PA: Trying To Shut Down A Discriminatory Charter School

Charter schools can't discriminate, claim their supporters, because they must allocate their seats by a random process, not by creaming or selecting only the students they want. It's a lottery. How can it be stacked?

So the success of Franklin Towne Charter High School in Philadelphia, a Blue Ribbon (aka high test score achieving) school, must be a testament to its great work and achievement. Right?

Except that about a year ago, the Philadelphia Board of Education began the process of shutting down FTCHS based on allegations reported by Maddie Hanna, Kristen Graham, and Kasturi Pananjadi at the Philadelphia Inquirer in May of 2023.

A top executive at Franklin Towne Charter High School said this year’s lottery was fixed, with students from certain zip codes shut out, and others eliminated because they — or their older siblings — exhibited academic or behavioral problems. Some children were also excluded because Franklin Towne’s chief executive didn’t want to take anyone from a particular charter elementary school, in the event he might have to pay for their transportation.

Patrick Field, Franklin Towne’s chief academic officer and an administrator at the school for 17 years, said the lottery tampering was ordered by Joseph Venditti, the longtime former CEO. Venditti abruptly resigned Feb. 27, citing health reasons, after Field alerted the charter’s board chair about the lottery issues.

So, we can call them "allegations," but they look an awful lot like "accurate reporting by someone on the inside."  (Meanwhile, Field was immediately put on administrative leave by the school and filed his own lawsuit for retaliation by the employer).

Nor does it look like a recent aberration. The school opened in 2000. As reported by Carly Sitrin for Chalkbeat, the 2014 application that won the school a National Blue Ribbon Award reported school demographics of 2% Asian, 8% Black/African American, 14% Hispanic, and 76% white. The demographics of the city in which FTCHS operated--  42% Black and 36% white. 

The Board has said that they don't necessarily want to shut the school down-- just get them to shape up and cease "blatantly racist practices", and revocation hearing would be the way to do that. Instead, the proceedings have turned into a year long slog.

The hearing should have started in October of last year. But Franklin Towne challenged the particular hearing officer the board hired, Rudy Garcia. Folks expected a quick decision. Instead, no ruling for ten months. Meanwhile, Franklin Towne ladling more charges against the board, including a challenge to Pennsylvania's charter law, saying both that Garcia was biased and that he couldn't run the hearing ad decide the school's fate.

The case is in front of Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle, a GOP judge (though a Democrat when she first ran for the seat). She's drawn some complaints from the Defender Association and a "not recommended" from the Philadelphia Bar Association. In 2020, when the state was trying to use emergency releases to thin out jail populations and slow COVID spread, Coyle denied every single request. She was a Philly Assistant DA from 1986 through 2002. And she was a member of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School Board of Trustees.

Coyle's work on this case has been less than spectacular. Kristen Graham reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer notes that, according to court records, Coyle posed this question to school board president Reginald streamer-- if there had been lottery manipulation, "why would that cause a concern?" If they had broken the law and actively discriminated against minority children, why is that a big deal. 

Streater, presumably after he had picked his jaw up off the floor, replied that the board takes seriously things like inequitable treatment of students and breaking the law. 

Last week Coyle finally issued her order. Franklin Towne gets its request to remove Garcia, but not its challenge to sections of the charter law. Sher ordered a thirty-day stay of the revocation hearings, as well as a hearing in her courtroom to address further stays. If this all drags on too long, she'll require Franklin Towne to show her that they are complying with lottery-based admission requirements.

Coyle doesn't appear very sympathetic to the board. For one thing, the school is so valuable--

Realistically, should this successful high school be forced to close its doors, not only would the attending children, their parents, teachers, and administrators be adversely affected, so too would the entire community. This would permanently deprive all future students from the zip code(s) that the school board believes had been disregarded by Franklin Towne’s former administrators.

In other words, revoking the charter because it won't admit certain students would deprive those students of the chance to attend the charter that won't admit them. 

Also, she thinks the whole revocation procedure is deficient and that the board was displaying "bullying and biased appearance." And this, from the Inquirer:

Coyle wrote that her order “aligns with the public interest of promoting trust in the legal system and the integrity of our public institutions and preventing overreaching of governmental functions.”

 This seems to suggest that charter school authorizers are not supposed act like charter school authorizers, that somehow performing their actual function of holding charters to the rules and regulations that govern them is somehow an "overreach." You could almost assume that Judge Coyle doesn't quite understand how charter law works, if not for the fact that she sat on the board of a charter school. 

The charter system was sold with the idea that charters would be accountable to authorizers, that they would have to earn the right to operate and continue earning it to maintain that operation. The Franklin Towne situation shows a different framing, one that is too common in the charter world--once established, the charter doesn't have to earn its continued existence. It doesn't need authorization from anyone; instead, authorizers build a case to close down the charter. Authorization to operate, once given, can never be withdrawn without protracted legal battles.

This is and the tradeoff of autonomy for accountability that we were promised. "Look," the charteristas said, "Authorizers watch over the charter school, and if at any point they determine the school is not living up to the rules of its charter, the authorizers just shut it down." Instead what we've got is, "The authorizers okayed this school twenty years ago, and they have no right to take that away."

Who knows how the Franklin Towne charter situation will work out. One hopes that, at best, they have actually started to function according to the rules, though what that will do to their remarkable "success" would be a whole other story. But the whole business is a fine demonstration of how the charter school system we were sold is not how things actually operate.