Mastery gets $9.6 million federal grant to expand
The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has awarded Mastery Charter Schools a $9.6 million federal grant with the goal of opening 12 new schools over the next five years as a part of the Department’s Replication and Expansion for High-Quality Charter Schools program.
These new schools would serve an estimated 6,800 students.
Mastery already serves approximately 12,000 students in grades K-12 between its schools in Philadelphia and Camden. The charter management organization operates 17 schools in Philadelphia and Camden, 11 of which are turnarounds of low-performing public and charter schools.
"The quality of the education and the teaching Mastery provides starts with the expectation that our kids have unbounded potential,” Mastery CEO Scott Gordon said in a press release. “The DOE award validates the effort and results our students have attained."
Mastery's grant proposal says the goal is to have schools in Delaware and Washington, DC, in addition to Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The money will be used to plan, design, and implement new charter programs, but Mastery said it will also be using the money to evaluate the effectiveness of its existing charters.
Under the District’s Renaissance turnaround initiative, schools are converted to charters but continue to operate as neighborhood schools with a defined catchment area. For the first cohort of Renaissance charters authorized in 2010, Mastery was the only provider that had all of its Renaissance charters renewed after its five-year review. Other providers, including ASPIRA and Universal, have had difficulties, with at least one charter not recommended for renewal or in limbo.
Gordon, in a statement, said that Mastery’s Renaissance schools “are able to bring kids back to their neighborhood school, so rather than seeing a community asset closed we are able to work with families to breathe new life back into that school. The turnaround results have been dramatic.”
In late September Superintendent William Hite announced that he would recommend to the School Reform Commission that three additional elementary schools be turned over to Mastery gets $9.6 million federal grant to expand | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:
