Ohio House Takes My Advice and Moves Ball Forward on Charter Accountability

State Rep. Robert Cupp, R-Lima

It's not often that I can say that one of my ideas was adopted by the Ohio House of Representatives. I tend to be the wrong party for such occurrences. So when it does happen, I have to point it out with some pride and gratitude.

In the House version of the biennial budget (House Bill 49), House Republicans inserted a subtle, but important provision in the state's new charter school sponsor evaluation system that will result in, I believe, more accurate assessments of how sponsors do their jobs.

(For those of you who don't know, sponsors are typically non-profits, schools or other entities that oversee charter schools' operations. It has traditionally been sponsors who have fallen asleep at the switch as Ohio's charter schools became a national laughingstock for performance and accountability.)

The current evaluation system says that sponsors will be graded based on three elements: how their schools perform academically, how well they adhere to state operational guidelines and how well they adhere to national standards, as developed by the charter industry. They receive a rating of "exemplary", "effective", "ineffective" or "poor". If they are at the high end of the spectrum, they have more freedom to open new charters. If they're at the low end, they could be shut down.

he problem has been that sponsors that performed really poorly on academics could still receive relatively high ratings as long as they dotted their i's and crossed their t's on the more bureaucratic measures. Likewise, sponsors with really high academic ratings were classified as ineffective because they didn't dot i's and cross t's as effectively.

My thought, as I've said in multiple forums since the sponsor evaluation system was adopted several years ago, was we should weight academics more than the other two sections. And if the sponsor fails to do well on the bureaucratic measures, it shouldn't knock them all the way down the scale if they're doing stellar academic work.

Under the House version, which was put forward by House Finance Primary and Secondary Education Subcommittee Chairman Robert Cupp, R-Lima, (who is chair of the same subcommittee I chaired in 2009) charter sponsors will no longer automatically receive bad ratings if they don't dot i's or cross t's. And the sponsors' schools' academic performance will now count 60 percent more than the other two sections.

What does this mean? It means the sponsors that currently have A grades for academics (all of these are school districts and one Educational Service Center, by the way) will no longer be deemed "ineffective" because they don't dot their i's effectively. They'll be considered "effective" or "exemplary" because the students over whom they have authority are doing well.

Likewise, sponsors that are currently deemed effective because they dot i's really well but receive Ds on their academic ratings will be less highly rated.

This will encourage sponsors to take more care with their schools' academic performance -- the heart of their mission -- because it will matter a lot more to their rating. So in that way, the House budget moves the ball forward on charter school accountability, even by a little bit. And for that, I, and the parents and students of Ohio, am and are grateful.