Philadelphia school board again denies Global Leadership high school charter application

The Philadelphia school board last week again rejected a proposed charter high school affiliated with two existing charters in West Philadelphia — a relationship that board members said wasn’t adequately acknowledged by the charter’s backers.

But not everyone agreed with the denial of Global Leadership Academy International Charter High School, which said it wasn’t formally tied to two other Global Leadership schools and shouldn’t be evaluated on their merits, though it pledged to follow their model.

Board member Lisa Salley said the school district’s evaluation of the charter’s application reflected bias.

“Something about the process here is very alarming,” Salley said before the board voted Thursday, 7-2, to deny the application for the new charter, which sought approval to open this fall on North Broad Street and eventually enroll 600 students.

Salley, who along with board member Cecilia Thompson voted no, said there appeared to be “lots of personal bias, versus figuring out what’s best for the children.”

Other board members pushed back on the comments, which came as the district faces allegations that it has discriminated against Black-led charters.

“I think we have to be very careful when we use terms like bias,” said Sarah-Ashley Andrews, adding that “we need to call a spade a spade and say this is a lack of transparency.”

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently managed, educate about one-third of public school students in the city. The school district is charged with evaluating charters; a coalition of Black charter leaders has said their schools are disproportionately rejected or targeted for closure. An investigation commissioned by the school board into the claims is ongoing.

Naomi Johnson-Booker, the CEO of Global Leadership Academy Charter School — one of the two other Global Leadership schools — and a member of the African-American Charter Schools Coalition, said the district’s evaluation was unfair.

“Am I a threat to somebody?” Johnson-Booker, a founding member of the proposed high school, said in an interview Tuesday. She said she and others made clear that the high school was independent from Global Leadership Academy Charter School and Global Leadership Academy Charter School Southwest at Huey, both K-8 schools in West Philadelphia.

But district officials said the high school qualified as an existing charter operator, given its ties to the other Global Leadership schools: In addition to sharing the “Global Leadership” name, the proposed high school would rely on the educational model used at the existing charters, and planned to contract with Global Academies, a company that provides services to those two schools. The school would give admissions preference to students from the existing Global Leadership charters.

The “existing charter operator” section of the charter application “was tailor-made for them to highlight their successes and in some instances, to address their challenges,” Peng Chao, director of the district’s Charter Schools Office, told the school board. He said the failure to address it was “on the one hand curious, and on the other hand, concerning.” Some board members noted concerns about the academic performance of the existing Global Leadership charters.

Johnson-Booker, meanwhile, said the high school shouldn’t be assessed based on the K-8 schools.

“There is no relationship, other than a model that I have created that works for children,” said Johnson-Booker, a former school district administrator who took over Global Leadership Academy Charter School from another charter operator in 2006. In 2016, she took over the former district-run Samuel B. Huey Elementary School to become Global Leadership Academy Charter School Southwest at Huey.

“I’m not just somebody who fell off a mountain,” Johnson-Booker said.

While the high school had revised its application after it was first denied by the school board in February, it still didn’t fully complete the section regarding existing charter schools, according to Chao. He said the charter also didn’t supply a contract with Global Academies, the vendor that would be supplying services, and that was represented by the same law firm as the charter.

Johnson-Booker said Global Academies wasn’t a management company that would be running the high school but a vendor that answered to her. “I meet with them, I tell them what my needs are,” Johnson-Booker said, adding that the company “provides educational, operational, and financial services to anyone, not just to schools.”

Board member Julia Danzy, who voted against the proposed charter, said she approved of Global Leadership’s model — exposing children to the broader world, including through international travel.

But she said the school board would be demonstrating bias if it didn’t call out the charter for the omission in its application.

“At the end of the day, we don’t have two sets of children,” Danzy said. “We have Philadelphia’s children, who just happen to be attending different types of schools.”