"The SRC also voted to renew three schools' charters. Two - Planet Abacus and Laboratory Charter - are strong academic performers whose renewals had been held up because their founder, Dorothy June Brown, was on trial on federal fraud charges.
Brown was acquitted on six counts and will be retried on 54, but officials were satisfied that both schools had met several conditions, including severing ties to Brown."
June Brown has been a larger-than-life, polarizing figure in our school district. She had influence in the highest levels of Philadelphia education, is married to a former judge and head of the USEEOC. There is ample evidence that she is both a visionary public educator and a federal criminal. These two poles have been understandably hard for people to keep in their heads at the same time, yet both appear to be true.
The best testament to her vision is that it outlives her involvement. Brown and Slade have not been involved directly in the school, since 2009 in her case and since 2012 in his case. Though this school is a 2013 National Blue Ribbon School, continues to achieve top marks, her grandnephew (a 2003 convicted credit card felon who publicly signs his name as "Dr." without ever having earned a PhD) saw fit to castigate us publicly at our most recent monthly board meeting, claiming that we were not grateful enough.
Any gratitude we might have felt was more than offset by their arrogance, their crimes, their fraud, the public shame they brought our school and the over half million the school was forced to take from needy children to pay for their legal defense. Yes, believe it or not, thanks to PA corporate and nonprofit law, the victim is compelled to pay to defend the very people who defrauded it. We were contractually compelled to additionally pay over $200,000 in annual salary and benefits over the 18 month period that Slade was suspended by the board, (but with full pay). The average charter school leader makes less than $120,000. That may be fine for most corporations or NPO’s but when you’re talking about scarce school-kid taxpayer dollars, it stuck in our craw. As it should in yours. Whether legal or illegal, we may never get the bottom of the full cost of Brown's and Slade's drain on public funds that ostensibly are earmarked to educating children. Through documents I've obtained through Right to Know Act requests, I've estimated that Slade has cost the school in excess of $1.6 million and this is likely a conservative figure.
My own grassroots contribution to the school has been not unlike my life's work, to research, to take complex and sometimes contradictory information and fashion a narrative that empowers stakeholders and decision-makers. I've done this in public testimony, regular emails and Facebook to a core group of parents one attorney dubbed the “Fantastic 9” for our tenacious determination to ask the hard questions and create reform in a school that for the past five years has been riddled by allegations of malfeasance which turned into full-blown scandal in July of 2012 and a federal trial that ended in a controversial hung jury last December.
For the longest time, our principal battle has been waged against our own Board of Trustees, all of whom were at one time appointed by June Brown or Michael Slade. We were fortunate in one respect—at least our board was comprised of living individuals. Planet Abacus operated for years with a phantom board. As at that school, parents were actively discouraged from even attending monthly board meetings. Dr. Brown told any parent who asked, "You let us worry about running the school. You mind your children."
I'm somewhat chagrined to say we followed that direction because the work demanded of our children DOES require nightly hands-on parental engagement. And there was no arguing with the results. Kids work hard, parents work hard. Our administrators obviously worked hard. The school consistently earned top ten in PSSA test results with 90-100% of students achieving advanced or proficient results. Our students graduate and go to top private and public magnet high schools, more than prepared for academic success. Yet, as early as 2009, many of us became aware of the darker side of non-engagement, when Brown went on the offensive with a SLAPP suit against parents at another school who had the temerity to question her business practices. 2009 was a turning point for me as I reluctantly concluded that you don't SLAPP people soliciting public information unless you have something to hide.
Yet, like our kids, we kept our noses down for three more years and let them run the school until it became public knowledge that the Charter School Office had recommended non-renewal and shutting our school down and indictments were handed down against Brown, Slade and other key school officials. In June of 2012, only one parent attended the meeting and he wasn't even a Lab parent. Through 2012 through 2013, our core group rallied through emails, meetings, petitions and SRC attendance. We attended board meetings and vocally challenged any action we believed served the financial interests of the founders over the interests of our children. Two nights ago, 40 informed parents packed a classroom. The genie is out of the bottle, never again to return. Our evolution from cowed, silent beneficiaries of services to empowered public activists has become complete.
Attendance and participation is one thing. The power to vote to effect change is another. It wasn’t until last year that several Brown-appointed trustees resigned for "personal reasons" and parents were able to force ourselves into board seats. I’m gratified to report that as of December we have a 3-2 majority of parent community trustees over Brown appointees. I’m proud to have played a public pressure/active role in forcing the resignation of two past Brown-appointed board presidents. It’s amazing what a letter to the US Attorney soliciting federal scrutiny of board actions will do!
We are actively looking to unseat the remaining two Brown/Slade era trustees who have no educational expertise, background or assets save their close personal relations with the founders. We are demanding our BOT sever Michael Slade’s contract for cause. When we do these things, our reform phase will at long last be complete and the board will be liberated to move on to its true calling and intended role of educational leadership in complex times.
Other than my fellow parents, my chief go-to source has been Martha Woodall, ace education investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Martha has been tirelessly sniffing out irregularities in June Brown’s business practices for almost nine years. She was not universally loved at Lab Charter, (no siree bob) because many of us, myself included for awhile, felt that she was too critical and one-sided. I’ve just been a little faster than most to realize how invaluable Martha’s pit-bull-jaw clamp on the investigation has been. To say I am grateful and admire her is a vast understatement.
Planet Abacus is another school that Brown founded in Tacony, similar to our Northern Liberties campus. It too has faced a long, even steeper uphill battle extricating itself from June Brown influences. Their parents and board should be proud of their work in re-securing their charter.
Even with high performing schools like ours and Abacus, the charter story in PA is a mixed bag. Arise Charter, on the other hand is a school of very low performing students, hemorrhaging money. It makes eminent fiscal sense to close it, yet the kids, many of whom were adjudicated/in foster care, came out and spoke heartrendingly, compellingly for their school family. And these are "lost through the crack" kids for whom the notion of family is very tenuous. For the SRC to parse test data and use it to decide the fate of kids whose lives have been scarred by tragedy and abuse based on cold metrics seems the very definition of heartlessness. Yet that is their thankless, volunteer job and for what I can see, they are diligent about its undertaking.
When it comes to education, my generation of parents faces challenges and complexities my own parents never dreamed of. The most reductive analysis is that there are hundreds of billions of public dollars flowing into private hands in the name of education. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that; it could be the source of great innovation, if but for the fact that the people who’ve so vigorously championed privatizing public education have stacked the system so that little or no effective oversight follows the money. These free marketer thinkers have created a Frankenstein monster that practically begs to be scammed, abused and defrauded.
Why would they do that?
My advice to any parent activist is to “follow the money because your elected officials aren’t.” My passion comes from moral outrage over the vast amounts squandered through bloated salaries, waste, neglect, lack of innovation and cronyism, but more from the conviction that a superior public education should be as inalienable a right as freedom of speech, vote, association and religious practice. As Sam Seaborn in the popular TV series “The West Wing” once put it, "Schools should be palaces of learning." We owe our kids, our democracy, our future no less than our best.
I believe in “choice” and choice not just for high-performing kids and their parents. I believe in choice for adjudicated/foster kids, special needs kids, arty kids, tech kids, sporty kids, musical kids, families of faith. There’s too little choice out there. Parents are forced to make inadequate, sometimes painful, sometimes heartbreaking decisions based on lack of choice.
I’m not saying that everybody should have the same choice. The foster-cared kids at Arise Charter would have a horrible educational and social experience mixed in with predominantly two-parent students at Lab Charter or Planet Abacus and vice versa. Real choice means the opportunity to tailor the educational environment that is right for the student. Too make them feel part of a community, a safe family of like learners. Because its only when they feel "safe at home" that each child’s special skills can be nurtured and their special needs met. For too long we’ve suffered under the 19th Century one-size-fits-none factory model of education. It’s been a catastrophe. Like it or not, charters represent the best, current solution, but only if there is true choice to create individualized learning environments.
Even more alarming is the well-intended but disastrous trend to strip choice from public charters. Specialized learning environments like Lab’s are being increasingly pressured to relax its academic standards and acceptance policy and take all comers, whether they are prepared to meet the rigorous demands of our school or not. Special-needs learning environments like Arise are being forced to kowtow to test metrics that don’t even begin to connect to the holistic emotional and social needs of its kids.
This was clearly in evidence tonight when one of the SRC commissioners asked the Arise kids what their classes were like and what they learned. One of the kids, a statuesque 19 year old woman, talked about the emotional support she got for herself and her child. It was like the commissioner and the young woman were from different planets. And they are for all intents and purposes. Norming all the schools could have potentially devastating impacts on any school that thrive on unique cultures—whether they are communities of high parental engagement and no-excuses output from students or communities where counseling, intervention and social services fill the traditional roles of parents. Over-reliance on test data has abundantly revealed its short-comings. Not only does "the almighty test score" deny the intangibles of education, but it actively encourages cheating to obtain results that are tied to funding.
Anybody who has attended as many SRC meetings as I have, realizes that the problems facing Philadelphia schools and students are profound and the bar for fixing them is alarmingly low. At times, there’s an air of desperation in the room as witness after witness testifies to the effects of budget cuts and school closings, of kids taking life in hand, walking through crime-infested neighborhoods to get to school, of parents who don’t have five-figure means for private school, but have a proud vision for their children’s educational success. It’s called the American Dream and torn and tattered, it parades up to the witness seat and testifies in three minutes increments about the realities of urban public education in this our nation’s first capitol. There are so many sad stories, too many to count at times, but also some hopeful and optimistic ones.
Maybe this is why Dorothy June Brown was so successful and respected in her day. She took the same demographic as the Philadelphia public schools, 50% families at or near the poverty line and fashioned an no-frills, old-school educational mecca where children study two languages, do two hours of homework a night and excel beyond the wildest dreams of their hardworking parents. This was and is a formidable accomplishment, but somewhere along the line, she lost her way and must pay for it. Did she go into the charter business opportunistically aiming to game the system or did she walk an altruistic, righteous path until the system presented far too many temptations, too alluring to resist? It’s an intriguing mystery.
We may never know and in truth it doesn’t much matter now. What does matter, the central mystery, is how the greatest, most advanced nation on earth has willfully abdicated its commitment to invest wisely and sufficiently in its most cherished asset—our children. Like the story of Brown and Slade, the landscape of 21st century public education is a case study in cognitive dissonance, the simultaneous holding of multiple, opposing points of view—all of which are true. That said, I find optimism through my engagements with my fellow Lab Charter parents. We are living and working "The Dream." But mine is a fragile optimism, easily lost and not shared anywhere as widely as it should be. One thing is abundantly clear; American public education is deeply imperiled and the stakes for inaction strike at the very heart of our democracy and economic future.
I don't know exactly what my future holds, but if anything, this essay has become a sort of manifesto—a blueprint for engagement that is at once timely, socially significant and a source of deep personal commitment. I'm eager for your comments and questions, both here and on Facebook where this is linked.
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