More charter trouble in Philadelphia

by David Safier
It started with a bit too much money going from Philadelphia's Agora Cyber Charter School to its management company, which is now facing federal prosecution.

Now it looks like the net is spreading wider.

Philadelphia may be a long way from home, but its charter school problems don't sound much different from stories coming out of Arizona, though I haven't heard local tales that reach the same level of criminal behavior. It's possible our schools are cleaner than those in the City of Brotherly Love. Or maybe we don't know what's going on, because no one in our regulation-phobic Department of Education is minding the store.

A side note. In Pennsylvania, charters come up for renewal every 5 years. Renewal time is when festering problems are most likely to be discovered. In Arizona, renewals are every 15 years. Since our charter legislation was written in 1994 — 15 years ago — the original charters will begin going through the renewal process in January, 2010, for the first time ever.

Fifteen years is a long, long time to let a school run without making it go through the kind of inspection it should get during the renewal process. So far as I know, no other state waits anywhere near 15 years. But apparently it's not long enough for our legislature's taste. In a law passed this year, the charter renewal period was extended to 20 years. One-fifth of a century. That's an even longer long, long time.