Why charter schools are a bad deal for Chester Upland

To the Times:

“Choice” is a word you’ll hear a lot from the folks pushing charter schools. As in, parents should have the choice to send their children to a regular public school or a charter. But if Chester Community Charter’s proposal, one of three being considered by Chester Upland School District, is accepted, parents in two elementary school districts in Chester Upland will lose that choice.

CCCS proposes to turn Main Street and School of the Arts into charters – as the neighborhood schools as well. So, depending on where you live, it will be a matter of sending your children to a charter or else. And if they end up in one of those CCCS schools, the students stand to be the losers, judging from the fact that those two public schools have outperformed CCCS over the years, based on student scores on standardized tests. And who knows what’s next, maybe Stetser?

Then there is the matter of transparency and the public’s right to know. The process of deciding which proposals to accept, in response to Judge Dozor’s dictum that the district should put out requests for proposals from charters, has gone on behind closed doors for the most part. This continues despite the judge’s order that “the Receiver shall immediately produce to the parties, file with the court, and release to the public the following documents and information ... All proposals, including cover letters, narratives, exhibits, and attachments, submitted in response to the Request for Proposals.” Public input at the end of the process, without a chance to study those three proposals beforehand, doesn’t meet our definition of transparency.

And speaking of transparency, taxpayers in Chester

Upland should know how their tax money is being spent. In the case of CCCS, which has been referred to as a for-profit enterprise, CSMI, the management company that is the for-profit part of that operation, refuses to divulge how it spends its money; e.g., how much goes for profit. As it is, CCCS has spent more of its budget on administrative costs, as opposed to things like the teaching of students, than other such operations.

Finally, there is the matter of special education. Reimbursement for special ed students is much higher than for regular students. CCCS has more of its students in that category than the other two brick-andmortar charters in Chester Upland, although students in all three are drawn from the same population.