This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
By Bill Hangley, Jr.
This week, all six schools in the Philadelphia School District’s so-called “Renaissance Match” program must make tough decisions about their future. But the choice faced by Martin Luther King High is unique: The known, or the unknown?
The known in this case is Foundations Inc, a nonprofit based in New Jersey that’s helped manage programs at King since 2003. The unknown is Mosaica Education, an international for-profit company based in Atlanta that has run schools from the Midwest to the Middle East, but never in Philadelphia.
By the end of the week, King’s School Advisory Council (SAC) must vote to recommend one of the two to run King next year. The recommendation won’t be binding, but Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has promised to factor all SACs’ preferences into her own deliberations before she delivers her recommendations to the School Reform Commission on March 16.
This story continues on the NewsWorks website; it is a product of a reporting collaboration between the Notebook and WHYY.