Reply #174: some snippets [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

Charter executive pay: How much is too much?

The 10 charters up for renewal next month in Philadelphia are the first to be evaluated since new ground rules for executive compensation were put in place via amendments to the state’s charter law last summer. And a charter school association is encouraging schools to sign onto a new set of ethical standards.

But what level of compensation is appropriate for the top executives of charters remains a gray area.

Last year the Inquirer reported that one charter executive, Dorothy June Brown, was drawing salaries totaling more than $500,000 from three Philadelphia charters and a private school. Brown has stepped down from her position at Ad Prima Charter School, one of the charters now up for renewal. Before she left, she was earning $150,000 from that one school alone, for a reported 26-hour work week...


But two of these charter schools now pay CEO salaries of $190,000 or more, far higher than principals and regional superintendents in the School District. Until recently, one of these was being paid as a consultant through her management company, obscuring her actual earnings.

Nothing in the current crop of charters compares with last year’s Inquirer revelations of financial impropriety and nepotism at the Philadelphia Academy Charter School, where former CEOs Brien Gardiner and Kevin O’Shea were at one point earning annually $224,500 and $206,137 respectively, and hiring relatives at six-figure salaries.

http://www.thenotebook.org/april-2009/091206/charter-executive-pay-how-much-too-much



You want to cherry-pick, but it's very simple to do the same with charters. Quarter of a million dollar salaries for supers aren't *typical* of the public schools. You have a problem with a supers' salary then address *that* on its merits. It has nothing to do with public schools per se, & charterizing does *nothing* to address it.