How to Turn an Ineffective Charter Sponsor into a High Performing One: Make ECOT a Dropout School

In a little-noticed detail of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow's (ECOT) attempt to become a Dropout Recovery School, potentially the greatest beneficiary of the shift would be ECOT's sponsor -- the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West.

Here's how.

Under current law and the school's current configuration, the ESC of Lake Erie West is hammered on its sponsor evaluation grades because such a large percentage of the students it oversees come from ECOT. According to the Plain Dealer, "Poor grades, largely from the 15,000-student ECOT, dragged that ESC's rating down to 'ineffective.'"

ECOT and its allies tried to change the House Bill 2 provision that weighted enrollment during the evaluation because they wanted the 15,000 student school's grade to be counted just as heavily as a school with 60 or 100 students.

The legislature did not grant that request, so ECOT's poor grades have a tremendously negative impact on the ESC of Lake Erie West's ability to sponsor schools and collect their 3 percent sponsorship fee.

This put the ESC in a bind because as an "ineffective" rated sponsor, it had to improve its rating in three years or get shut down, yet if they cut ECOT loose, they would lose about $3 million in fees they currently collect -- a gravy train for the ESC.

Switching the school to a dropout recovery school solves the problem. Why? Because performance is so dreadful at dropout recovery schools, and state regulation so lax, that even ECOT's poor performance would grant them exceedingly high grades under the much more lenient dropout recovery accountability system.

So the weighted system that hurt the ESC when ECOT was getting Ds and Fs under the regular report card will not help the ESC because those Ds and Fs will turn into As under the more lenient system.

And all they need to do is change the school's designation.

For example, ECOT's graduation rate of 39.6 percent rates as a very low F on the regular state report card. However, under the dropout recovery report card, that 39.6 percent four-year graduation rate "exceeds standards", which means it will be graded on the sponsor report card the same as an A on the regular report card. The ESC will then have that "A" weighted by the 15,000 students in ECOT, making the A a kind of Mega-A.

So, not only does this let ECOT suddenly promote itself as receiving the highest grades possible by the state (even though there's no real improvement), but it allows the ESC to continue collecting millions all while having its sponsorship grade improve dramatically, potentially allowing it to collect millions more in sponsorship fees from additional schools.

But nothing has changed at ECOT.

Just because dropout recovery schools are worse performing than ECOT doesn't mean ECOT is high performing. It means that once again, ECOT is gaming a system its politically connected founder, William Lager, helped create with legislative blessing.

Those who suffer most are the students and parents at ECOT who will undoubtedly be roped into thinking ECOT is a high-performing school for their kids, even though it is a national embarrassment.

Only in Ohio's feebly regulated dropout recovery school system would ECOT be considered anything other than a failure.

Ohio Budget Keeps Progress on Charter Sponsor Evaluations.

Ohio's Charter School Sponsor Evaluation System has come a long way since it was introduced in 2012 as a way to track how sponsors' schools rate.

In Ohio, the state's more than 60 charter school sponsors are supposed to perform the oversight function reserved for school boards and the Ohio Department of Education on the traditional public school side. However, because Ohio is one of two states that let non-profits also sponsor schools, Ohio has been called the "Wild, Wild West" of charter school sponsoring ... by the national charter school sponsor advocacy group.

Ohio has recently tried to beef up its sponsor oversight. Now there are real consequences. If a sponsor doesn't score well, it can be stripped of its schools. If it does well, it can sponsor more and be freed of some regulation.

However, there has always been an issue with these ratings -- an issue I've discussed since House Bill 2 (which put the teeth into the ratings system) passed in 2015. There are three components to the sponsor evaluation system upon which sponsors are judged. They are:

1. A sponsor’s adherence to quality practices
2. Compliance with applicable laws and administrative rules
3. Academic performance of its schools

Under House Bill 2, all three components were supposed to be weighed equally -- a calculation I saw as problematic because if a sponsor failed academically, but received As on the other two more bureaucratic measures, then they would average out to a B-. So sponsors that have academically failing schools could keep sponsoring them, while sponsors that received As in academics but didn't score as well on the other two could be kept from sponsoring more schools.

In a perfect policy world, you'd want your sponsors with the best academic ratings continuing to sponsor schools while sponsors with the worst academic ratings would be stripped of those schools.

The Ohio Department of Education tried to mitigate this issue through rule making, saying that if a sponsor failed any of the categories it couldn't open new schools (a process that seemed to me to be illegal because state law was pretty clear you couldn't weigh any one score more than the other, but I digress). However, that resulted in the highest academically rated sponsors (which were almost invariably public school districts or public education service centers) not being allowed to open new schools because they didn't do as well on the bureaucratic measures.

So you had the bad policy outcome of sponsors with the highest rated schools not being allowed to sponsor more simply because they failed to follow the bureaucratic measures.

In the current budget, which has been passed by the Ohio Senate and is now in Conference Committee, there has been a change to the system so that sponsors that fail in bureaucratic measures but excel in academics aren't automatically stopped from sponsoring more charters. 

This is a positive step because now state policy won't stand in the way of sponsors with high performing schools from taking control of more schools because they don't fill out paperwork well.

However, there was another tweak that will weigh value added measures more heavily in the academic rating prong. What does that mean? 

Value added measures sound good in theory (giving schools credit from improving kids' scores rather than simply looking at raw scores), but there are well founded issues with value added scores too that make their evaluative use questionable in some cases, especially as smaller populations of students are used. 

In general, charter schools' value added grades on the state report card tend to be better than their proficiency scores. So will the change in academic scores show better performing schools among more sponsors? Probably. Will that mean that more sponsors will be able to keep sponsoring schools because their academic ratings will be artificially boosted by this tweak? We'll see.

As with most Ohio Charter School issues, the answer will likely be murky, complicated and need a fix in two years. 

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.

Education Chairman Andrew Brenner Stands Up for Failing E-School Giant

House Education Committee Chairman Andrew Brenner, R-Powell, is at it again. This time, he's proposing a change to Ohio's charter school evaluation system that would primarily benefit the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), the nation's largest K-12 school and among the nation's worst performing.

He's doing this by proposing to lessen the impact the number of students at a charter school plays on the academic performance rating of a charter school sponsor. Sponsors are supposed to oversee Ohio's privately run, publicly funded charter schools.

Under the state's sponsor evaluation system, sponsors are rated either Exemplary, Effective, Ineffective or Poor based on three criteria: How their schools perform, how well the sponsor adheres to state regulations and how well they adhere to industry-created operating standards.

Under the academic rating, schools' performance is weighted by how many kids are in the school. So if a sponsor is responsible for 20 schools, but 90 percent of the students are in one of them, that one school's academic rating counts more than the other 19. Brenner's change would mean all 20 are counted the same, even if 90 percent of the students are in 1 school.

ECOT's current sponsor is the Education Service Center of Lake Erie West, which has an F in academic performance, driven in large part by ECOT's horrific academic performance. Lake Erie West risks its ability to sponsor future charters, or even its current portfolio, if it continues with these poor ratings. Which means it has an incentive to dump ECOT, even though the sponsor receives more than $3 million a year just from state mandated fees it receives from ECOT.

But Brenner's proposal would soften ECOT's impact on Lake Erie West and likely keep the sponsor from potentially dropping ECOT.

This is the kind of stuff that made Ohio the national laughingstock it has been for years on charter school oversight. Add to this provision the revelation late last week that Ohio will have to cough up $22 million of the nation's highest $71 million it received to promote charter schools in the state because there are only 5 of 65 sponsors that perform well enough to qualify, and you start seeing why we still have so far to go.

I agree that the sponsor evaluation system needs tweaked. There are 8 Ohio charter school sponsors with As in academics. None rate above ineffective on the overall rating. Why? Because the state took liberties with the law governing the rating system. Under Ohio Revised Code Section 3314.016(B)(6), "[t]he department annually shall rate all entities that sponsor community schools as either "exemplary," "effective," "ineffective," or "poor," based on the components prescribed by division (B) of this section, where each component is weighted equally . A separate rating shall be given by the department for each component of the evaluation system."

However, weighting each grade equally means if you get an A and two Fs, you get a B, or effective, rating. The Ohio Department of Education wrote a rule stating that if a sponsor received an F in any category, they couldn't be rated above ineffective, which weighs one are more than another in violation of the law. Not saying what ODE did wasn't admirable, but it was, likely, illegal.

I would like to see the academic portion counted more heavily than the bureaucratic provisions. Parents don't care if sponsors dot i's and cross t's; they care if they actually make sure their children are being educated.

But the last thing we need is stuff like Brenner's provision to once again carve out Ohio's worst-performing schools for special protections. That's what makes Ohio's charter school experience so ridiculed nationally.

Our state's kids and parents deserve better.

Ohio Charter School Sponsor Ratings: School Districts have Highest Academic Achievement

While I have concerns with how the overall grades are being calculated in Ohio's new charter school sponsorship ratings, there's something really interesting happening in the area that is most important in my mind -- academic performance.

Try this: The only recipients of an A, B, or C in academic performance are school districts and Educational Service Centers. While it is also true that these public entities sponsor far fewer charter schools, the performance shouldn't be overlooked.

It appears that the more charters you sponsor, the worse your rating. Which isn't surprising, given Ohio's overall poor performing charter sector.

But it should be made clear that the 33 charter school sponsors that receive As, Bs and Cs on academic performance are all public entities.

Equally telling?

All 33 are rated ineffective or poor. Which means the state would say that the 33 highest rated charter school sponsors in academic performance would be banned from opening new charters, or in the case of the poor rated sponsors, would have to immediately shut down.

I'm not sure that how the accountability system should work.

Ohio Sponsorship Ratings: It Pays to be a Bureaucrat

The new Charter School Sponsor ratings are out, and there are a ton of poorly rated sponsors in Ohio -- a result nearly everyone foretold.

However, one of my concerns about the new system, which the historic House Bill 2 instituted, has come to fruition, though not as dramatically as I thought it might.

The new system called for sponsors to be graded in three, equally weighted areas: Adherence to quality practices, as outlined by industry standards, compliance with current law and rules, and academic performance. If they rated poorly, they wouldn't be allowed to sponsor schools anymore. If they were deemed "ineffective," they wouldn't be able to sponsor any new schools.

My concern had been that if the sponsor was great at dotting i's and crossing t's, they would be able to get away with lousy academic performance. If you get two As and an F, that's a B- average. So my concern was sponsors with poorly performing schools could remain as sponsors simply because they could jump through the other two bureaucratic hoops.

The new data indicate that is happening in some cases. And in others, sponsors with great academic performance are being deemed ineffective because they don't follow the bureaucratic process -- an equally concerning outcome in my view.

For example, the only 5 sponsors to receive an effective rating -- the highest given this year (there is an exemplary rating that no sponsor reached) -- all received Ds on their academic performance. But they made sure that they dotted their i's and crossed their t's. So they got the highest rating.

One of those -- St. Aloysius Orphanage -- has been banned from opening new schools in Cleveland because of their schools' awful academic track record there. It's not a good look for the state to say a sponsor is among the state's best while the state's second-largest district has banned it from operating. Again, if the academic portion were weighted 50% and the other two at 25% each, then that problem wouldn't be as great.

And on the other hand, there are 8 sponsors with As for academic rating -- 7 of these sponsors are school districts; one is an Educational Service Center. Yet all are rated as ineffective or poor, overall, because they aren't meeting the industry developed quality standards.

Does this system disproportionately harm school district sponsors? I think it's a question that needs asked. It certainly appears that charter sponsors aren't being rewarded enough for good academic performance -- which is, let's face it, the most important aspect of a sponsor's job -- or punished enough for poor academic performance.

But am I glad that sponsors are finally being rated? Yes. It's a positive step. But there are serious concerns with the current calculation that lead to incongruities that need addressed. I hope the state takes up these concerns and fixes them quickly.