District’s hearings to shut down Palmer Charter School begin

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Hearings began today on the School District’s effort to deauthorize and shut down Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School, even as the founder’s plan to steer the school through its immediate financial crisis has apparently fallen through.

Speaking after this morning’s testimony, Palmer said he does not know how much cash the 1,200-student school has on hand or how much longer it can stay open without some kind of fresh financial support.

“We’re going to do everything we can. We have people who are reaching out to us, people who want to get involved,” said Palmer, a pioneer of the local charter movement. “The school is not closed.”

Palmer, however, could not guarantee that his school would be able to stay open after this month.

“It’s going to be touch and go,” he said.

What’s more, school officials have confirmed that they will move this week to slash enrollment radically, in order to get from 1,200 students to the SRC-approved 675. They say they’ll hold a lottery starting Thursday to determine which students stay.

The Palmer school’s current financial straits stem in part from its decision to spend years enrolling more students than the 675 authorized by the SRC, in the hopes of eventually winning a court decision that would force the District to pay back the difference.

Instead, the courts ruled in favor of the SRC, leaving the Palmer school deep in debt and unable to pay its bills.

In September, Palmer sent a letter to the District saying that without an infusion of cash, he wouldn’t be able to stay open. Then, two weeks ago, at a community meeting at the school, Palmer announced a plan to save the school by teaming up with a Washington, D.C.-based charter operator, Friendship Public Charter Schools. If if the District approved the Friendship plan, Palmer said, anonymous donors would provide enough cash to keep most students enrolled (District officials have said they will only pay for the 675 students that are authorized).

But today, Palmer said that Friendship has backed away from that plan, in part because of the revocation hearings – a separate matter that began when the SRC determined in 2014 that it wouldn’t reauthorize the school for another five-year charter, due to its academic and financial performance.

“I think what’s happened is that their position is that it’s so late, and there’s so many issues on the table. I think they wanted revocation taken off the table,” Palmer said of the Friendship plan. “So they’ve backed off. Once this gets settled, we’ll take another look."

District officials say the Palmer school officials have not provided any updates on the financial situation in recent weeks. For now, they say, they’ll continue to help Palmer students find new schools if they choose.

Hearings begin

The revocation hearings, which will involve multiple witnesses and could stretch out for weeks, were triggered by the SRC’s decision earlier this year to deny the Palmer school a third five-year renewal.

The school first applied for charter status in 1999 and opened a year later. It has been renewed twice since then.

In 2010, the SRC renewed it for five years despite a recommendation by the charter school office that it only be renewed for a single year, with conditions.

The District’s case for non-renewal now rests on several grounds: poor academic performance, financial mismanagement, inadequate compliance with reporting requirements, failure to follow District protocols for enrollment and admissions, and a lack of properly qualified teachers.

Academic shortcomings will be central to the case, said the District’s attorney, Allison Petersen of the Levin Legal Group. The school’s test scores were on the rise leading up to 2010, she said, but since then, the decline has been steady.

The District’s case will cover “the lack of improvement, the poor performance in comparison to other schools in the District, some of them charter schools,” said Petersen.

Petersen did not bring up the fact that the school was under investigation for cheating — flagged in 2011 for improbable numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on the PSSA. New testing security measures put in place for 2012 were followed by a significant drop in scores. For 11th graders, proficiency rates dropped by 38 points in reading and 46 points in math. An internal investigation found no explanation for what state officials called “extensive evidence of testing irregularities.” The Pennsylvania Department of Education never reported on whether there was any external investigation of the suspected cheating at the school.

Palmer said his attorneys, Robert and Jerome Gamburg, will counter the District’s case by attempting to “put the system on trial.”

“It’s not about our school,” said Palmer, who hopes the hearings will expose “all the contradictions in our system – the lack of true reform, the corporate takeover, the politics involved, the whole idea of high-stakes testing.”

Gamburg’s opening statement reflected that approach. After listening to Petersen lay out the Palmer school’s alleged failings, he opened his case by saying, “It struck me when listening to the presentation you could easily [replace] the name ‘Walter Palmer’ with ‘the School District of Philadelphia.’”

Palmer is being deliberately “silenced” by the District, he said. “Many if not all of the alleged violations have been or are being rectified,” Gamburg said.

Later, Gamburg said he’s confident that the Palmer school itself is a solid academic performer, despite flagging test scores.

“I defy anyone to spend an hour at that school and tell me he’s not doing it right,” Gamburg said. “We’re making the improvements … not as quickly as we’d hoped, but we’re certainly improving.”

The value of standardized tests

Among the arguments Gamburg will try to make is that the standardized tests on which the Palmer school fares poorly are, in fact, an inappropriate measure of student performance, particularly for minority students.

Such tests can’t measure “the growth of a person and an individual,” he said in his opening arguments.

The District’s lawyers moved quickly to defuse that argument. They used testimony from the first witness, Lauren Thum of the District’s charter school office, to show that Palmer’s charter applications repeatedly stated the goal of improving students’ test performance by 10 percent or more.

Palmer said later that such language should be taken with a grain of salt. “It was almost pro-forma,” he said. “Almost everybody doing applications, from the beginning, was trying hard to say what they thought would help them get the school approved.”

Another key plank in Palmer’s case is his belief that to some degree, it’s personal. He believes the District is retaliating against him for pressing the issue of enrollment caps and using the courts to seek the right to expand without restriction.

However, Palmer could not say what evidence his team plans to present to back that assertion. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” he said, adding that he expects that case to be more circumstantial than direct.

Asked whether he planned to present evidence of conscious retaliation against Palmer by the District, Gamburg said only, “We’ll get there at some point.”

The revocation hearings are presided over by attorney Rudolph Garcia, of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. He’ll hear the evidence and make a formal recommendation to the SRC, which will have the final say.

The hearings, which are open to the public, will resume Thursday (Room 1075 at District headquarters), and are expected to continue into November.