Philly’s Black charter operators say they’re treated with bias. Here’s what a long-awaited investigation says

The question, posed by a group of charter schools, has been hanging over the school system’s head for nearly two years: Does the Philadelphia School District engage in racial discrimination against its Black-led charters?

The investigation report, finally released to the public Friday, answered: It does not.

There were no “intentional acts of racial discrimination or bias, based on the race of a charter school leader, committed by any members of the Board of Education, School Reform Commission, or the Charter Schools Office,” it read.

But the 132-page report, compiled by Ballard Spahr lawyers led by former city solicitor Marcel Pratt, comes with many asterisks — some of which speak more to the way Pennsylvania’s charter law is structured than the district’s own processes — and recommendations for changes moving forward.

While not overtly discriminatory toward Black charters, “the evidence showed that the district was aware for several years that charter schools led by people of color, including Black-led charter schools, encountered unique challenges under its regulatory processes, and that the district took no meaningful actions to address internal or external concerns until the public calls for this investigation,” the investigators wrote.

Further, the report concluded, “a number of other charter authorizing issues, such as inherent conflicts of interest for the district, low transparency, and a lack of training on implicit bias and antiracism for high-ranking decision makers, contributed to concerns of racial bias and inequity.”

Here’s a primer on the how the report came about, its conclusions, and what’s next.

In 2020, the African African American Charter Schools Coalition formed, a group of 17 schools banding together to highlight problems they saw in the sector and to advocate for solutions.

“Our schools have collectively dealt with racism, inequity, and biases when it comes to our schools’ oversight, expansion, and renewal opportunities,” Naomi Johnson Booker, a leader of the group, longtime city educator, and founder of two charters, said in 2020.

In December 2021, the school board commissioned the investigation, saying it took the allegations seriously and valued the work and voices of its minority-led charters.

Coalition leaders and others in the community have been unhappy with the slow pace of the investigation, going so far as to hold a public rally in June calling for the release of the report. State Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams (D., Phila.) suggested there the state withhold district funding until it was released.

Reginald Streater, the school board president, said the investigation was not final until recently, and that it took so long because of the sheer size of the district, its 83-school charter sector, and the number of people involved in the investigation. (Current and former board members, as well as former School Reform Commission members were all interviewed, as were those involved with existing and closed charter schools, though some declined to participate.)

The report is dated Aug. 31. It was released Friday.

In Pennsylvania, charter schools are authorized by local school boards, and operate independently, with taxpayer money, though they are subject to oversight and evaluation by the district’s charter office — which reports to the school board.

The coalition said the board, and its predecessor, the SRC, disproportionately targeted Black-led charter schools for closure, and generally treated minority-led schools unfairly during the authorization and renewal processes.

Though the topline finding was no bias, the report noted that between 2010 and 2021, eight of the 13 schools the district moved to not renew or revoke were Black-led. (Such processes include lengthy proceedings, days of hearings, and voluminous evidence. All were closed, the district said, for academic, financial and operational shortcomings.)

As early as 2017, the district acknowledged internally that it was moving to close minority-led charters at “a concerning rate,” but investigators found no evidence that any steps were taken to address the disparity.

The report also noted that the district uses so-called surrender clauses with minority-led charters more than other schools. Those clauses require the charter organization to give up its charter if the school board finds the school does not meet conditions of the charter, without possibility for appeal. “Schools with fewer resources and less bargaining power are more likely to accept such clauses and a surrender clause insulates the Board of Education’s later nonrenewal or revocation decisions from appellate scrutiny.”

Transparency issues and communications around charter authorizing practices are a weak spot, the report found, and Black-led charters often do not trust the district. “It is reasonable for some Black-led charter schools to question authorizing practices that could offer additional transparency,” said the report.

Investigators made several recommendations.

The first — calling on the district to petition Harrisburg lawmakers to hold hearings on possible changes to the charter school law that might result in an independent charter authorizer — gets at “significant concerns raised regarding the inherent conflicts of interest present in a system in which the same entity serves as the charter school authorizer/evaluator/funder, and a competitor to charter schools.” Investigators also suggested the board separate its charter schools office into two separate offices, one that handles charter-school authorizing and another that handles charter support.

The report also calls for different hearing officers to be used for charter nonrenewal processes, and giving charters a voice in how hearing officers are selected. It calls for implicit bias training and equity audits of how charter renewals, evaluations and nonrenewals work.

It called for more transparency in the charter school renewal process and more opportunities for charter schools to be heard before nonrenewal happens.

Streater said in an interview that he was “pleased” and “relieved” that the report confirms the board’s long-held position — there is no intentional or systemic discrimination against Black-led charters.

But he stopped short of endorsing the report fully, and said some of its recommendations — like the board going to Harrisburg to advocate for an independent charter authorizer — seem unlikely to happen.

Still, he said, the board and district have and will continue to “engage with the coalition” and hope to improve relations.

”There’s still work to be done. Historically in the city of Philadelphia, we’ve been on a journey around charter schools. This is another piece of a mosaic of the puzzle to move the conversation forward,” said Streater.

Dawn Chavous, a spokesperson for the coalition, took the report as a vindication of her group’s assertions.

”The report demonstrates that the district representatives ignored internal and external concerns regarding the effect of the Charter Schools Office’s authorization practices on minority and Black-led charter schools,” Chavous said in a statement. “The report also identifies an inherent conflict of interest with the district serving as the authorizer and evaluator of public charter schools.”

Chavous questioned delays in the report’s release, which she said “brings into question its ability to act in good faith with any remediation processes.”

Going forward, the coalition “demands to drive the process for restructuring the public charter school authorization system, along with our partners at the state and local level,” Chavous said.

Ballard Spahr provided its services pro bono, but the district paid $55,000 for a racial equity analysis by the Center for Urban and Racial Equity, at Ballard’s request, which informed the report.