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News & Information
Comprehensive Charter School Reforms In The Works
Posted November 11, 2009
HARRISBURG (Nov. 9) - The chairmen of the state Senate Education Committee are proposing reforms to charter school law they say would make the schools easier to create and also easier to monitor and regulate.
The proposed legislation would create the Office of Charter and Cyber Charter Schools within the state Department of Education to oversee charter school functions. It would also allow institutions of higher education, including community colleges, to approve the creation of charter schools, among other changes.
Twelve years after charter schools were authorized in Pennsylvania, Sens. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, and Andrew Dinniman, D-Chester, say their proposed reforms would impose much-needed accountability measures on the state's more than 130 charter schools.
Currently local school districts are responsible for overseeing the charter schools within their boundaries, and in many districts, oversight has been lax, Piccola said.
Last month, Kevin O'Shea, the former head of a Philadelphia charter school, was sentenced to three years in prison for stealing as much as $1 million from the school. O'Shea pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud, theft from a federally funded program and filing a false tax return and admitted to collecting kickbacks from contractors, using school funds to finance improvements to his home, stealing money from school vending machines and spending $145,000 on luxurious executive offices.
"School districts for the most part. have failed to exercise any significant oversight," Piccola said. But with centralized oversight of charter schools, "we will be better able to quickly identify the ones that need help and either get them help in a rapid fashion or get them out of business in a rapid fashion."
Some parts of the proposal, such as allowing colleges and universities to authorize charter schools, have attracted criticism from some in the education community.
Tim Allwein, assistant executive director of governmental and member relations for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said that provision would provide private institutions too much power to distribute public funds.
"I would hate to see [institutions of higher education have] that authority, and then have the payment of tuition then fall on school districts," Allwein said. "That would be creating a mandate allowing someone else to create larger costs for [taxpayers]."
According to Dinniman, compromises exist that could avoid such a situation. Many community college officers are appointed by school boards or county governments, and so are some officers at the 14 universities in the public State System of Higher Education system. Restricting authorization abilities to publicly appointed boards could provide a middle ground.
Barry Cohen of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools said expanding the powers of authorization to colleges and universities would bring "a neutral, objective party" into the authorization process.
"Districts are often reluctant to authorize charter schools because they know it would take away from some of their enrollment," Cohen said.
Charter schools receive their funding from their students' home school districts, sometimes creating tension between local administrators and charter-school officials.
Cohen said his initial response to the proposed reforms is "very positive."
Allwein said he supports the proposed accountability measures, which include creating the charter schools office in the Department of Education and tying charter school performance to the Pennsylvania Ethics Act and other standards of conduct.
"We're always for additional accountability, whether it's on charter schools or [traditional] public schools," Allwein said.
Charter schools are public schools, but they operate free from many of the educational mandates associated with traditional public schools. Charter schools can accept students from outside their local districts, and they are at a greater liberty to construct alternative curricula and experiment with educational techniques.
"Charter schools are wonderful in that they provide us with the opportunity to see different approaches," Dinniman said. "The day is over when all children can be educated in exactly the same manner. We need to have a variety of approaches that work with a variety of learners."
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