Philadelphia As Failed Experiment In Education Deform

Remember the excitement education deformers showed when Philadelphia decided to turn over a bunch of schools to for-profit school operator Edison Schools?

For profit public school operators like Edison were supposed to be the future of public education, supplanting the traditional public schools that operate with unionized teachers under the administration of public servants.

At the height of its power and prestige in 2005, Edison was running a total of 22 schools in Philadelphia.

But Edison's running of the schools in Philadelphia was a miserable failure.

By 2008, Philadelphia had revoked its contract with Edison and voted to seize 4 of the schools it was operating back from the company immediately.

Edison had lots of other contracts around the country canceled as well.

So much for the future of for-profit public education.

But charter operators are run as for-profits too and Philadephia has many of those as well. While Washington D.C. is the epicenter of the education deform/for-profit charter school movement, Philly isn't far behind with 63 charter schools enrolling 34,000 students at a total cost of $320 million as of the 2008-2009 school year.

Education reformers had much hope for the success of the charters, but so far, much of the success seems to be in lining the pockets of the charter school operators.

As I detailed here yesterday, 13 Philadelphia charter schools are under investigation by the City Controller's Office for financial abuse and fraud. 9 charter schools are under investigation by the US Attorney's Office in Philly for the same reason.

The most striking example of abuse is at Harambee Institute of Science and Technology, where the operator ran a nightclub out of the school on weekends, handed out $7.5 million in construction contracts to her husband for work on her schools, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars for personal travel and expenses and listed them as business-related, and claimed to work more than 365 days a year when she put in for compensation.

Then you also have the charter school operators of Philadelphia Academy who were caught defrauding the school for close to $1 million dollars and bribed a policewoman with $34,000 to keep quiet. When it became clear investigators were going to arrest everybody involved, one of the charter operators committed suicide. The other pleaded guilty to mail-fraud theft and tax evasion. The police officer, a 25 year vet, was given a year in prison.

Philadephia Academy was considered a "success" by education reformers, btw, before one of the operators was hauled off to jail for fraud and the other committed suicide before he could be arrested.

Well, I guess in a way it was a success - it showed what happens when you turn a blind regulatory eye to these for-profit schools and simply assume that the marketplace will regulate itself.

You would think one scam and scandal after another - from Teapot Dome to the S&L crisis to the AIG/Lehman/Bear Stearns collapse - where taxpayers were left to pick up the mess and the bill from deregulation would relieve us of this silly notion, but so far they haven't.

Rather, the deregulators and privatizers grow more powerful and bring their deregulation/pro-privatization agenda to public schools.

Indeed, even the "Socialist" president, Barack Obama, is a deregulation/pro-privatization guy when it comes to public education.

But just as Philadelphia showed us how miserable a failure turning public schools over to for-profit Edison Schools has been, it is also showing us just how crooked and corrupt many charter operators are.

Did they start crooked and simply use the charter school movement for their latest scam? Or does the lack of regulation tempt good people to steal - to see their charter school budgets as their personal bank accounts and their charter schools as their own "private fiefdoms", as the City Controller put it?

It's probably a little of both. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

The only thing that does matter is that these crooks are stealing millions of dollars from education at the very same time school districts are being forced to slash their budgets by double digits.

When the NY State legislature takes up the Race to the Top jive again and charter operators and pro-charter education deformers clamor for the lifting of the charter caps, the UFT and others must again push for stronger regulation of the admissions policies and the finances of these schools.

And they can use the plethora of scandals in Philadelphia (and the burgeoning ones here in NYC involving Malcolm Smith and the charter schools he founded) as reasons why there must be more stringent regulation and outside accountability of these schools.

That way we can put the crooks out of the education business and into the license-making business (which is where most of them belong anyway.)