The Number That Changed How I Think About Philadelphia Public Education

by Malik Boyd, Director of Advocacy Communications, PCE

Before I joined PCE, I thought I understood Philly's education landscape. I didn't.

I've spent most of my professional life telling the stories about the city I love, Philadelphia: its neighborhoods, its institutions, its culture, its politics. I thought I had a reasonably complete picture of how this city works, including its public schools.

Then someone told me the number:

65,000 thousand.

That's how many Philadelphia students attend public charter schools. One in every four children enrolled in public school in this city. I had no idea the scale was that significant, and I'm someone whose job is understanding both audience and impact.

So I started asking myself: why don't more Philadelphians know this? Part of the answer is that the education debate in Philadelphia has been framed around conflict rather than fact. You're either pro-charter or anti-charter. When a debate gets reduced to a binary, the numbers get lost in the noise.

What A Philadelphia Charter School Actually Is

Philadelphia has over 80 public brick-and-mortar charter schools. Every one of them is free to attend. Every one of them is publicly funded. Every one is open to any Philadelphia student: not a test, not a fee. Many public charters conduct lotteries when demand exceeds capacity.

Charter schools are not private schools. They are not selective academies. They operate under a performance contract called a charter, that defines what the school must accomplish to remain open. If a charter school fails academically, financially, or in governance, its contract can be revoked. That accountability mechanism is real. It has been used.

Why This Matters

My job at PCE is to make sure Philadelphia's charter school families have a voice in public debate that matches their actual numbers. That the facts about what charter schools are:  public, free, accountable, are as widely understood as the mischaracterizations of what they are not.

Over the next several weeks, we'll be publishing a series that builds from this foundation. We'll cover what charter schools are, how they're overseen, why that oversight has a documented structural problem, and what the solution looks like.

We start with 65,000.

We'll end with what those 65,000 students deserve.

—

Malik Boyd is the Director of Advocacy Communications of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence (PCE), representing more than 80 public brick-and-mortar charter schools that serve nearly 65,000 students, almost 40 percent of Philadelphia’s public school population.