use by the city’s Apply Philly Charter enrollment system.
Students have a new way to research options. In February, the school board approved a $1.6 million contract with Avela, a software company. According to the Accenture report, the system under the company the district previously contracted with, SchoolMint, was rife with technical difficulties and errors that frustrated families and school counselors. Avela’s tool, called Explore, is a more comprehensive and user-friendly tool for students to research their school choices, according to the district.
Schools will no longer accept PASA scores in applications. The Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment is a standardized test for students with significant cognitive impairments. It is taken by under 1% of students in the district.

Questions about algebra, tests linger for selective admissions

The lottery system, which debuted in 2022, replaced a longstanding process that relied heavily on principal choice and favored students who attended schools with enough counselors to provide advice and help with applications.

The district has different entry requirements for its array of selective admissions and citywide admissions schools, most of which are middle and high schools. Qualifying students must meet minimum percentiles on standardized tests — ranging from being in the top 50% to the top 20% for magnet schools like Masterman and Central — and satisfy grade and attendance requirements.

The new admissions system won’t address all of the challenges and controversies around admissions.

One of the more high-profile issues involves eighth grade algebra. The district is working to expand algebra access, but most schools in the prioritized ZIP codes don’t offer it. And Masterman, Philadelphia’s flagship high school, requires applicants to have taken eighth grade algebra. District spokesperson Christina Clark said she did not have information on whether algebra access is expanding for this coming school year.

Most district students take the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, and can use those standardized test scores to satisfy admissions requirements. Students coming from private and charter schools may submit scores from a different standardized test, such as the Terra Nova. But judging the impact of eliminating the PASA could be difficult.

Under a 1995 consent decree known as LeGare, the district has been under a court order to offer equitable access to all its schools to students with disabilities and English learners. In announcing the new system, officials did not make any reference to LeGare.

Abigail Beljean, who has two children in the district, is a former counselor at the Wissahickon Charter School. She helped students make their high school choices, and said that she hoped the new system would not impede opportunities for students with disabilities to schools.

In her experience, a student who might need an alternative assessment like the PASA could also “be an incredible artist or musician,” she said, and could succeed at schools like Creative and Performing Arts High School (CAPA) and GAMP.

She noted that before the lottery, principals could use their discretion to admit students who missed the required percentile on a standardized test by just a point or two. They no longer have that option.

Overall, she said, while the district “has made some good changes,” to make the process more fair, she hopes it maintains “some kind of pathway” for students who barely miss a test-score cutoff, or who have in the past taken the PASA test rather than the PSSA.

“If a kid can’t take the PASA, but has no other standardized test to submit, what do they do?” she said.

Clark said the PASA test doesn’t translate easily into percentile achievement, so is not suitable for judging readiness for the magnet schools. The district is encouraging students with Individualized Education Programs to take another approved alternative standardized test, or they can apply to waive that requirement.

Overall, said Jane de Lartigue, whose seventh grader at Houston Elementary School in Mount Airy will be applying to high schools this time next year, the new system “seems more equitable.”

Lartigue said that parents she has talked to and those in online discussion groups are hoping that students will now “have a better chance of getting into a school that they would prefer.”

“In theory it will help parents get a school that best matches their needs, while also freeing up other school spots sooner in the process,” said parent Emily Chaudhury in a comment posted to the NW PHL Public Schools Discussion Group on Facebook. “This will get more kids offered spots in the few rounds of wait-list offers than what has happened in previous years, leaving fewer kids without spots and fewer schools with empty seats – and staff reductions.”

While most admissions occur at the high school level, the new lottery process will apply to students currently in pre-kindergarten through eleventh grade who are applying to any school outside their regular neighborhood catchments that have admissions standards.

Philadelphia Bureau Chief Carly Sitrin contributed to this story.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Josh Shapiro: Learn about the education track record of Kamala Harris’ potential VP pick

2024-08-01T18:56:42+00:00

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Of all the vice presidential candidates reportedly under consideration by Democratic presidential frontrunner Kamala Harris, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has one of the most extensive education records.

But he hasn’t always been in lockstep with the Democratic Party — or teachers unions — when it comes to schools.

His public support of private school vouchers last year drew the ire of some national public education groups. Facing intense pushback from public school advocates, teachers unions, and some fellow Democrats, Shapiro has since tempered that position, and has not resurrected the $100 million state-backed voucher program that he struck from last year’s state budget.

Pennsylvania’s teachers unions, which strongly oppose private school vouchers, have not separately endorsed Shapiro explicitly for vice president.

The state’s teachers unions might welcome Shapiro as Harris’ running mate not so much because they think he would be their biggest champion in the White House. Instead, they could be motivated by the possibility of having a stronger ally in Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, a Democrat who would take over for Shapiro, according to one source with experience in progressive state politics, who spoke with Chalkbeat on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

Soon after Harris emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, 50 labor leaders, including the presidents of the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) and the Pennsylvania branch of the American Federation of Teachers, signed a letter of support for Shapiro. The letter does not directly mention Shapiro as a possible Harris running mate.

“Governor Shapiro knows better than anyone that we don’t have to agree on every single issue to continue to get stuff done,” the letter states.

Chris Lilienthal, a spokesperson for the PSEA, said Thursday that Shapiro has a “very good record” on public education, and that “we think he would be an asset to the Harris campaign.”

AFT Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers declined to comment.

Separately, Shapiro’s support for Israel and strong disavowal of pro-Palestinian university campus protests has also made him a target of progressives, some of whom claim that choosing Shapiro could divide Democrats.

His supporters in Pennsylvania say Shapiro is a measured politician who’s able to course-correct when he gets new information.

“He’s been far more amenable to suggestions that I think most people would ever give him credit for. He’s very good at taking in new information, he’s very good at looking at data, he’s very good at taking a step back to look for a bigger picture,” said state Rep. Peter Schweyer, a Democrat and chair of the House Education Committee, referring to working with Shapiro on education policy.

Shapiro was elected governor in 2022 after previously serving as the state’s attorney general since 2017 and as a state representative.

With Democrats and Republicans splitting control of the legislature, Shapiro was able to negotiate and sign a budget this year that includes record-setting funding for public schools — though not as much as public school advocates would have liked — and increases in state funding for early childhood education and special education.

In addition, he’s secured universal school breakfast for public school students, and pushed for strengthening the state’s K-12 teacher pipeline.

Shapiro has the support of Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker. (Harris’ campaign told Politico that she plans to hold her first rally with her VP pick in Philadelphia on Tuesday.)

“If you want to win Pennsylvania, there is no other candidate in this nation positioned to help us win the White House than our governor, Josh Shapiro,” Parker said at a rally to endorse Harris July 26.

Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro, said that “despite being the only Governor in the nation with a divided legislature – and despite bad faith attacks from all sides – Josh Shapiro has been a champion for public education and delivered real results.”

Here’s what we know about Shapiro’s education record in Pennsylvania:

Shapiro’s past support for school vouchers drew criticism

Shapiro, who attended a private Jewish day school and sent his kids to one as well, originally proposed a $100 million private school voucher program in his budget last year in coordination with state Republicans.

After intense pushback from the teachers unions, public education advocacy groups, and Democrats, he ultimately vetoed the proposal and did not take up the issue again in earnest this year.

“In his second budget, he didn’t bring it up. He didn’t put it in his budget address. And it was never seriously on the table this year,” Schweyer said.

But Shapiro’s willingness to champion vouchers at all, a position shared by some Philadelphia Democrats, did not go over well on the national stage.

During a visit to Philadelphia last year, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona underscored national Democrats’ views when he said he was “totally against” vouchers. If he were to become the Democratic vice presidential nominee, it’s likely Shapiro would face pressure to express such opposition to vouchers.

In a letter from late July, a group of national public education advocacy organizations wrote that Shapiro’s support for vouchers amounts to him supporting “education policies mirroring Project 2025,” referring to the presidential transition plan proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

But Democrats and public school supporters aren’t alone in their criticism of Shapiro’s track record on private school choice. Vouchers and school choice in general are core parts of the Republicans’ education platform. Pennsylvania GOP members said they felt stung by Shapiro’s initial commitment to the program last year, only for him to subsequently veto the program in the budget.

Still, some education advocates who’ve disagreed with Shapiro’s support for vouchers are still backing him. Schweyer, who said he’s “proudly one of the most anti-voucher legislators” in Pennsylvania, threw his support behind Shapiro and defended his education record on social media.

Schweyer said “what we’ve done in education, I would argue, is more transformative and more impressive than fixing a bridge in 12 days,” referring to Shapiro’s nationally lauded success overseeing the rebuilding of a section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.

Despite nixing a private school voucher program, Shapiro has pumped more funding into Pennsylvania’s tax-credit programs that support school choice — the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and Educational Improvement Tax Credit. Both give tax breaks to businesses that donate to organizations that provide private school scholarships to students.

Shapiro condemned students’ pro-Palestinian protests

Along with his support for vouchers, most of the national criticism aimed at Shapiro has come from progressive Democrats, young voters, and pro-Palestinian advocates who say his vocal support for Israel would divide the Democratic Party.

Shapiro, who is Jewish, has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has taken a hard-line stance on university campus protests and encampments at University of Pennsylvania. He called on the university to “disband the encampment, and to restore order and safety on campus.”

He also called former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s testimony to Congress about campus antisemitism “absolutely shameful.”

However, Shapiro has also strongly condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him “one of the worst leaders of all time.”

Public school funding got boost from Shapiro

Faced with a court mandate to reform the way Pennsylvania funds its public schools, Shapiro has called for increasing basic school funding by more than $1 billion in each of the last two state budgets he and lawmakers negotiated.

“The results of two years of budgets under Governor Shapiro are almost $2 billion of new funding to schools,” and millions more for other kinds of support for public schools despite Republican attempts to curb funding, Schweyer said.

However, Shapiro and state lawmakers also failed to deliver a long-term plan to move the state towards fully funding public schools.

“The same budget legislation that admits the scope of the Commonwealth’s constitutional shortfall still leaves nearly 90% of that hole to be filled by some undefined date in the future, or not at all,” the Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center said in a joint statement after the budget signing.

Shapiro turned to teacher pipeline to address shortages

Persistent teacher shortages have plagued Pennsylvania, as well as the rest of the country. Shapiro’s administration has made an effort to grow the teacher pipeline, though educator advocates have said he could have done more.

In the most recent budget Shapiro signed, allocated $1.4 million in funding for districts and universities to “engage” students interested in working with students with disabilities. In Philadelphia, the hardest to staff teacher positions have been in special education.

The budget Shapiro signed also added $20 million more for student-teacher stipends — though the demand outweighed the allocation last year, a trend that’s expected to continue. To provide every student-teacher in the state with such a stipend would cost roughly $75 million annually.

The most recent budget also created a pathway for non-U.S. citizens to become teachers.

Shapiro said he’s ‘building better schools’

Public education advocates have also celebrated Shapiro’s ability to secure universal free breakfast for all Pennsylvania students.

In addition, he’s secured money for much-needed school construction and renovation, a new “solar for schools” energy program, and millions more for career and technical education.

In a post in late July on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, Shapiro touted these and other education policies as examples of his ability to work with Republicans.

“We’re building better schools for the next generation of Pennsylvania leaders,” Shapiro said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania governor’s backing for vouchers perplexes allies

2024-07-26T20:19:15+00:00

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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is being eyed as a potential Democratic vice presidential nominee, but with that attention has come intense scrutiny of his support for a traditionally conservative idea: taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

Since taking office last year, Shapiro has become the most prominent Democratic voice in the state for such a program. Last summer, he backed a controversial Republican voucher proposal to the chagrin of longtime party allies and influential unions that supported his candidacy — though he ultimately vetoed the language after facing opposition from fellow Democrats.

Despite his high-profile public backing, Shapiro’s embrace of vouchers appears to be a relatively new conviction, according to political insiders and others who have worked with and followed the governor in his two-decade political career. As a state lawmaker in the 2000s, he didn’t advocate for the issue, they recalled, let alone push legislation.

Shapiro’s thinking on the issue can be understood in part through his relationship with at least one prominent school choice advocate, sources told Spotlight PA.

Voucher programs vary widely, but they broadly route public money to pay for tuition at private and religious schools.

Proponents argue they give children attending struggling public schools crucial options, while opponents say they weaken public schools by diverting funding and don’t necessarily help students. Studies have shown that their effects are mixed, with more recent reviews of statewide programs showing they have caused student test scores to decline.

Shapiro did not publicly back creating a voucher program until his run for governor in 2022, according to a review of news articles and public statements he has made.

He has tempered his position — deeply unpopular among many of his Democratic colleagues — by saying he will only support such a program if it does not take money away from public education.

“I think it’s very important that we fully fund public education,” Shapiro told reporters at a 2022 campaign event. “And I also think it’s really important that we empower parents to put their kids in the best place for them to be able to succeed.”

To be sure, during his time as governor, both state budgets have included major public education investments. This year’s $1.1 billion increase for K-12 education was the largest single-year bump in the state’s history, according to Shapiro.

“In his time in office, Governor Shapiro has consistently delivered historic increases in public education funding and finally, after decades of inaction, moved Pennsylvania towards adequately and equitably funding our public schools,” Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement to Spotlight PA.

Behind the scenes, however, he has also tried to convince fellow Democrats to set aside public dollars for vouchers. For many of them, Shapiro’s insistence on the issue is confounding.

Shapiro, 51, has been an elected official since 2005, when he joined the state House representing the Montgomery County district where he grew up and still lives. Several former colleagues say that during his eight years in the chamber, he wasn’t involved in school choice debates in any significant way.

“I’ve had conversations with [Shapiro] about many other things,” said Tony Payton, a former Democratic state representative from Philadelphia who supports school vouchers and served alongside the governor, “and that wasn’t one of them.”

There would have been opportunities.

In 2011, while Shapiro was still a state House member, Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, launched a push to create a school voucher program. That effort passed the state Senate with bipartisan backing but foundered in the state House, where it never came up for a vote.

State Sen. Anthony Williams, a Philadelphia Democrat, was one of the Democrats who supported it. He told Spotlight PA that Shapiro wasn’t involved in pushing for the program.

“Any Democrat that was for school choice, I would know that,” he said.

Williams, who is still a member of the chamber and remains one of the Democratic Party’s strongest school choice supporters in the state, says he didn’t get a hint that Shapiro was open to vouchers until he was running for governor.

“Now, I don’t know the whole motivation,” Williams said. He added that when he spoke to Shapiro about passing school choice legislation more recently, the governor said it was the “right thing to do.”

Williams added that Shapiro “has friends who are in the school choice community who align with him about that issue. And so in the conversations, I’m told, this issue came up, and they sort of found common ground.”

Those friends, Williams said, “were supporters, who are strong choice people, who supported his campaign, because they were supportive of the issue of choice.”

Three sources who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive political issue told Spotlight PA that notable among them is Joel Greenberg, a billionaire co-founder of the global high-speed trading firm Susquehanna International Group.

Greenberg served on Shapiro’s gubernatorial transition team with an assignment to focus on education policy, and multiple sources confirmed to Spotlight PA that the two have known each other for more than a decade.

In 2015, Shapiro, then a Montgomery County commissioner, gave the Philadelphia Inquirer his assessment of Greenberg’s political and philanthropic work.

“He’s a major employer in the region and he’s wonderfully philanthropic — for Jewish causes, educational causes and other community organizations,” Shapiro told the paper.

Another co-founder of Susquehanna International Group is even more well-known in the world of Pennsylvania school choice advocacy: billionaire Wall Street trader Jeffrey Yass. He’s emerged as a major Republican donor nationally and an inescapable power broker within the commonwealth, despite his nearly nonexistent public profile.

Both Greenberg and Yass have been involved in bankrolling the school choice movement for more than a decade in Pennsylvania.

“We are not in this to run charter schools, to manage charter schools. This is purely altruistic,” Greenberg told WHYY in 2015, when asked about his support for Williams’ mayoral campaign. “We view this as helping kids have a choice who are trapped in failing, oftentimes violent schools.”

Along with fellow suburban Philadelphia billionaire and SIG co-founder Arthur Dantchik, Greenberg and Yass were at one point the main donors to Students First, a political action committee founded in 2010 to support school choice candidates.

Shapiro accepted $175,000 from that PAC between 2012 and 2016, according to campaign finance records. During that time, he was a Montgomery County commissioner and, by 2016, was running for attorney general.

The donations to Shapiro’s attorney general campaign so troubled Philadelphia’s teachers union that it quietly pulled its endorsement at the last minute, multiple news outlets reported.

The union declined to comment at the time, but a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed to Spotlight PA that the union pulled its endorsement over the Students First donations. (The Pennsylvania State Education Association, a larger, statewide teachers union, continued to back Shapiro in that election.)

During the 2022 gubernatorial race, PACs connected to Yass spent millions during the primary to oppose eventual Republican nominee state Sen. Doug Mastriano. One of those PACs, Commonwealth Leaders Fund, ran anti-Shapiro ads during the general election but scaled back then stopped that spending shortly after Shapiro publicly pledged his support for vouchers.

Once elected, Shapiro sought to create such a program as part of the 2023-24 state budget.

“I believe every child of God deserves a shot here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and one of the best ways we can guarantee their success is making sure every child has a quality education,” Shapiro told Fox News in June 2023, late in the state’s budget process.

The remarks preceded the Republican-controlled state Senate’s sudden passage of a budget deal that included $100 million in taxpayer money to fund private school tuition for students in low-performing public districts.

But once the budget reached the state House, Shapiro received hard pushback from the lower chamber’s new Democratic majority. In a politically embarrassing setback, Shapiro agreed to veto the voucher dollars in exchange for the rest of the plan’s passage. That veto led to a nearly six-month budget impasse as state Senate Republicans claimed betrayal.

In his February budget address this year, Shapiro called on the legislature to again consider vouchers, though a top Republican leader later accused him of being unwilling to use his “bully pulpit” to get such a program across the finish line.

His ongoing support also hasn’t saved him from Yass-funded criticism.

For the past two years, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which does not have to disclose its donors, has spent prodigiously on ads and other lobbying to criticize politicians who don’t support vouchers.

The group, Commonwealth Action, has received significant dollars from the free market Commonwealth Partners Chamber of Entrepreneurs, according to that group’s most recent filings to the IRS. Commonwealth Partners runs two political action committees that are among the most active in Pennsylvania school choice advocacy, and both are almost entirely funded by Yass.

Between April 2023 and March 2024 — the last recorded filing — Commonwealth Action reported spending more than $973,000 on indirect education lobbying, which includes advertising and other methods aimed at shifting public opinion.

One video from last summer funded by Commonwealth Action accused Shapiro of “choosing special interests over kids.”

Commonwealth Action is linked to an established conservative organization in Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth Foundation. Since summer 2023, the exterior of the organization’s Harrisburg building, which is across the street from the state Capitol, has featured ads calling for Shapiro to pass the voucher plan. The foundation is now funding a six-figure newspaper and TV ad campaign.

“You lied, and you turned your back on us again,” Printess Garrett, a Harrisburg mother, says in a TV spot. “The only thing we have for our children is our word, and if we can’t trust in your word, we don’t have anything else.”

Moving forward, political sources told Spotlight PA they expect teachers unions and other public education advocates to be among the most skeptical of a Shapiro vice presidency.

On Wednesday, 28 education advocacy groups from across the country sent an open letter to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris arguing that “it is essential that our President and Vice President be wholly committed to our nation’s public education system and willing to fight against school privatization in all its forms.”

But to Payton, not considering Shapiro for backing a policy to aid parents in the hunt for what’s best for their kids is a bad choice.

“To blatantly disqualify somebody over something ideological like that is foolish,” Payton said.

A big education fight stands in the way of a Pa. budget deal

2024-06-25T16:01:10+00:00

How much money to spend on Pennsylvania’s public education system has become a key barrier to a budget deal as lawmakers launch a barrage of talks ahead of the June 30 deadline.

Leaders in the split legislature say there are potential compromises on other key topics, including overhauling the state’s permitting process, making college cheaper, and creating new tax breaks.

But deciding how much money to spend on K-12 education remains an obstacle to closing a deal. Democrats who want to increase spending point to decades of funding inequality between rich and poor public school districts, while Republicans who want to curb costs warn of financial calamity if spending increases too quickly.

Lawmakers have to overhaul Pennsylvania’s funding system for basic education, following a judge last year ruling that the status quo is unconstitutionally inequitable. The commonwealth is also flush with cash, with $14 billion in reserves that have continued to grow this year.

Budget negotiations kicked off in February when Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, made his annual pitch to the legislature. In it, he called for $48.5 billion in spending, an 8% increase from last year, and proposed that much of the new money should flow to the state’s K-12 education system. That spending would be covered using $3 billion of the state’s $14 billion in cash reserves, Shapiro proposed.

In a state that has historically run deficits, the idea raised alarm bells among legislative Republicans. Heading into the final stretch, state Senate Republicans’ main goal is keeping spending under control, Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told reporters last week.

“We don’t have a fixed number in mind,” Pittman said last week. “What our focus is on [is] maintaining expectations, maintaining a reasonable growth of spending that allows us to be able to make sure that the taxpayers are protected.”

While some education issues, like adding more dollars for school construction, have bipartisan backing, Pittman said his goal is making sure the state doesn’t use up its reserves within the next three years.

That puts the state Senate at loggerheads with House Democrats, who called for new education funding for years when they were in the minority and are now determined to use their narrow majority to notch a victory on the issue. The 2023 state court ruling that found Pennsylvania underfunds public education in poorer districts has given their push extra weight.

Democratic lawmakers and the Shapiro administration authored a report earlier this year that proposes setting a baseline amount of per-student spending that increases based on factors like poverty and level of English proficiency within a district.

The report estimated it would cost $5.4 billion over the next seven years just to bring each district up to the new standard, alongside billions in additional dollars for property tax relief, school construction, teacher training, and school mental health resources — among other programs.

A bill that would implement that plan, and that includes changes to the way districts reimburse cyber charter schools that could save districts millions of dollars, passed the state House with bipartisan support earlier this month.

Sustaining such spending would quickly drain Pennsylvania’s cash reserves. But a University of Pennsylvania report released last week found that the benefits of increased education spending would outweigh the cost to taxpayers by boosting graduation rates and leading to “improved individual earnings, health, economic productivity, and reduced crime and government dependency.”

“We’ve been making the point that Pennsylvania pays a huge price, and has been paying it for literally decades, by failing to adequately fund public education,” state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) told Spotlight PA of the study.

Closed-door negotiations are ongoing, but insiders say that if lawmakers can agree on an education spending number, the rest of the trades that will make up the deal should fall into place.

Lawmakers say there is room for compromise on reducing the cost of higher education, updating the state’s business permitting process, and reducing taxes.

State Senate Republicans have advanced a package of bills that would offer scholarships to those who choose certain in-demand career paths, like computer science and nursing. Bradford added that he hopes to add elements of Shapiro’s higher education plan to find a deal.

“I think there is common ground about the need to make college more affordable, but also retain Pennsylvania students,” Bradford said.

Republicans’ longtime push to rewrite how state regulators issue permits may also bear fruit this year.

The state Senate passed a bill last year that would require agencies to set internal timelines for each permit request. Under the measure, the permit would be automatically approved if a requester didn’t get a response by those deadlines.

Democrats and environmental groups have traditionally opposed such efforts, arguing the practice could lead to more pollution and potentially threaten funding tied to enforcing federal environmental laws. But Shapiro has tried to speed up the permitting process within his administration, and Bradford said last week that he’s been “hearing out” the state Senate on its bills amid talks.

“We believe a government that is efficient is in everyone’s best interests,” Bradford said.

Finally, tax policy appears to be a potential bargaining chip. Responding to Shapiro’s spending plan, state Senate Republicans passed a $3 billion tax cut plan in May with Democratic support, arguing that Pennsylvania’s good financial position should be a sign to reduce taxes rather than increase spending.

Their bill would slightly lower the state’s flat income tax. The benefits of the plan would be small and would skew toward higher earners, the liberal Pennsylvania Policy Center said in a brief. According to the group’s data, the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers would save an average of $5,400 a year while the bottom 20% would get back just about $20.

Last week, Pittman said the state Senate’s proposal was an attempt “to do something within the world of taxation to be dynamic in encouraging growth and investment,” and that he welcomed House Democrats’ counterproposal.

Bradford told Spotlight PA he is willing to look at tax cuts as part of a budget deal. He also argued that the best way to get money into working people’s pockets would be a state version of the earned income tax credit, a federal program that gives a tax break to people under certain income levels.

A bill that would create such a program passed the state House last year but has lingered in the Senate.

The deadline for a deal is Sunday. Both chambers have scheduled voting session days through the weekend, which will likely be filled with closed-door negotiations, boisterous public rallies, and late-night votes.

The stakes of missing the deadline are low at first. While an on-time budget holds symbolic value for lawmakers in the middle of a key election year, a delay of a few days or even a week isn’t a big deal for government operations.

The state is bound by statute to pay its workers, cover debt payments, and continue many other critical government functions even without a budget. However, last year’s delayed budget — which wasn’t approved until December — showed that within weeks, the lack of funding can constrict the operations of county governments, libraries, and other core services supported by public money.

Pittman and Bradford have insisted that a ticking clock won’t make them change their approach.

“The test by which we judge the product is what is in it,” Bradford said.

Jay-Z’s organization’s involvement in Pennsylvania’s school voucher debate raises ethics questions

2024-06-15T00:36:58+00:00

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Inside Beckett Life Center, a North Philly community center, families on Wednesday gathered around catered sandwiches and salads listening to several young volunteers laud a proposal that would pour millions of state dollars into vouchers to help them escape their underperforming public schools.

It was one of 10 “dine and learn” events this month organized by Team Roc, the philanthropic arm of entertainment mogul Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, as part of the rapper’s high-profile involvement in the polarizing issue. Families were greeted with signage promoting the pending voucher proposal – known as Pennsylvania Award for Student Success or PASS – by name and had access to stacks of form letters to send to lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro in support of the initiative, also known as Senate Bill 757.

At the PASS It Forward "dine and learn" event sponsored by Team Roc, families encountered stacks of form letters addressed to PA lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro urging them to support the PASS initiative.

Those details about the “PASS It Forward” events led to questions about the ethics of Team Roc’s efforts and whether they have crossed from activism about school choice generally into lobbying for this legislation specifically.

Roc Nation spokesperson Didier Morais initially told Chalkbeat Thursday that the organization was not a lobbying group but “concerned citizens.” And a search of the public lobbying directory did not list Roc Nation, Team Roc, or Jay-Z as registered lobbyists in the state.

Hours after Chalkbeat published this story, Morais responded saying the organization had registered its lobbying paperwork. A copy of the paperwork showed it had been filed the same day the story published.

An expert told Chalkbeat that the signage and form letters available at the informational events could fall under the “indirect communication” portion of the state’s lobbying law, which describes efforts to encourage the general public to take action to directly influence legislative decisionmaking.

“That is classic lobbying,” Adam Bonin, a lawyer and lobbying law expert said about the form letters and efforts to encourage citizens to contact their legislators. “Entities which are involved in such efforts should register and should disclose their activities.”

Bonin added there’s nothing wrong with lobbying and it’s a protected First Amendment activity. But, he said, “the public has a right to know … how much is being spent on these efforts, what areas the entities are involved in, and in the case of coalitions who are the key funders behind these efforts.”

Hours after Chalkbeat published this story, a spokesperson responded saying the organization had registered its lobbying paperwork. A copy of the paperwork showed it had been filed the same day the story published.

Jeffery Frankenburger, deputy executive director at the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission, said he couldn’t comment on the specific case, but he did point to a lobbying disclosure manual that provides examples of lobbying through “indirect communication,” which include “communicating with others asking them to contact state officials or employees” and “drafting letters for a letter writing campaign to be sent to various representatives.”

The PASS It Forward PA website, the official website of Team Roc’s campaign which lists all of the events, only makes reference to Team Roc in small font on its “terms and conditions” page. The website also features a “take action” button directing readers to “Call your local house representative and state senator and urge them to vote yes on PASS to make educational options available to those who need it most.”

Morais told Chalkbeat Thursday that “there was no specific bill promotional language at the event nor did anyone sign anything that references a specific bill.” When informed there was signage promoting the PASS scholarship program and blank form letters available for families to sign and send to their legislators urging them to support PASS, Morais said he would need to look into the issue further.

Signage at the "dine and learn" events featured details about the PASS scholarship legislation and how it would work if enacted.

Workers in black “PASS it Forward” t-shirts staffing Wednesday’s event told Chalkbeat they were instructed not to speak to the press. A Team Roc spokesperson told The Philadelphia Inquirer those volunteers were receiving stipends from Roc Nation.

Frankenburger also said lobbying law states “any person who makes an expenditure for indirect communication,” even if they are not a registered lobbyist, must include disclosure language that “clearly and conspicuously states the name of the person who made or financed the expenditure for the communication.” The form letters did not include any such disclosure language or any reference to Roc Nation or Team Roc.

Frankenburger noted individuals or lobbying firms have 10 days from their lobbying activity to register with the state. Roc Nation’s first community event in Philly was June 10, and they first announced their “campaign” to support the initiative on June 7th. According to Team Roc’s lobbying registration, the group’s lobbying activities commenced June 4 — ten days before they filed.

A political tug-of-war with families in the middle

Philadelphia families attending these “dine and learn” events — especially those from low-income backgrounds — are locked in a political tug-of-war over their educational options. High-profile, monied lobbying groups like the Commonwealth Foundation and now Team Roc are ramping up efforts to tell local families how they would benefit from a state taxpayer-funded voucher program that aims to give students the options to leave underperforming public school systems. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro also has said he supports the effort.

“We must prioritize student-first solutions—programs like [PASS] Scholarships that immediately expand educational freedom for kids in our state’s worst-performing schools,” Commonwealth Foundation Director of Legislative Strategy Kevin Kane said in a statement. “Bipartisan initiatives like these will provide the options families need to find the best educational fit for their children now.”

Lawmakers and advocates across the education spectrum are concerned about Philadelphia’s persistently low standardized test scores but don’t agree on the solution.

Philadelphia politicians including City Council members Kendra Brooks, Isaiah Thomas, Jamie Gauthier, and Nicolas O’Rourke have strongly opposed any type of voucher program. Philadelphia’s city council approved a resolution Thursday condemning private school vouchers as “harmful to the School District of Philadelphia.”

“Vouchers put public money in the pockets of the rich while draining resources from public schools in our communities,” said Brooks in a statement. “Vouchers will not benefit the children in our communities or fix Pennsylvania’s unfair funding system. Instead, they will deepen the economic and racial divides in Pennsylvania’s school system and widen the gap between the rich and the rest of us.”

Signage at the "PASS It Forward" event instructed families how to apply for PASS scholarships. The bill creating the PASS program is still being considered by state lawmakers.

What would the PASS program do?

The PASS program is a voucher program being negotiated as part of the state budget process.

If approved, the PASS program would offer low-income families up to $10,000 in scholarships to attend private schools. To qualify, students must attend a state-designated “low-achieving” school, and their household income must be 250% of the poverty line, which is $75,000 for a family of four.

This bill is not the first of its kind. Arizona, Tennessee, Indiana, and New Jersey are also grappling with voucher legislation.

Public school advocates like Laura Boyce, executive director of Teach Plus Pennsylvania, have said diverting public money to private institutions stands in direct opposition to a recent court ruling that Pennsylvania has been unconstitutionally underfunding its public school system for years.

A well-funded, fairly-resourced public school district would benefit all Philly students and their communities, Boyce said.

Boyce and other voucher opponents also say that unlike public schools, private schools can choose not to admit students based on their special education needs, gender identity or orientation, or academic remediation needs.

Mayor Cherelle Parker and Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Tony Watlington have declined to comment on the voucher proposal.

Monique Braxton, a school district spokesperson said in a statement: “The Pennsylvania public school funding system has inadequately and inequitably funded low-wealth school districts for decades.” She said the district is “continually forced to parse insufficient resources, resources which cannot meet the varying needs of our students and staff.”

Families at the Beckett Life Center in North Philly ate sandwiches and salads at the "PASS It Forward" events while Team Roc volunteers provided information about the PASS initiative under consideration in Harrisburg.

What does voucher research show?

Increasingly, studies of voucher programs nationwide show wealthy families who may have already enrolled their students in private schools are driving much of the demand.

Voucher research more broadly tends to demonstrate low-income students do not boost their test scores from attending private schools. But there is some evidence that shows those who attend private schools are more satisfied with their school cultures and feel safer.

The research in Philly is limited.

The Children’s Scholarship Fund Philadelphia, an advocacy group that provides scholarships for low-income Philly students to attend private, tuition-based schools, published a report this year that shows their students outperformed their public school peers on math and reading standardized tests.

However, their report has some limitations. The report isn’t a direct comparison: For example, the CSFP report compared fourth- and seventh-grade scholarship recipients’ test scores to the scores of all children attending a public school. The private schools also administered different tests than the standardized exams public schools administer, which meant the CFSP data analysts sorted and converted the private school test data into a form that would be comparable to the state’s PSSA test — though not exactly the same.

But for parents like Keyzett Brockington-Ham, mother of three who also attended the Wednesday event, politics comes second to educational opportunities for their children.

“When I saw this I knew this was my time,” said Brockington-Ham about the PASS scholarship event.

Her daughter attends Meade School in North Philly, and her son attends ASPIRA Bilingual Cyber Charter School but Brockington-Ham thinks a private school would be a better option.

“This would be a great opportunity for my children.”

She voiced numerous concerns about her children’s schools like the bullying both experienced as well as little time spent on enrichment like art, music, and gym. Private schools would provide them with more resources they don’t have in the school district, Brockington-Ham said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Azia Ross is a summer intern for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. You can reach her at aziaross@chalkbeat.org.

Senate Education committee revives school voucher program at center of last year’s budget fight

2024-05-07T20:13:40+00:00

This story was originally published by The Pennsylvania Capital-Star

A bill reviving the school voucher program killed by House Democrats during last year’s budget debates passed the Senate Education committee with bipartisan support on Tuesday. The program, called the PASS scholarship, would allow most students in the state’s lowest-performing school districts up to $10,000 to spend towards private schools.

The PASS program was initially supported by Gov. Josh Shapiro during partisan debates over the state budget last year, but House Democrats opposed it. While the version of the budget that passed the Senate included funding for the voucher program, House Democrats refused to pass it unless Shapiro agreed to veto the item. Ultimately, that’s what happened.

The Senate Education committee’s move Tuesday is almost certain to revive that fight.

Public school advocates have long opposed school vouchers, saying the money would be better spent shoring up the state’s public schools, especially in light of the recent court ruling that found the state’s public schools were unconstitutionally underfunded.

“Pennsylvania’s system of public school funding is so inequitable that the Commonwealth Court ruled it violates the state constitution,” said Pennsylvania State Education Association President Aaron Chapin. “Instead of sending hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools, we should focus on the public schools that educate 90% of Pennsylvania’s students.”

Proponents of the program note that, unlike school voucher programs in other states, the PASS scholarship would not take money from public schools that recipients would have otherwise attended.

Sen. Anthony Williams (D-Philadelphia), the only Democrat on the committee to vote in favor of the legislation, noted he also supports vastly increasing public school funding. But he also expressed skepticism that any amount of money could help the students stuck in the state’s worst-performing public schools.

“You cannot look past the obvious,” Williams said. “There are parts of Pennsylvania, rural and urban, that are not being served by the public experience and the billions of dollars that we may or may not send to them will not fix that. We cannot find teachers.”

Committee Democrats and Republicans alike acknowledged that the bill being put forward essentially amounted to the start of a battle over what to include in this year’s budget.

“I’m not in the room when the budget deal gets negotiated behind closed doors,” said Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny), the minority chair of the committee and a staunch opponent of sending state funds to non-public schools. “There is no trade for vouchers.”

Asked whether Shapiro still supports the program, a spokesperson pointed to his budget address earlier this year.

Shapiro said during the address that he still supports some form of voucher funding for students in underperforming school districts to spend towards “extra tutoring, books and computers, or yes, going to another school.”

Shapiro added, “the Senate passed a proposal last year that included important elements of that, and it’s something I support and consider to be unfinished business.”

The 2025 budget must be passed by both the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House before being signed by Shapiro.

Latino-led charter schools attract Philadelphia families with tight-knit communities and Spanish

2024-03-22T17:23:43+00:00

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All four of Margarita Albino’s children have passed through the halls of Pan American Academy Charter School.

The Northeast Philadelphia resident, who is Dominican, was drawn to the school by its dual language program. Although Albino is bilingual, she says she feels more comfortable with Pan American’s staff, which is made up of predominantly Spanish-speaking Latinos.

“The school knows that it’s needed to keep [the heritage] alive in them,” she said, adding later, “They have no problem assisting me in Spanish.”

Latino families in Philadelphia say they’re choosing charter schools operated by Latino-led nonprofit organizations because the schools are able to fill gaps not filled by the school district. Several Spanish-speaking parents and caregivers told Chalkbeat that Latino-led charter schools are providing more cultural representation, language accessibility, and a tighter-knit community than their traditional neighborhood public schools.

The Latino population in Philadelphia has almost tripled since the year 2000, reaching about 16% of the city’s residents in 2020, according to the census.

Additionally, about a quarter of the roughly 197,100 students in the Philadelphia school district identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to district data. And in the 2022-23 school year, the district reported 17% of students were English learners, a 9% jump from the 2014-15 school year. Almost half of English learners came from Spanish-speaking homes.

Though the majority of Hispanic students in Philadelphia are enrolled in traditional district schools, Hispanic students comprise 18% of total charter school enrollment, according to a report by advocacy group Children First. The group also notes Hispanic students make up the largest number of Philadelphia-based cyber charter students with 1,478 students, or 80% of total cyber charter students in 2023.

In the 1970s, Philadelphia public schools were trailblazers for bilingual education. The district oversaw a pilot program for English as a second language and a Bilingual Institute to train and recruit teachers. It also opened a bilingual school, as well as bilingual programs that reached about half of the burgeoning Puerto Rican student population.

But the programs’ budget, which was supported by federal funding, eventually dwindled. Today, just eight out of 218 district schools offer Spanish-English dual language programs.

There’s also the issue of staff representation and educators’ ability to connect to Latino families. Only 4.4% of teachers in the district are Hispanic, according to a 2022 Research for Action report. A lack of bilingual and culturally competent staff can weaken parent-teacher communication and impact students’ academic success, according to research.

The school district said it’s aware of these gaps and is working to address them by hiring more Spanish speaking bilingual counseling assistants and teachers.

Nathalie Nérée, the district’s head of special education and diverse learners, said there are plans to implement another dual language program in a public school. But she said the district would need more resources and community support, since dual language programs are “costly.”

Diana Garcia, principal of district-run Willard Elementary School in Kensington, said there have been several families that have left her school for Pan American Academy Charter School, which is in Fairhill and is run by Congreso de Latinos Unidos. Thirty-five students whose designated local public school is Willard attend Pan American, according to district data.

Garcia said one reason for this is the convenience of having their children across grade levels attend the same school. But she also said “there is more work to be done” when it comes to district staffing. She said she hired at least eight more staff members to accommodate Spanish speakers at Willard after becoming principal.

“If this school who has a 45% Latino population doesn’t have Latino representation to service those families, then we’re failing them,” she said.

‘You were encouraged to celebrate your child’s success’

There are at least four Latino-led charters in Philadelphia that advertise having a sizable number of Spanish-speaking teachers, as well as dual language programs for students.

The district’s recent enrollment data shows that 91% of students at Esperanza Academy and 84% of students at Pan American identify as Hispanic or Latino. At Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School in Olney run by ASPIRA Inc. of Pennsylvania, 86% of students identify as Hispanic/Latino.

Although the Latino-led charter schools embrace the Spanish language, they do not guarantee if any staff speak Portuguese, which is spoken by Brazilians, or indigenous Latin American languages like Qʼeqchi’ spoken by some Guatemalans; there has been an influx of these groups in recent years.

Glenda Marrero, principal of Hostos Charter School, says that parents are more involved when there’s faculty who speak the same language.

“They tend to come to more activities because they know they’re not going to miss out,” she said. “There’s nothing like sitting in a room and not understanding nothing, but people are clapping around you.”

Cesar Ríos, a bilingual guidance counselor for students in grades 4-8 at Hostos Charter School, said that he witnesses more “parental and familial engagement” at the school.

He said one example of the school’s work with Latino families involves helping undocumented children or family members who need academic or other support.

He also said not all Latino students come from Spanish-speaking families, and that Hostos prioritizes teaching students about Latino “cultural heroes that might not otherwise be addressed let alone highlighted at another school.”

Farrell Elementary school teacher Angelee Rivera said her daughter transferred to Esperanza Cyber Charter School for her junior year of high school.

Rivera, who is Puerto Rican, said she felt the charter school, which is run by the local Hispanic-focused nonprofit Esperanza, embraced the Latino community. She was especially touched by remarks made by the CEO of Esperanza, the Rev. Luis Cortés, Jr., who is Latino, at her daughter’s graduation.

Cortés Jr. encouraged families to “turn up” and loudly celebrate their students’ achievements: “‘Our kids, they go through so much in their life just for being Black and brown and they survived the pandemic. … When your child’s name is called I want you to show out!’”

Rivera said Cortés Jr.’s words reminded her of an incident at the Philadelphia High School for Girls that occurred around the same time as her daughter’s graduation. Officials at Girls High withheld some students’ diplomas during the graduation ceremony because their families cheered loudly as their names were called.

“You have a school like Girls High, if you dance across the stage to show that you’re proud of yourself, you’re kind of punished,” Rivera said. “And yet in a school that is about community and is about the Latino community specifically, you were encouraged to celebrate your child’s success.”

Philadelphia’s ‘Renaissance’ charter schools did not produce what was promised

2024-02-28T12:30:00+00:00

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On the first day of classes last September, the Philadelphia school superintendent and mayor joined other officials outside of Guion S. Bluford Elementary School to cheer on its 539 students as they entered the building.

The school district’s choice of Bluford for this annual ritual was telling. From 2010 to 2022, Bluford — built in 1972 to serve a growing population in the Overbrook neighborhood — had not been run by the district, but as a charter school operated by Universal Companies as part of the district’s Renaissance Initiative.

Then in the summer of 2022, in a dispute with its board of trustees, Universal ended its contract, and for that academic year the school operated in turmoil. Without its longtime manager, Bluford struggled to hire teachers, convince parents of its viability, and keep up the facility — among other problems, it lost internet access — until the district stepped in to build a new staff and assign a turnaround principal in 2023.

Bluford was part of one of the most sweeping education policy shifts ever undertaken in Philadelphia. The Renaissance Initiative — launched in 2010 under Superintendent Arlene Ackerman while the district was under state control for poor performance — strove to turn around about 10% of Philadelphia’s low-performing district schools by ceding them to charter organizations that promised to do better.

“We will transform historically failing schools and embrace bold new educational approaches with proven track records of success that can transform schools,” Ackerman wrote of the Renaissance initiative in her ambitious reform plan for the district.

At the height of the Renaissance Initiative, 22 former district schools were controlled by charter operators. But district leadership has quietly moved away from the model. Over the past seven years, four schools, including Bluford, have been returned to the district. One, Daroff Charter School, closed entirely. Now 17 schools are part of the initiative — and no new schools have been added since 2016.

“The goal was to prove that charters would work with any kid, not just about parents who were highly motivated to enter a lottery, and to show that a neighborhood school turned over to a charter organization would do better than if run by the school district,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, an advocacy group.

“As far as I can tell, the data didn’t result in that.”

In fact, a Chalkbeat analysis has found that the dramatic turnaround promises of the Renaissance program never materialized.

Some schools made incremental progress over the years that slightly outpaced the district as a whole, but the group of schools overall has not seen meteoric success.

Indeed, in 2023 the Renaissance charter schools as a group mostly performed worse in standardized tests for elementary and middle schoolers than the district averages, the analysis showed. And compared to district schools, a lower share of Renaissance charters exceeded those averages.

“It was a bad idea poorly implemented,” said Chris McGinley, who served on both the School Reform Commission that oversaw the district while it was under state control and the Board of Education, which won back control of the district in 2018.

The program could be under greater scrutiny as Mayor Cherelle Parker takes office. Parker has had a mixed message on charters, continually emphasizing that she would not stand for people pitting district-run and charter schools against each other.

But she hasn’t said whether she would like to see growth of the charter sector, which already educates about a third of the nearly 200,000 students in the city’s publicly funded schools. And she has not yet named new school board members, who could decide the fate of the Renaissance program itself and its remaining charters.

Parker’s 50-member education policy subcommittee includes the CEOs of four of the seven organizations that run Renaissance charters, three of which operate schools that were recommended for nonrenewal due to subpar academic performance while the fourth was denied a new charter application based on the record of its existing schools.

Her appointees to the Mayor’s Office on Education, Sharon Ward, an activist and former state official, and Debora Carrera, a former district principal assistant superintendent, declined comment and couldn’t be reached, respectively.

Superintendent Tony Watlington declined to comment on the program.

Peng Chao, head of the board’s Office of Charter Schools, which evaluates existing charters and vets new applications, said that the outcomes for the Renaissance schools “have been mixed.”

“With a sector of over 20 schools over the course of more than a decade, it isn’t surprising that some schools have excelled in certain areas and others have struggled. Every school, Renaissance or not, has a different arc,” said Chao.

Betting on a school turnaround model

Turning district schools over to charters has been a go-to turnaround method in major urban districts for more than two decades. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana took over the New Orleans schools, shut down all but a few that were high performing, and created a Recovery School District that was essentially a system of charters. Chicago had its own Renaissance schools initiative that leaders are rethinking.

In Philadelphia, the movement flourished when the district was under state control and coincided with a push in Pennsylvania to expand the charter sector. Even before the official start of the Renaissance program, under the influence of prevailing Pennsylvania politics at the time, other district schools had become charters.

Charter expansion has long been the favored school reform strategy of Pennsylvania’s Republican governors and legislators as they resisted more spending on education and sought to weaken unions, even though the state had the widest gaps in the nation between high-wealth and low-wealth districts. Only last year did a Commonwealth Court judge rule the funding system unconstitutional.

Ackerman was betting her career on the success of Renaissance schools. She told Pew Charitable Trusts in 2010, “If I can show [parents] what the other side of the rainbow looks like, I don’t care who comes in after me. They are going to force the new superintendent and the new administration to give them what their children deserve.”

Ackerman’s vision for the Renaissance program included two models designed to offer “greater autonomy in exchange for increased accountability,” according to her 2009 reform blueprint for the district, Imagine 2014. Implicit in the entire initiative was to set up a competition to determine which turnaround strategy was more effective — more internal resources and a staff shakeup, or charter conversion. The schools that remained under district control were given more resources and called “Promise Academies,” while those that were handed over to charter organizations were dubbed “Renaissance” charter schools.

“Arlene was very strong on the idea that these programs would run in parallel with a lot of ability to compare the results from the programs,” said former School Reform Commission member Joseph Dworetzky. “I thought it was an interesting idea.” Dworetzky also said the board considered this more efficient and a way to stem the spiraling costs to the district of charter proliferation.

The Renaissance charters had defined catchment areas like traditional district schools, but otherwise operated independent of the district, the same as any other charter school.

At first, things seemed to be going well. An 18-month interim report found “The Year One outcomes for schools in the Renaissance Schools Initiative suggest that something positive is happening.” In 2014, Renaissance charters were doing a successful job keeping students enrolled for the entire school year, another report found.

But under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, cuts to education spending between 2010 and 2014 put a strain on the entire system. The belt tightening effectively ended the Promise Academy experiment by stripping the schools of extra programs and supports. The Renaissance charters were impacted because, as the district’s budget decreased, their per pupil payments went down.

In 2011, Ackerman resigned.

Her successor, William Hite, continued the Renaissance conversions, but decided to let parents vote, first on who the new operator should be and then whether there should be a conversion at all. This caused conflict, especially at Wister Elementary School in Germantown, where Hite had second thoughts about his initial recommendation. During the 2016 debate over whether the school should become a charter, parents were bitterly split, and the School Reform Commission overruled Hite to approve the turnover.

After that, Renaissance conversions ceased.

In March of 2020, as McGinley was preparing to leave the school board, which by then had resumed control of the district, he proposed a resolution to formally end the Renaissance program altogether — but that resolution was quietly removed from the meeting agenda and never resurfaced.

How Renaissance schools measure up

Determining the impact of the turnarounds is challenging in Philadelphia, since two major events have occurred since the program started in 2011 — a revision of standardized tests in 2015, limiting the ability for apples to apples score comparisons, and the educational upheaval of the pandemic.

But looking at results, most of the Renaissance charter schools do not show high rates of proficiency. According to the Chalkbeat analysis, these schools started out well below district and state averages in English Language Arts and math performance — that’s why they were targeted for this intervention.

The analysis, though, shows that none of the schools are performing particularly well today. For instance, a majority of the Renaissance charters saw less than 10% of students score at or above proficiency on math tests in 2023. By some metrics, a few made incremental progress over the years.

Several schools, including Harrity Elementary and Mann Elementary, operated by Mastery, showed spikes in indicators including test scores for the first several years, said Chao, head of the board’s Office of Charter Schools.

But, he added, “Sustained improvement in student achievement, however, has not been as evident or consistent.”

The saga of Memphis Street Academy@JPJones in Frankford is telling. Once a junior high school with a reputation for out-of-control discipline and general disarray, it is now run as a Renaissance charter for 5th through 8th grades by American Paradigm schools. In contrast to its past, it is calm and orderly, with a solid teaching staff and lots of student activities.

But its achievement scores have remained persistently low — math proficiency is at 1%, and the Board of Education has voted not to renew the five-year charter signed in 2017.

American Paradigm has since sued the district in federal court saying the performance standards they agreed to, based on absolute achievement rather than growth in student scores, are unfair. The school can remain open during the appeals process.

Hite, who was superintendent between 2012 and 2022 and presided over the creation of five Renaissance charters, in hindsight questioned the effectiveness of the initiative.

“What I recall is that they saw climate and culture indicators improve, and in some cases saw growth improve, particularly [in a reduction of] children who scored below basic,” Hite said in an interview. “But we really didn’t see marked improvement in achievement.”

Hite attributed this to the myriad factors besides school quality that affect student outcomes, including the impact of poverty, violence, and the lack of essential services.

“This stuff takes time,” he said.

Bluford and Daroff were not the only schools that exited Renaissance. Two other district schools that became Renaissance charters, Olney High and its feeder Stetson Middle, were also taken back by the district due to both lagging performance and financial problems within Aspira, Inc., to which they had been turned over.

Michael Roth, now Olney’s principal, worked in the school under both models. He is not a fan of charter conversion as a school reform strategy.

“I think it’s offensive,” he said. “A lot of these measures were experimenting with communities of color. I’m not saying some good things didn’t come out of it, but my thought is, why don’t we properly fund the public schools and make sure they have the resources they need and do it right without switching back and forth?”

Tangela McClam, Principal of Bluford Charter School, left, greets students on the first day of school.

Renaissance supporters say look beyond test scores

Scott Gordon, the founder and longtime executive director of Mastery Charter, deems the initiative a success, saying that the Renaissance program brought numerous improvements to schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, even if test scores did not dramatically rise. Mastery has run nine Renaissance charters, and essentially built its brand around the program.

Chalkbeat’s analysis showed that Mastery performed marginally higher on average than other Renaissance charters on the 2023 state tests, the PSSA, but still had overall scores below the district average (with one single exception on the English language arts test).

Gordon said the model showed that a different governing structure could bring more stability to neighborhood schools, improve academic outcomes while serving the same kids, and draw parents back into the building.

Before Mastery, he said, ”These were schools in a never-ending negative spiral, lots of transiency, kids with high needs. As the school struggles, parents begin leaving, it struggles more, and it goes downhill.”

‘We needed a turnaround in a turnaround’

Bluford’s history shows that the initiative both fell short of being transformational and also often sowed confusion for families.

Bluford was one of the original Renaissance charter schools. Formerly the William B. Hanna elementary school (it was renamed for astronaut and alum Guion Bluford, the first Black person in space), Bluford was turned over to Universal Companies. Like the other schools in the program, it had long suffered from poor academic performance.

But the desired turnaround never happened; in 2015, the School Reform Commission voted to revoke the charter because it did not meet its academic targets. “I was struck by the notion that we needed a turnaround in a turnaround,” commissioner Feather Houstoun said at the time. But appeals kept it open — even though the Board of Education’s own Renaissance schools policy was supposed to supersede the state’s charter authorization, evaluation, renewal and revocation process.

Then, in 2022, Universal had its falling out with the board of trustees that oversaw it, leading to its tumultuous year and the district’s decision to return it to district control.

“It was very traumatic,” said teacher Tyshea Tucker. “Everything was so sudden.”

When the upheaval occurred, Tucker had been a teaching assistant at Daroff studying for her degree. She moved to Bluford when it was still a charter, and then applied to stay when the district took over and is now a second-grade teacher.

All the disruption was even more unsettling for her students, she said, many of whom have already had to deal with trauma in their lives. The staff turnover, she feared, reinforced feelings that adults weren’t there for them. She said she had to “go the extra mile” to build relationships and trust with them.

For longtime neighborhood stalwarts like Tamara Keene, who sent two sons through Bluford, the changes have been jarring.

Keene said the school functioned well under Universal at first.

But when Universal left in 2022, along with about half the staff, the board running the school “didn’t have a lot of control. … They spent a year just holding the school down.”

The turnover split parents, some of whom wanted the school to remain a charter, while others, like Keene, wanted a traditional public school option. “I’m still upset that there was no neighborhood school that was not a charter,” she said.

This current tension between charters and traditional schools harkens back to why Ackerman launched the Renaissance experiment in the first place. Despite scant evidence that the Renaissance schools delivered the promised transformation, Ackerman had concluded at the end of her time as superintendent that dramatic educational improvement for traditionally underserved students was impossible within the existing structure of large school districts with many power centers, especially teachers unions.

And her ideas for reform are still present today.

Like Ackerman, Parker is advocating for longer school days and a longer school year, tall orders to make happen within the traditional district structure.

But if it does happen, families like Keene’s will be the ones experiencing it firsthand.

Although Keene’s children are grown, she will continue watching the transformation of Bluford from a new perch — three of her grandchildren now attend the school.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Pennsylvania’s budget impasse ends, but ‘Level Up’ funding gets left behind

2023-12-14T17:28:42+00:00

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s budget impasse ended Wednesday after the divided state legislature agreed to send millions of dollars to community colleges and libraries, fund public legal defense, and create a student teacher stipend.

Three budget-enabling code bills, plus dozens of other pieces of legislation, passed with broad bipartisan support during a swirl of late-night votes and were sent to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s desk.

The flurry of action marked a sudden end to five-and-a-half months of deadlock that divided the Democratic-controlled state House and the Republican-controlled state Senate and ground the gears of government to a halt.

The budget bills create a handful of new programs, many of which had been prioritized by state House Democrats, including ones that would more than triple the size of Pennsylvania’s child care tax credit and add preventative dental care to the state’s Medicaid program.

“We are collectively showing that we can move past the partisan politics, have real conversations and get a lot done for the good people of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro, a Democrat, said Wednesday night shortly before signing the bills.

Negotiations over these parts of the budget broke down this summer after Shapiro agreed to veto $100 million for private school vouchers favored by Republicans in order to win support from state House Democrats for the main budget bill.

At the time, the Shapiro administration said it would hold off on spending about $1.1 billion until it received additional authorization from the legislature.

This week’s deal leaves out some high-profile programs lawmakers had initially agreed to in their summer agreement, which had been caught in the spending delay.

Most prominently, the popular Whole-Home Repairs Program — which provides grants to property owners who need to fund expensive maintenance projects like fixing leaky roofs — was not given the $50 million lawmakers agreed to spend earlier this year.

Other programs caught in the code bill delay — such as the stipends, indigent defense funding, and state allocations to community colleges and libraries — ultimately received funding, though the delay caused hardships. Some nonprofits that benefit from the PA Workwear program and provide clothing to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients had to lay off staff while they waited for the code fight to resolve.

Wednesday’s deal marks the conclusion of months of talks, a resolution that lawmakers in both major parties celebrated.

State House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) said she is grateful the budget is finished and looks forward to the next one, “because the good news is we’re just getting started.”

The programs that didn’t make it into the final deal, like Whole-Home Repairs, were often casualties of last-minute horse-trading rather than concerted opposition.

Despite being swamped with demand since it was created last year using federal stimulus dollars, funding for Whole-Home Repairs will “lapse” until lawmakers return to the budget negotiating table next year, state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told reporters Wednesday night.

It could make a comeback then. State Sen. David Argall (R., Schuylkill), who helped champion the proposal last year, said he supports the repair grants and is looking ahead to next year’s budget talks to restore funding.

“It just got lost in the shuffle with all of the other competing programs,” Argall told Spotlight PA.

The final deal also does not route $100 million in additional state aid to Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts, a program known as “Level Up.” Instead, the legislature reallocated those dollars to a state board to fund school construction projects. Another $75 million was allocated to remove lead, asbestos, and other toxins from schools.

State Rep. Pete Schweyer (D., Lehigh) said in a statement that the $175 million marks “the first time in nearly a decade” that “funding passed by the House will give school districts the necessary resources to make the building upgrades.”

Supporters of alternatives to public schools also got a win, as the final education code added $150 million to two related state tax credits for businesses that fund private school scholarships. But for the first time, schools will be required to report data on scholarship recipients’ grade level, disability status, and original public school district, among other data points.

Some of the new proposals that made it into the final code deal were unexpected.

One of the biggest changes, which emerged publicly late in lawmakers’ talks, was the expansion of the state tax credit created last year that allows parents to deduct child care costs from their state taxable income.

The current state credit is capped at 30% of the value of the federal credit, which means it can give caregivers a maximum of $315 annually for a single dependent under 13 or $630 for two or more children, depending on income level.

Under the new law, parents can receive a refundable tax credit equal to their federal child care deduction starting in 2024. That amount can be up to $1,050 for one dependent under 13 and $2,100 for two or more, depending on income.

Child care costs vary by location and the child’s age, but according to federal Department of Labor data, amounts can range from $6,000 to $14,000 a year for Pennsylvania families.

The deal also restarts dental care for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians receiving medical assistance. These benefits had been stripped down to only medically necessary care for adults, such as exams, X-rays, and tooth extractions, but usually excluded other surgeries like root canals.

“As the saying goes, when you smile, the whole world smiles back at you,” state Rep. Valerie Gaydos (R., Allegheny) said on the state House floor Tuesday, when the chamber passed a standalone proposal to reintroduce dental care.

The deal also increases a surcharge on phone bills to pay for 911 dispatching infrastructure. The fee will increase by 30 cents in 2024 to $1.95 before it disappears in 2026.

The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania called the increase “far short of properly funding” the service.

One last budget item remains unfinished. A bill that would give $31.6 million to the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school, the commonwealth’s only such school, fell 12 votes short of the two-thirds vote needed to approve the allocation.

The bill was sunk by GOP opposition, which state House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler (R., Lancaster) attributed to the school’s recent controversy. The university’s former president, Liz Magill, resigned after testifying before Congress regarding antisemitism on college campuses. Members of Congress and alumni called for Magill’s resignation after she defended allowing genocidal language on campus, saying that such language was allowed as free speech.

“Our institutions of higher education have become an unfortunate home for hate,” Cutler said.

Other unfinished business may have to wait until next year.

For instance, the final package did not contain a boost to state public transit funding through a sales tax transfer, a measure backed by both Democrats and Republicans. SEPTA had pushed for such a measure throughout the fall to avoid reducing service, citing dwindling federal stimulus dollars and low ridership.

“We have the ability to keep advocating for this transit system,” state Rep. Morgan Cephas (D., Philadelphia) and chair of the city’s delegation told Spotlight PA. “And that’s something that we’ll be focusing on in the next fiscal cycle.”

Spotlight PA’s Kate Huangpu contributed reporting.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Pennsylvania’s current child care tax credit is worth 30% of the federal credit, and that the just-passed budget code will increase its value to match 100% of that federal credit, for a maximum value of $2,100 annually.

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Pennsylvania Democrats, Shapiro cut budget deal without school voucher program

2023-07-06T01:48:04+00:00

A push by Pennsylvania Republicans and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro for a state-funded voucher program appears to be dead for now, after Shapiro said the program will not be enacted as part of the state budget.

In a statement Wednesday, the governor said he did not want to further hold up the already overdue budget. Last week, the Democratic-controlled House Rules Committee knocked down legislation that would have set up a $100 million so-called Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program.

As part of a deal with the House, which has a one-vote Democratic majority, lawmakers in that body passed the $45.5 billion budget bill with the voucher language included. Shapiro has promised to line-item veto the appropriation when it comes to his desk. Late Wednesday evening, the House voted 117 to 86 to send the bill to Shapiro.

“Without enabling legislation setting up this program, my Administration legally cannot implement it,” Shapiro said in his statement. “Knowing that the two chambers will not reach consensus at this time to enact PASS, and unwilling to hold up our entire budget process over this issue, I will line-item veto the full $100 million appropriation and it will not be part of this budget bill.”

Though the proposed voucher program will not be enacted as part of the state budget, Shapiro signaled similar proposals will continue to be brought up in the coming months as he has made clear he supports the idea of a state-backed, school-choice program.

“While I am disappointed the two parties could not come together, [House Majority] Leader [Matthew] Bradford has given me his word … that he will carefully examine and consider additional education options including PASS, Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC), and Education Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) as we work to address our public education needs in light of the Commonwealth Court’s recent education ruling,” Shapiro wrote in a statement.

In February, a Commonwealth Court judge declared Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional and ordered the General Assembly to bring it into compliance. While including some significant increases, this budget does not fundamentally overhaul the Commonwealth’s approach to education spending to provide adequate funding to all districts and make it more equitable.

Asked about vouchers, Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington said in a statement that his hope is that lawmakers will focus on adequately and equitably funding education so that Philadelphia students have the necessary resources to get “the education they deserve and need.”

The voucher program — negotiated between Shapiro and Senate Republicans — quickly became a sticking point in budget discussions. In a budget it passed on June 30, the GOP-controlled Senate revised an earlier voucher plan to make it more palatable to holdouts by adding household income limits and reporting requirements for private schools. It also got a new name: PASS, rather than the previously proposed “Lifeline Scholarship Program.”

As written, the majority of Philadelphia School District students would have been eligible under both the PASS or Lifeline versions of the voucher program. Critics said either version has the potential to upend the city’s public school system.

Philadelphia Board of Education President Reginald Streater told Chalkbeat in a text Wednesday that “vouchers are a red herring and will not address the needs of the families who depend the most on public education.” He said the voucher proposal “feels like a dereliction of duty,” and that fully funding education would solve many of the district’s challenges.

“We are on the cusp of an educational renaissance,” Streater said. “The last thing Philadelphia needs is any legislation that adversely impacts a scintilla of funding, resources and attention that would have any unintended or intended effect of kneecapping Philadelphia’s collective efforts and momentum to provide our city with the public education system our students deserve.”

Meanwhile, proponents of the voucher program, including the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, said it could have been one of “the biggest, most impactful, positive change[s] in education in three decades.”

Ultimately, Democrats in the House stood firmly opposed to any state-backed voucher program, blocking the budget bill late on Friday and killing the separate Lifeline Scholarship voucher bill in the House Rules Committee.

“This is an embarrassing setback for Governor Shapiro on his first budget and at the hands of his own party,” Erik Telford, a spokesperson for the Foundation, said in an email. “Shapiro would rather cave to Matt Bradford than stand firm behind his pledge to support the kids trapped in failing schools, despite having reached a bipartisan agreement with support in the House and the Senate.”

Pennsylvania’s other school choice programs

Pennsylvania already has two programs that promote school choice: the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and Educational Improvement Tax Credit. Both give tax breaks to businesses that donate to organizations that provide private school scholarships to students.

Those programs are notoriously opaque as state law prohibits the collection of information on academic achievement of EITC voucher students in particular. Although touted as a boon for low-income families, EITC has broad eligibility requirements — up to 500% of the poverty line. Families with three children and earning up to $168,000 a year can qualify.

OSTC, a much smaller program, is targeted more narrowly to families living in the attendance boundaries of the 15% of lowest-achieving schools in the state. Philadelphia has 139 such schools, which represents 36% of the 382 in the state, the largest number by far among the 500 districts in the Commonwealth. Both programs have steadily increased in cost over time; today, they are collectively funded at $340 million.

Susan Spicka, executive director of Education Voters PA, which opposes all voucher programs, said in an interview the PASS program’s ambiguous language could open the door to double or triple-dipping, allowing families to obtain funding from multiple school-choice programs at once.

Critics of both iterations of the voucher program also said it didn’t include enough protections against discrimination. Voucher programs in some states have been criticized for sending state money to private schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers.

“The goal of legislation like this … is to push vulnerable students and families into private and religious schools where they check their constitutional rights at the door,” Democratic Sen. Lindsey Williams said on the Senate floor before casting her no vote on June 30.

“Private schools can and do discriminate against disabled kids. Private schools can and do refuse to admit LGBTQ+ students. Private schools can and do refuse to accept kids because they are poor or struggling academically,” Williams said.

Supporters tout vouchers as lifelines for students trapped in failing public schools. Many education activists reject that idea.

Philadelphia and other districts like Reading and Norristown with high numbers of students in poverty aren’t failing, said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, an advocacy group that opposed the voucher program.

Rather, she said, “the state legislature is failing them by not funding schools sufficiently.”

Not all Philadelphia-area Democrats opposed the idea of vouchers, however. Democratic Sen. Anthony Williams, who represents parts of Philadelphia county, voted in favor of the budget with the voucher program included, saying parents in Philadelphia cannot wait for the public school system to improve or for the legislature to develop a new funding formula that meets constitutional muster.

The Shapiro-backed PASS voucher program would have cost $103.7 million but was contingent on a commitment that vouchers would be part of a full budget agreement. That pact would have to include historic education spending and fund priorities such as student mental health, special education, universal free breakfast, and “sustained funding for necessary and urgent environmental repairs in Pennsylvania schools,” said Manuel Bonder, Shapiro’s press secretary, in a text message Thursday night.

That historic increase never materialized. While the House added hundreds of millions in education spending to Shapiro’s proposed budget, the Republican-led Senate scaled back the total.

For instance, it eliminated $100 million Shapiro had proposed for school building repair — a desperate need in Philadelphia where several schools have closed due to asbestos — and increased special education by less than Shapiro wanted — $50 million instead of $143 million.

The Senate did increase so-called “Level Up” funding targeted to the 100 districts with the lowest per-pupil spending, including Philadelphia, which Shapiro’s proposed budget did not include.

Under the approved budget, basic education spending, the single largest line item, will increase by $567 million to a total of nearly $7.9 billion.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia board rejects five charter school proposals

2021-03-05T03:29:15+00:00

With barely any comment, the Philadelphia Board of Education unanimously denied five new charter school applications Thursday after hearing scathing critiques of all of them from the district’s reviewers.

Christina Grant, head of the district’s charter school office, described all of the applications as deficient either in their planned academic program, operations, finances, or evidence of community support — sometimes in all four areas. The office doesn’t directly recommend denial or approval, but these evaluations had few positive things to say.

The five schools were seeking to enroll more than 4,300 students. The district currently has 86 charter schools that enroll over 70,000 students, more than a third of the 200,000 total in the city’s publicly funded schools.

Charter school expansion was the main reform strategy initiated by the board’s predecessor, School Reform Commission, which governed the district for nearly two decades after the state declared it academically and financially distressed. The board has not approved a new charter school since taking over its governance when the district was returned to local control in 2018.

More than $1 billion of the district’s $3.3 billion budget consists of tuition payments to charters — and the state’s charter school funding formula hasn’t been significantly revised since the law was passed in 1997. Combined with a declining state share of overall school costs, this means that charter and district schools compete for increasingly scarce resources.

“The district does not need and cannot afford any more charters,” said Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, which advocates against charters.

Two of the proposed new schools would have been operated by Aspira, Inc., which already runs five charters, including a cyber school. The proposed new schools were the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Preparatory Charter School, for kindergarten through eighth grade, and the Bilingual Business, Finance and Technology Charter High School.

The community development organization has a troubled history dotted with investigations into its management and financial practices relating to its charters — including its use of state and local per-pupil subsidies for the schools as collateral for loans to shore up other aspects of its operations.

Two of Aspira’s existing schools, Olney High and Stetson Middle, are former district schools that were converted to charters in an effort to turn them around under an initiative called Renaissance Schools started by the SRC. But due to mediocre academic performance and questionable finances and operations, the board voted in 2018 not to renew the charters and reabsorb the schools into the district. But Aspira appealed to the state and the schools remain under Aspira’s management.

Even the SRC, in 2017, voted not to renew Olney and Stetson’s charters.

No district school has been converted to a charter since 2016 under the Renaissance program, and board President Joyce Wilkerson, who also served on the SRC, has questioned the effectiveness of the model.

Grant’s critique said that the applications for both new charters would give Aspira “outsized control” and contained “numerous inconsistencies in anticipating per-pupil funding,” among other shortcomings. It was proposed that many of the employees would work directly for Aspira and not for the schools, which would present a problem in creating a cohesive staff and school culture, Grant said.

The three other proposed charter schools voted down Thursday were Empowerment Charter School, Philadelphia Collegiate Charter School for Boys, and Pride Academy Charter School.

Empowerment was proposed as a kindergarten to fifth grade school in North Philadelphia operated in conjunction with the educational leadership company Jounce Partners. Courtney Taylor, presented as the principal of the school, said it would be named for Shirley Chisholm and would nurture students to be “activists” and “reach beyond their potential” in a close-knit community.

Several parents and community members spoke in favor of Empowerment, not least because it promised to be staffed by people of color.

“One of the things that is important to me is that children see someone who looks like [them] as a teacher,” said Ruth Williams, a community member. “I didn’t see a teacher who looked like me until high school.”

But the charter office report said the application “did not present compelling evidence of the founding coalition’s ability to establish and operate a charter school.”

The Philadelphia Collegiate Charter School for Boys, proposed to locate in Mount Airy, would “prepare Philadelphia’s next generation of young men,” according to its application. It would be managed by an organization that runs a similar school in Baltimore.

“Being in an environment with leadership of men of color can be transformational in the lives of young boys they serve,” said Eric Worley, a graduate of the district and longtime city resident.

The district’s critique said, among other things, that the application did not clearly outline the role of the management organization and did not present a curriculum that would meet state requirements.

In rejecting this application, board members Julia Danzy and Reginald Streater said that they saw value in gender-specific education, especially for boys of color, but that this proposal fell short. “This application does not contain what we need,” Danzy said.

Pride Academy, a K-5 school proposed for Germantown, planned a project-based curriculum to help students develop life-long learning skills for the 21st century.

Jamie Meekins is a local small business owner and potential parent who had hoped to partner with Pride in its hands-on curriculum around nutrition. He urged approval, as did parent John Scarborough. “I believe in the vision of teaching through project-based learning,” he said, adding that he would enroll his child if it opened.

But Grant said its application lacked “a systemic approach for its educational philosophy” and did not show enough evidence of community support.

Among nearly 30 speakers, about half opposed charters on principle, while echoing the shortcomings of these applications, and the rest offered support for Pride, Empowerment and the Collegiate School for Boys. No speakers at the meeting spoke on behalf of the Aspira charters.