putting the cart before the horse

Back in the day when there were carts and horses, people understood
what was meant by "putting the cart before the horse". If we don't
have our priorities straight, it ain't going to run. We voters are
constantly being suckered by our elected officials, telling us we can
or cannot do this or that because we have laws governing it. State
budgets are that sort of thing. Let's pull our heads out of the
confusion and sit back and decide our priorities. Do we want our
children to be educated and ready to take their place in advancing our
nation's well being? Or do we want well paid public officials, with
posh offices and lots of subordinates running around? Do we want
decent school buildings and small class rooms with teachers who can
afford to live in the districts where they work? Do we want roads
that have no pot holes and bridges that do not fall down? Or do we
want conference rooms in fancy resorts where our elected officials
plop their plush bodies down to fret and stew over why the sky is
falling in.
I believe that we have been snookered. We have been charmed into
believing that we, the voters, must obey the demands of our elected
officials.
Did someone say they don't believe it? Then tell me why we are
getting less for our tax dollars, while our public officials are doing
just fine? Here's a thought out of the box, tell our elected
officials that they will present us with a budget that pays for our
priorities. When they get it figured out, they can pay themselves for
a job well done. After the fact. Always after the job is done.
If the priorities are more numerous than the dollars in the budget,
let the voters decide which can be dropped or under funded.
But above all, put the voters back in the drivers seat. Put the horse
back ahead of the cart.

Carl Jarvis
On 9/13/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > How the GOP and Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed
> Pennsylvania Schools Dry
> ________________________________________
> How the GOP and Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed
> Pennsylvania Schools Dry
> By Jeff Bryant [1] / Salon [2]
> September 11, 2015
> As schools across Pennsylvania open their doors for the new school year,
> there's one district in the state where teachers will be hard at work even
> though they're not likely to get paid.
> The teachers are actually already on the job, having reported for work a
> week early as originally expected. But when the district's administration
> announced it could not meet a scheduled payroll on September 9, a week
> after
> classes start, the teachers - along with janitors, nurses, and other school
> personnel - held an impromptu meeting and voted to temporarily forego pay.
> The teachers are employed by the financially strapped school district of
> Chester Upland, located about 20 miles west of Philadelphia. Years of
> deliberate under-funding by the state, coupled with policies that favor the
> rapid expansion of publicly funded but privately operated charter schools,
> are bleeding the district. The dedication of committed and caring educators
> seems to be one of the few forces binding the shattered school community
> together.
> "We aren't broken," says Dariah Jackson, one of the teachers working for no
> pay tells Salon in a phone interview. Jackson, a Special Education and Life
> Skills Support teacher in grades 3-5, says, "I'm in my classroom, as are my
> colleagues, ready for the students to walk through the door next week."
> When asked how long is "temporary" in their resolve to work with no pay,
> Jackson says, "No one has set a time limit for now. We have to be here for
> our students. They need a place to go."
> But while Jackson and her colleagues show their determination to meet the
> needs of the students, there are forces acting in Chester Upland, and
> across
> Pennsylvania, focused on anything but that.
> School Breakage 101
> "Chester Upland is broke," explains Wythe Keever, spokesman for the
> Pennsylvania State Education Association. "Actually, they're a lot worse
> off
> than broke," he tells Salon. "They have an operating budget deficit in
> excess of $20 million that is expected by the end of the year to go beyond
> $40 million."
> "The school district is in danger of not existing," says Jeff Sheridan, a
> spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, in a report by Lyndsey Layton of
> The Washington Post [3].
> What's not helping for sure is an ongoing imbroglio over Pennsylvania's
> state budget. Legislators and Wolf have been unable to come to an agreement
> on the state's fiscal responsibilities, delaying budget completion for over
> 50 days. What's the fight about? Education funding [4]. The newly elected
> Democratic governor insists on increasing school funding and correcting
> unfair distributions - particularly those that go to online "cyber" charter
> schools [5] - while an entrenched Republican legislature continues to
> exhibit reluctance to adequately and fairly fund the state's schools.
> So school districts across the state are having to dig deeper into their
> own
> local resources to fund the reopening of schools. Districts like Chester
> Upland, that are heavily reliant on state aid, simply don't have coffers to
> dig into.
> But there are also long term "structural problems," explains Keever.
> As Layton recounts in her report, "Chester Upland's financial problems date
> to 1994, when it was first classified by the state as being in 'economic
> distress." The district has been in and out of state receivership since.
> "A similar financial collapse occurred in the district in 2012," Layton
> continues, "and the teachers also agreed to work without pay then. In the
> end, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the district, and lawmakers
> arranged a bailout, so that employees' paychecks were just a couple of days
> late."
> One of those "structural problems" is that Chester Upland is a school
> district serving a lot of families living in poverty. According to
> Wikipedia
> [6], in 2009, "the District residents' per capita income [7] was $13,521,
> while the median family income [8] was $30,900." Both figures are way below
> national and Pennsylvania state averages. Only 10 percent of the people who
> live in the school district have college degrees.
> Schools that serve communities that are so disproportionally poor are bound
> to be financially at risk in a system such as America's where the financial
> base for schools starts with local property taxes. But the state of
> Pennsylvania compounds the problem by deliberately under-funding the
> schools
> in the state that are most in need of money.
> As Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker [9] explains on his blog, "the
> Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school
> finance systems in the country [10]," giving less state and local revenue
> to
> the state's highest needs schools like Chester Upland.
> A national report released by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this
> year spotlighted the Quaker State as being among the worst of the 23 states
> across the country that distribute more education money to richer school
> districts and less money to those with the least means.
> As The Post's Emma Brown [11] wrote when the report was released,
> "Pennsylvania's state and local per-pupil spending in its poorest school
> districts is 33 percent lower than per-pupil spending in the state's most
> affluent school districts, the highest differential in the country."
> Charters Sap the District
> Charter schools add to the financial burden placed on resource-starved
> schools like those in Chester Upland.
> According to a local news outlet [12], teachers in Chester Upland "say the
> district's ongoing financial problems are because of the state's funding
> formula, specifically what the school district is required to pay to
> charter
> schools. The school district receives about $16,000 for children with
> learning disabilities from the state, but it is required to give the
> charter
> schools $40,000 for each student listed with a learning disability."
> "It's absolutely an unsustainable expense," Keever explains. The Chester
> Upland district now pays about $64 million, over half of its budget, to the
> charter schools - more money than what the school district gets from the
> state.
> Professor Baker, a school finance expert, says this method of financing
> special education in charter schools "is poorly conceived, creates perverse
> incentives for charter school operators, and inappropriately drains
> disproportionate resources from sending districts."
> Further, as Keever explains, "When students and funding are drawn away from
> a traditional public school, the traditional public school can't reduce
> their overhead because they have fixed costs. They have to operate the
> buses
> and feed the students and pay the light and water bill. Charter schools
> taking away a few students from different grade levels doesn't produce any
> savings. You still have to staff the same number of classrooms."
> A Special Education Scam
> To be fair, charter schools, which have been expanding over the years, now
> educate about half of the students in the district. But there are good
> reasons to believe the charter schools have turned these payments for
> special education services into a profit center.
> "The charter schools are submitting bills for students with special
> learning
> that are $10,000-17,000 more than what neighboring school districts are
> paying.," Keever points out.
> Indeed, Valerie Strauss [13], on her blog at The Washington Post, points to
> a report from Chester Upland's state-appointed receiver, Francis Barnes,
> who
> documents how the charter schools seem to mine the local district of
> low-cost special education students while leaving the traditional schools
> with students who have the most severe disabilities. He points to data
> showing the district's charter schools tends to serve high proportions of
> low-cost special needs students - those with speech and hearing
> disabilities, for instance - while serving low proportions of high-cost
> special needs students, such as those with autism or emotional problems.
> "Payments to the charters are absolutely more than what it costs to educate
> these children," Keever contends. "Many of the children designated special
> needs in the charters are actually receiving low-cost services that the
> charters are billing at $40,000."
> Charter Fraud Is Rampant in Pennsylvania
> It's not at all hard to believe there might be something fishy about a
> charter school operation in Pennsylvania. Last year, a report [14], "Fraud
> and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools," found
> charter school officials in the state have defrauded at least $30 million
> intended for school children since 1997.
> The report found an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds
> to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was
> caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits
> associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more
> than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber
> school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a
> Florida condominium, and an airplane.
> Because Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter
> schools, the $30 million documented in this study is likely the minimum
> possible amount.
> Another report revealed how Pennsylvania charters across the state had
> gamed
> the system for special education funding. The report found in 2013, public
> schools paid out $350 million for charters to educate special education
> students but the charter schools spent only $150 million on special
> education services, resulting in a $200 million profit [15] for the charter
> industry.
> None of this evidence of financial fraud has been uncovered by state
> agencies overseeing the charter schools. The evidence has been brought to
> light by whistleblowers, media coverage, and watchdog groups - not by state
> auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing
> fraud. And charter schools, which self-report their enrollments to the
> district and the department of education, can operate for years without
> fear
> of an audit.
> Charter Operators Get Mansions While Teachers Can't Get Paid
> What needs to change, at the very least, is the funding formula for how
> charter schools are paid for special education services.
> The Pennsylvania State Education Association has presented recommendations
> [16] for changing the state's charter school law, that include fixing the
> special education inequities, enforcing some financial transparency on
> charters, and capping charter school undesignated fund balances.
> To his credit, Governor Wolf has taken steps [17] to correct the funding
> formulas for special education in a way that would help cash strapped
> districts like Chester Upland. The charter school industry, unfortunately,
> has fought him at every step, and Wolf's latest proposal was rejected by a
> Pennsylvania district court [18].
> In Chester Upland specifically, "The charter schools have accumulated
> massive fund balances," due to gaming the state's charter funding system,
> Keever contends. He points to one charter in particular, Chester Community
> Charter School.
> Chester Community Charter, the largest charter in the district, is managed
> by a company owned by Vahan Gureghian. Gureghian, an attorney and
> prodigious
> donor to Republican politicians [19], recently put on the market his Palm
> Beach, Florida mansion listed at $84.5 million. The "French inspired" house
> [20] features 35,000 feet of living space, a bowling alley, and a moat.
> "It's difficult to pin down how much the Chester Community Charter School
> and others have profited," Keever admits. "The charters have refused to
> honor right to know requests under the state's open records laws, so
> there's
> little to no way to document how much the management company that runs that
> charter is actually taking out."
> While the full extent of charter school profiting remains a question,
> nevertheless, Gureghian and his expansive Palm Beach estate strike quite a
> sharp contrast to Dariah Jackson and the rest of the Chester Upland
> educators willing to work for no pay.
> Speaking from her small classroom, in a beleaguered school, in a
> long-struggling community, Jackson remains defiant. "I want everyone to
> know
> we care about our students. The paycheck is not what's foremost in our
> minds.
> "Now we just need our elected officials to act."
> For the students' sake, let's hope they do.
> Jeff Bryant is an associate fellow at Campaign for America's Future and the
> editor of the Education Opportunity Network website. Prior to joining
> OurFuture.org he was one of the principal writers for Open Left.
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [21]
> [22]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/education/how-gop-and-education-privatizers-are-usin
> g-charters-bleed-pennsylvania-schools-dry
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeff-bryant
> [2] http://www.salon.com
> [3]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-a-bankrupt-pa-school-distri
> ct-teachers-plan-to-work-for-free/2015/08/28/0332898e-4dba-11e5-84df-923b3ef
> 1a64b_story.html
> [4]
> http://www.ydr.com/politics/ci_28664643/wolf-lawmakers-resume-talks-gop-offe
> r-school-aid
> [5] http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/05/pa-cyber-whine-party.html
> [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Upland_School_District
> [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_income
> [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_family_income
> [9]
> http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/the-commonwealth-triple-scr
> ew-special-education-funding-charter-school-payments-in-pennsylvania/
> [10] http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/
> [11]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-23-states-richer-s
> chool-districts-get-more-local-funding-than-poorer-districts/
> [12]
> http://6abc.com/education/chester-upland-teachers-agree-to-work-without-pay/
> 960004/
> [13]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/08/31/is-this-any-w
> ay-to-run-a-school-district/
> [14]
> http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/charter-schools-PA-Fraud.pdf
> [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRw5oO02KpA
> [16]
> http://www.psea.org/uploadedFiles/LegislationAndPolitics/Solutions_That_Work
> /STW-UpdatePACharterSchoolLaw.pdf
> [17]
> http://articles.philly.com/2015-08-24/news/65773715_1_public-charter-schools
> -robert-fayfich-pennsylvania-coalition
> [18]
> http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20150826_Judge_rejects_Wolf_challeng
> e_to_charter_funding.html#FaBkHDktlZRAO83z.99
> [19] http://powerplayers-pa.herokuapp.com/donors/vahan-gureghian-i/
> [20]
> http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/news/local/north-end-mansion-listed-a
> t-845m/nkhyf/
> [21] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on How the GOP and
> Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed Pennsylvania Schools Dry
> [22] http://www.alternet.org/
> [23] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > How the GOP and Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed
> Pennsylvania Schools Dry
>
> How the GOP and Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed
> Pennsylvania Schools Dry
> By Jeff Bryant [1] / Salon [2]
> September 11, 2015
> As schools across Pennsylvania open their doors for the new school year,
> there's one district in the state where teachers will be hard at work even
> though they're not likely to get paid.
> The teachers are actually already on the job, having reported for work a
> week early as originally expected. But when the district's administration
> announced it could not meet a scheduled payroll on September 9, a week
> after
> classes start, the teachers - along with janitors, nurses, and other school
> personnel - held an impromptu meeting and voted to temporarily forego pay.
> The teachers are employed by the financially strapped school district of
> Chester Upland, located about 20 miles west of Philadelphia. Years of
> deliberate under-funding by the state, coupled with policies that favor the
> rapid expansion of publicly funded but privately operated charter schools,
> are bleeding the district. The dedication of committed and caring educators
> seems to be one of the few forces binding the shattered school community
> together.
> "We aren't broken," says Dariah Jackson, one of the teachers working for no
> pay tells Salon in a phone interview. Jackson, a Special Education and Life
> Skills Support teacher in grades 3-5, says, "I'm in my classroom, as are my
> colleagues, ready for the students to walk through the door next week."
> When asked how long is "temporary" in their resolve to work with no pay,
> Jackson says, "No one has set a time limit for now. We have to be here for
> our students. They need a place to go."
> But while Jackson and her colleagues show their determination to meet the
> needs of the students, there are forces acting in Chester Upland, and
> across
> Pennsylvania, focused on anything but that.
> School Breakage 101
> "Chester Upland is broke," explains Wythe Keever, spokesman for the
> Pennsylvania State Education Association. "Actually, they're a lot worse
> off
> than broke," he tells Salon. "They have an operating budget deficit in
> excess of $20 million that is expected by the end of the year to go beyond
> $40 million."
> "The school district is in danger of not existing," says Jeff Sheridan, a
> spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, in a report by Lyndsey Layton of
> The Washington Post [3].
> What's not helping for sure is an ongoing imbroglio over Pennsylvania's
> state budget. Legislators and Wolf have been unable to come to an agreement
> on the state's fiscal responsibilities, delaying budget completion for over
> 50 days. What's the fight about? Education funding [4]. The newly elected
> Democratic governor insists on increasing school funding and correcting
> unfair distributions - particularly those that go to online "cyber" charter
> schools [5] - while an entrenched Republican legislature continues to
> exhibit reluctance to adequately and fairly fund the state's schools.
> So school districts across the state are having to dig deeper into their
> own
> local resources to fund the reopening of schools. Districts like Chester
> Upland, that are heavily reliant on state aid, simply don't have coffers to
> dig into.
> But there are also long term "structural problems," explains Keever.
> As Layton recounts in her report, "Chester Upland's financial problems date
> to 1994, when it was first classified by the state as being in 'economic
> distress." The district has been in and out of state receivership since.
> "A similar financial collapse occurred in the district in 2012," Layton
> continues, "and the teachers also agreed to work without pay then. In the
> end, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the district, and lawmakers
> arranged a bailout, so that employees' paychecks were just a couple of days
> late."
> One of those "structural problems" is that Chester Upland is a school
> district serving a lot of families living in poverty. According to
> Wikipedia
> [6], in 2009, "the District residents' per capita income [7] was $13,521,
> while the median family income [8] was $30,900." Both figures are way below
> national and Pennsylvania state averages. Only 10 percent of the people who
> live in the school district have college degrees.
> Schools that serve communities that are so disproportionally poor are bound
> to be financially at risk in a system such as America's where the financial
> base for schools starts with local property taxes. But the state of
> Pennsylvania compounds the problem by deliberately under-funding the
> schools
> in the state that are most in need of money.
> As Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker [9] explains on his blog, "the
> Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school
> finance systems in the country [10]," giving less state and local revenue
> to
> the state's highest needs schools like Chester Upland.
> A national report released by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this
> year spotlighted the Quaker State as being among the worst of the 23 states
> across the country that distribute more education money to richer school
> districts and less money to those with the least means.
> As The Post's Emma Brown [11] wrote when the report was released,
> "Pennsylvania's state and local per-pupil spending in its poorest school
> districts is 33 percent lower than per-pupil spending in the state's most
> affluent school districts, the highest differential in the country."
> Charters Sap the District
> Charter schools add to the financial burden placed on resource-starved
> schools like those in Chester Upland.
> According to a local news outlet [12], teachers in Chester Upland "say the
> district's ongoing financial problems are because of the state's funding
> formula, specifically what the school district is required to pay to
> charter
> schools. The school district receives about $16,000 for children with
> learning disabilities from the state, but it is required to give the
> charter
> schools $40,000 for each student listed with a learning disability."
> "It's absolutely an unsustainable expense," Keever explains. The Chester
> Upland district now pays about $64 million, over half of its budget, to the
> charter schools - more money than what the school district gets from the
> state.
> Professor Baker, a school finance expert, says this method of financing
> special education in charter schools "is poorly conceived, creates perverse
> incentives for charter school operators, and inappropriately drains
> disproportionate resources from sending districts."
> Further, as Keever explains, "When students and funding are drawn away from
> a traditional public school, the traditional public school can't reduce
> their overhead because they have fixed costs. They have to operate the
> buses
> and feed the students and pay the light and water bill. Charter schools
> taking away a few students from different grade levels doesn't produce any
> savings. You still have to staff the same number of classrooms."
> A Special Education Scam
> To be fair, charter schools, which have been expanding over the years, now
> educate about half of the students in the district. But there are good
> reasons to believe the charter schools have turned these payments for
> special education services into a profit center.
> "The charter schools are submitting bills for students with special
> learning
> that are $10,000-17,000 more than what neighboring school districts are
> paying.," Keever points out.
> Indeed, Valerie Strauss [13], on her blog at The Washington Post, points to
> a report from Chester Upland's state-appointed receiver, Francis Barnes,
> who
> documents how the charter schools seem to mine the local district of
> low-cost special education students while leaving the traditional schools
> with students who have the most severe disabilities. He points to data
> showing the district's charter schools tends to serve high proportions of
> low-cost special needs students - those with speech and hearing
> disabilities, for instance - while serving low proportions of high-cost
> special needs students, such as those with autism or emotional problems.
> "Payments to the charters are absolutely more than what it costs to educate
> these children," Keever contends. "Many of the children designated special
> needs in the charters are actually receiving low-cost services that the
> charters are billing at $40,000."
> Charter Fraud Is Rampant in Pennsylvania
> It's not at all hard to believe there might be something fishy about a
> charter school operation in Pennsylvania. Last year, a report [14], "Fraud
> and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools," found
> charter school officials in the state have defrauded at least $30 million
> intended for school children since 1997.
> The report found an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds
> to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was
> caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits
> associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more
> than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber
> school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a
> Florida condominium, and an airplane.
> Because Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter
> schools, the $30 million documented in this study is likely the minimum
> possible amount.
> Another report revealed how Pennsylvania charters across the state had
> gamed
> the system for special education funding. The report found in 2013, public
> schools paid out $350 million for charters to educate special education
> students but the charter schools spent only $150 million on special
> education services, resulting in a $200 million profit [15] for the charter
> industry.
> None of this evidence of financial fraud has been uncovered by state
> agencies overseeing the charter schools. The evidence has been brought to
> light by whistleblowers, media coverage, and watchdog groups - not by state
> auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing
> fraud. And charter schools, which self-report their enrollments to the
> district and the department of education, can operate for years without
> fear
> of an audit.
> Charter Operators Get Mansions While Teachers Can't Get Paid
> What needs to change, at the very least, is the funding formula for how
> charter schools are paid for special education services.
> The Pennsylvania State Education Association has presented recommendations
> [16] for changing the state's charter school law, that include fixing the
> special education inequities, enforcing some financial transparency on
> charters, and capping charter school undesignated fund balances.
> To his credit, Governor Wolf has taken steps [17] to correct the funding
> formulas for special education in a way that would help cash strapped
> districts like Chester Upland. The charter school industry, unfortunately,
> has fought him at every step, and Wolf's latest proposal was rejected by a
> Pennsylvania district court [18].
> In Chester Upland specifically, "The charter schools have accumulated
> massive fund balances," due to gaming the state's charter funding system,
> Keever contends. He points to one charter in particular, Chester Community
> Charter School.
> Chester Community Charter, the largest charter in the district, is managed
> by a company owned by Vahan Gureghian. Gureghian, an attorney and
> prodigious
> donor to Republican politicians [19], recently put on the market his Palm
> Beach, Florida mansion listed at $84.5 million. The "French inspired" house
> [20] features 35,000 feet of living space, a bowling alley, and a moat.
> "It's difficult to pin down how much the Chester Community Charter School
> and others have profited," Keever admits. "The charters have refused to
> honor right to know requests under the state's open records laws, so
> there's
> little to no way to document how much the management company that runs that
> charter is actually taking out."
> While the full extent of charter school profiting remains a question,
> nevertheless, Gureghian and his expansive Palm Beach estate strike quite a
> sharp contrast to Dariah Jackson and the rest of the Chester Upland
> educators willing to work for no pay.
> Speaking from her small classroom, in a beleaguered school, in a
> long-struggling community, Jackson remains defiant. "I want everyone to
> know
> we care about our students. The paycheck is not what's foremost in our
> minds.
> "Now we just need our elected officials to act."
> For the students' sake, let's hope they do.
> Jeff Bryant is an associate fellow at Campaign for America's Future and the
> editor of the Education Opportunity Network website. Prior to joining
> OurFuture.org he was one of the principal writers for Open Left.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [21]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[22]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/education/how-gop-and-education-privatizers-are-usin
> g-charters-bleed-pennsylvania-schools-dry
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeff-bryant
> [2] http://www.salon.com
> [3]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-a-bankrupt-pa-school-distri
> ct-teachers-plan-to-work-for-free/2015/08/28/0332898e-4dba-11e5-84df-923b3ef
> 1a64b_story.html
> [4]
> http://www.ydr.com/politics/ci_28664643/wolf-lawmakers-resume-talks-gop-offe
> r-school-aid
> [5] http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/05/pa-cyber-whine-party.html
> [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Upland_School_District
> [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_income
> [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_family_income
> [9]
> http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/the-commonwealth-triple-scr
> ew-special-education-funding-charter-school-payments-in-pennsylvania/
> [10] http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/
> [11]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-23-states-richer-s
> chool-districts-get-more-local-funding-than-poorer-districts/
> [12]
> http://6abc.com/education/chester-upland-teachers-agree-to-work-without-pay/
> 960004/
> [13]
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/08/31/is-this-any-w
> ay-to-run-a-school-district/
> [14]
> http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/charter-schools-PA-Fraud.pdf
> [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRw5oO02KpA
> [16]
> http://www.psea.org/uploadedFiles/LegislationAndPolitics/Solutions_That_Work
> /STW-UpdatePACharterSchoolLaw.pdf
> [17]
> http://articles.philly.com/2015-08-24/news/65773715_1_public-charter-schools
> -robert-fayfich-pennsylvania-coalition
> [18]
> http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20150826_Judge_rejects_Wolf_challeng
> e_to_charter_funding.html#FaBkHDktlZRAO83z.99
> [19] http://powerplayers-pa.herokuapp.com/donors/vahan-gureghian-i/
> [20]
> http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/news/local/north-end-mansion-listed-a
> t-845m/nkhyf/
> [21] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on How the GOP and
> Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed Pennsylvania Schools Dry
> [22] http://www.alternet.org/
> [23] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>