Amid rapid charter school growth, and stunning fraud charges, city leaders consider overhaul of District charter office
By Benjamin Herold for the Notebook and WHYY/NewsWorks
Even as federal investigators were finalizing a massive fraud indictment against one of Philadelphia’s most prominent charter school operators, the School Reform Commission was moving thousands of students andhundreds of millions of dollars into the city's publicly funded charter sector.It’s a massive gamble, made riskier by the meager staffing in the School District’s Office of Charter Schools. Currently, 80 independently managed Philadelphia charters serving more than 50,000 students are monitored by just six people – a number that observers on all sides of the heated charter school debate agree is woefully inadequate.
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