Yesterday, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the front page revealed that officials at a recently defunct charter school, the Walter D. Palmer School, had invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination seventy-seven times during Philadelphia School District hearings on whether its charter should be revoked. This incident reflects what I believe are wider problems in the American educational system.
The District hearings resulted from questions over how the Palmer Charter School had been billing the Philadelphia School District. The School's charter, signed in 2005, allowed it to enroll and bill for 675 students, but it ended up enrolling over 1300 students, resulting in an overpayment of $1.5 million dollars over one fiscal year.
During the hearings, Walter D. Palmer School officials took the Fifth for even basic questions. Daria Hinson, the School's Director of Administration, took the Fifth when asked if the was the chief administrative officer. She also invoked her right against self-incrimination when asked about her 1990 conviction for fraud and whether she had informed the school about it before being hired. Richard Troutman, the Controller of the School, refused to answer questions about how the School managed its billing, himself invoking the Fifth Amendment.
As Walter D. Palmer himself, the founder of the School, noted, taking the Fifth should not be considered proof of guilt. Any judge who knows his law will tell you that. That said, the unwillingness to answer even basic questions makes one suspicious, particularly as the School has been under federal investigation for two years. However, rather than looking at just one incident, I think we should consider its implications for American public education as a whole.
Cases of possible corruption are a natural growth of the charter system and the move towards privatization of our nation's public schools. Although many charter school officials genuinely want to help young students, many are just in it for high pay. For example, Hinson earned $92,832 a year, while Troutman earned $97,500. Such high salaries are not isolated occurrences. As Diane Ravitch noted in The Nation, Eva Moskovitz, head of New York City's well-publicized Success Academy, makes over $500,000 a year. Charter schools are mainly an excuse to reap profit from our public education system, something easy to do when, as New York University's Pedro Noguera argued, also in The Nation, the charter school system suffers a notable lack of transparency.
Furthermore, charter schools have not lived up to their promise as being saviors of our public school system. As Ravitch argued, even the famous Success Academy was unable to get any of its graduates into New York's elite specialized schools and suffers a high teacher attrition rate. It also reportedly pushes out large numbers of students in order to inflate test scores. Most damningly, only twenty-nine percent of charter schools performed better than the average public school, while thirty-one percent performed worse.
Results like these do not justify the corruption that charter schools have spawned.