Compel City Council to Approve New School Board Members

I am writing to ask for your support in protecting our traditional public schools. City Council has the authority to approve new members of the Board of Education. With a charter law that is draining public school budgets and historic underfunding by the state, I ask that you only approve new School Board members who will deny all new charter applications until these two conditions are met:

  • That the state law demands more charter accountability, transparency, and reimbursement only for services provided;
  • That all school districts across the state are fully and fairly funded according to the decision made by Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer in February, 2023.

Former Auditor General Eugene DiPasquale has declared that Pennsylvania’s charter law is “the worst in the United States”. To date, 469 of the 500 school districts in Pennsylvania have called for reform in the
charter law “to ensure that school districts and taxpayers are no longer overpaying or reimbursing charter schools for costs they do not have”; and in reports issued in 2014 and 2016, the Philadelphia Controller’s Office has also been critical of the state’s Charter School Law, which has allowed the
district to exercise lax oversight of its charters.

While civil rights groups such as the NAACP have called for a moratorium of all new charters across the country, a recent report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress underscores Pennsylvania’s
problems by finding the commonwealth’s charters to be close to the bottom in reading and math scores of the 35 states included in this study.

The study also found that Pennsylvania had large achievement gaps between white and Black charter students as well as white and Hispanic students, when compared to other states. Since half of the state’s charters are housed in Philadelphia, aren’t we doing a disservice to all of our students and students of color in particular, by allowing the introduction of new charters into the mix of publicly funded schools in the city?

You have been entrusted with a duty to protect the interests of our city’s children. Please use it wisely in assuring that the School District of Philadelphia has a Board of Education that adequately serves the needs of its students.

Thank you for considering this request.