Lessons from King
Disclosures of backroom politics in the process to turn around Martin Luther King High ignited calls for more transparency.
by Bill Hangley, Jr.
Former School Reform Commission Chair Robert Archie, who resigned September 19, faces accusations that he tried to help steer a contract to an organization to which he had ties.
Told that Martin Luther King High's multimillion-dollar charter school deal ran aground on a reef of Philadelphia politics, Jeffrey Henig could only joke: "I'm shocked! Shocked!"
Henig, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, specializes in urban education reform. He won't say that cronyism and corruption are inevitable where charters and other "turnaround" models are concerned. But the risk is always there, he said, and the antidote is transparent, accountable governance.
"I always say, you need good government in order to have good privatization," said Henig.
"It's inevitable that there's some kind of tradeoff between a highly structured centralized system, versus a decentralized system that taps into enthusiasm and new ideas. If you decentralize, and you've got more omelets in the making, it's almost inevitable that some are going to be bad eggs."
There is no more obvious bad egg among Philadelphia's school turnaround projects than King. Most of Philadelphia's charter school conversions have been completed without major controversy. And while many suspect that local politics heavily influenced turnaround decisions at some schools, such as West Philadelphia and Audenried High, only at King have so many details of backroom politicking broken out into the open.
The result has been a slowly unfolding controversy that left King itself scrambling to recover and helped undermine public confidence in the leadership of the School District.
But King's story also reveals one of the benefits of an open, public process. Had parents and community members not been so closely involved in choosing a new provider, Philadelphians might never have learned about the behind-the-scenes battle for the school's valuable contract.
"Even if you've got a well-functioning and capable bureaucracy with integrity," said Henig, "it helps to have more eyes on the ground."
Contracting troubles
King's charter was no small prize: a five-year deal worth an estimated $12 million a year that could have extended indefinitely. The 1,000-student school in East Germantown was designated for charter conversion last year as part of now-departed superintendent Arlene Ackerman's Renaissance turnaround process. If all had gone according to plan, King would be a charter today.
Instead it remains in District hands, undergoing changes as a Promise Academy. What started as an orderly public process designed to involve the community broke down completely after a powerful local politician stepped in at the last minute to try to steer King's contract to a favored provider.
That kind of thing should surprise no one, said Kent McGuire, former head of the College of Education at Temple University.
"Why would we think that we wouldn't have the same problems with charters as with any other set of large-scale contracting procedures?" asked McGuire, now head of the Southern Education Foundation.
"That's why transparency is so important. That's why we want processes conducted in the sunlight."
But shedding that light is not always easy. It's been six months since news first broke of State Rep. Dwight Evans' backroom attempts to ensure that King's charter would go to his longtime associates at Foundations, Inc. The story is still unfolding today.
"Right now, we're at a point of frustration because there's so many pieces to this puzzle that still don't make sense," said Conchevia Washington, parent of a King student.
"We just want to know what happened and why. How did we get to that point where politicians felt the need to stop a process that had followed all the rules? And that left us with this unclear future?"
Washington, chair of King's volunteer School Advisory Council (SAC), was a key player in the public process. She was stunned to find herself part of a tensely political backroom drama.
Comments (3)
Submitted by Veteran of the WPHS "Renaissance" (not verified) on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 17:23.
All I can say is that there is a limit to what a small group of community members can do to bring about transparency and accountability on the part of government and other public officials. You may be able to draw a lesson from the King story that without the public involvement through the SAC, the backroom deals would not have come to light. But in the West Philly case, the reasons why the decision of the SAC was overturned was never uncovered -- even though it involved similar backroom conversations. Archie himself, it was reported in The Notebook, said he "couldn't remember" who the "tipster" was that got him to halt the SRC vote and an investigation into the charge of conflict of interest on the SAC was never made public, if it even was completed. Members of the West SAC were threatened, manipulated, pressured, and ultimately worn down. The press never pressed in the same way as for MLK for an explanation. I was personally pressured and intimidated about my right to speak up as a citizen about what was happening. If there is going to be strong community involvement to hold public officials accountable, then it has to be independent of the school district, well organized, and city-wide. If that is what it takes to force ethical behavior in a privatizing environment, I am not optimistic about Philadelphia's chances. So far, I don't see that the public in this city is either unified or strong enough to counteract the forces of greed and the politically powerful. Get ready for life in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Submitted by Bill Hangley (not verified) on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 17:37.
Veteran, I appreciate your thoughts a great deal. I feel very lucky to have been assigned the task of covering King last year by the Notebook & WHYY. We didn't know going in that anything like the Mosaica deal would go down - but once Porter dropped the contract, it was obvious that something was going on, and I'm very, very glad that I had the time, and WHYY & the Notebook had the resources, to support a sustained look at what happened. But I'm also aware of the fact that we know next to nothing about the process at other schools, West among them. Feel free to write me anytime at billhang@msn.com if you'd like to talk about what happened there.
Submitted by tom-104 on Fri, 09/23/2011 - 20:31.
This is some much overdue reporting which brings together much of what happened in the political conflict over MLK high school. I am concerned, however, that both in this article and in the Inquirer there is a good guy/bad guy approach with Ackerman and Mosaica being the good guys and Archie and Evans with Foundations being the bad guys. I think the situation is more complex than that.
Ackerman in her recent communications portrays herself as being innocent and politically naive about what was going on. Her whole history at Washington D.C. and San Francisco and now here shows she is far from that. She is very aware of all the players in the political game and she likes to portray herself as an innocent bystander even as she is orchestrating events behind the scenes.
Members of the MLK SAC have stated in comments here that they were in no way pressured to pick Mosaica. People from the West Philadelphia SAC had a different experience in their choice of managers. So what role Ackerman played in the promotion of Mosaica is still unclear.
Given her history of her relationship with Porter, the head of Mosaica, I cannot believe that she had a hands off approach in promoting Mosaica. He was a fellow at the Broad Foundation when Ackerman was an instructor for them. (See page 20 of the report to Mayor Nutter.) Broad Foundations is one of the leading promoters of the privatization of public schools and Ackerman has been deeply involved with them for many years.
What Ackerman was naive about was the specific political interests in Philadelphia. She crossed politically powerful people who had other interests than hers in take over MLK. The differences had nothing to do with differing educational philosophy, etc.
What we had is a fight over lucrative contracts, political power, and control. None of them had concern for the public interest and certainly not for the education of the students at the schools involved. Each party was out for themselves.
This is our future if the privatization of public schools is allowed to proceed.
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