Wolf attacking charter schools
The Observer-Reporter Feb. 17 editorial, “Restoring fairness to charter school funding” is based on false implications and an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the facts.
Here are a few examples:
As stated by the U.S. Attorney, Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is a victim of the alleged improprieties of its former founder, not a defendant as implied in the editorial.
Agora Cyber Charter School was forced to lay off employees as a result of the state budget impasse and the fact school districts have illegally withheld payments due to the school.
We agree cyber schools should not be paid for expenses they do not have, but they should be paid for expenses they do have that brick-and-mortar schools do not. Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposal addresses the first, but totally ignores the second. We have proposed a bipartisan commission of the Legislature to investigate the actual costs of cyber education, but the governor has chosen to ignore that proposal, not engage in any discussions with the charters, and recommend unilateral cuts.
Charter schools are public schools. To imply otherwise, as the editorial does, is in conflict with the governor, Department of Education, House of Representatives, Senate, and Supreme Court.
We do not oppose the elimination of the “double-dip” which was actually done under Gov. Tom Corbett, and has not been paid to charters in more than a year.
The governor’s proposal for charter schools to be prohibited from retaining an unreserved fund balance violates accepted accounting principles and is inconsistent with what is permitted for districts. While charters held $148 million in unreserved fund balances in 2014, districts held $1.6 billion. It is prudent financial stewardship for both to hold reasonable unreserved balances, but if the Governor believes it’s good for charters to surrender the $148 million, it’s reasonable to ask why he has not proposed that districts surrender the $1.6 billion.
A bipartisan commission created a very good formula for changing the way special education students were funded, but the legislation to implement the formula was applied differently to charters than to districts. The difference would have meant a special needs student in a charter school, with the same challenges as a student in a district school, would receive at least 30 percent less than the student in the district school. That is blatantly discriminatory and a violation of federal law, but it is what the governor is proposing, and what your editorial is endorsing.
Ignored in the editorial are the facts the governor undermined the creation of educational choice alternatives in Philadelphia, Chester-Upland, and York; diverted $8 million in Ready to Learn grants from charters to districts; and permitted the Department of Education to withdraw from the resolution of funding disputes between districts and charters in direct violation on the Charter School Law. This long list pf actions against all charter schools, regardless of how effective they are in educating children, can’t be viewed by any unbiased observer as anything less than a consistent and “unrelenting attack” on charter schools, the 130,000 students in those schools, and the tens of thousands of children on waiting lists to get into a charter school.
Robert Fayfich
King of Prussia
Fayfich is the executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools.