State Sen. Jim Brewster unveiled a cluster of proposed overhauls this month centered on addressing “transparency, fiscal solvency and accountability issues” in charter schools.

But with Pennsylvania’s General Assembly wrapping up its work for this session, his spokesman said the proposals won’t show up in bill form until the Legislature reconvenes in 2017 — the 20th anniversary of the state’s charter school law that practically everyone with a stake in the matter agrees needs changing.

Mr. Brewster, D-McKeesport, and three members of the Senate Democratic policy committee heard testimony from charter schools executives, traditional school district representatives and state officials on the topic at a hearing Oct. 13 in Monroeville. Mr. Brewster left little doubt about his position on Pennsylvania’s public schools run by private entities.

“If I said to you, you may be the cause of the failure and eventual closing down of 15 school districts, how would you feel about that?” he asked one charter school CEO.

More than 150 brick-and-mortar charter schools, nearly half in Philadelphia, enroll 128,000 students across the state. Fourteen cyber charters operate in Pennsylvania. None of the schools have elected school boards and only some have teachers unions.

The hearing came a week after Mr. Brewster released the 10 proposals on his website, ranging from requiring local school boards to co-approve financing agreements on charter building projects over $1 million to halting the approval of new cyber charters for what he described as poor test scores. He has made similar proposals before. In 2013, he introduced four bills, which stalled in the Senate Education Committee.

Some of the new ones were informed by the recent findings of Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, who has deemed Pennsylvania’s the worst charter school law in the country and has called for the entities running charter schools to fall under the state open records law. In August, the Democratic fiscal watchdog who is seeking re-election next month, said his office found ties between some charter schools and their property owners that could contradict state guidelines that say buildings owned by a charter school are ineligible for lease reimbursement.

Both traditional districts and charter schools generally agree the charter school law was aimed at paving the way for innovative schools that could share best practices — a concept that both sides said hasn’t happened consistently. Charter advocates maintain that the schools were designed to address inequity in education, too.

“Charter public schools must add value and contribute to a menu of quality choices for our youth and their families, especially those who are unable to afford living in a more affluent and wealthy community where there appears to be a correlation between educational quality and students achievement,” said Ron Sofo, City Charter High School’s CEO. “Why do we become concerned when less economically advantaged families exercise choice when a significant portion of our school going population has the means to make these types of choices every day?”

Or, as Anthony Pirrello, CEO of Montessori Regional Charter School in Erie, Pa., put it: With charters, “ZIP code doesn’t doom your life like it does now in traditional districts.”

Traditional school district leaders at the hearing said they’re hemorrhaging money to charter schools each year. 

In his prepared remarks, Woodland Hills superintendent Alan Johnson said charter school operators in Pittsburgh, Penn Hills, Clairton, McKees Rocks and elsewhere “are exploiting white ‘fright’ and the public’s unfortunate perception of urban schools as blackboard jungles.

“In the 21st century, schools should work toward building bridges between cultures and not using this divide as a recruitment tool,” he said.

Clairton’s school board president, Richard P. Livingston, outlined a litany of problems in his testimony, saying, among other things, the cost of charter schools has caused the district to raise taxes three times in the past decade and that Clairton has no legal standing to oppose charters in surrounding districts that may pull from its student body.

“Both charter and traditional schools compete for money and students,” he said.

In a sometimes tense exchange, Mr. Brewster volleyed with the charter school CEOs over their motivation.

“I don’t want to assume this, but the principals of your nonprofit companies, they got into this business to make money, correct?” he said.

When the CEOs protested, he asked, “We’re educating kids out of the goodness of our hearts?”

“Any charter school that’s run by a management company that runs that charter school for profit, you should create a law that that can’t happen,” Mr. Sofo told him.

No representatives from cyber charter schools were among those testifying. Jeremy Resnick, who oversees the 11 Propel charter schools that enroll 3,700 students in Allegheny County, called for a separate statute that applies to cyber charters that he said many believe exists because of a loophole in the original law.

Molly Born: mborn@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1944 or on Twitter @molly_born.

First Published: October 24, 2016, 4:00 a.m.