Feds Say Ohio Has No Plan to Improve Educationally Challenged Student Performance in Charter Schools

Today, I was looking at the Ohio Department of Education's (ODE) website and out of curiosity decided to check in on the state's implementation of that much-ballyhooed $71 million grant -- the nation's largest -- it received to grow high-performing charter schools here.

Later, it was discovered that David Hansen -- the husband of Ohio Gov. John Kasich's Chief of Staff -- who oversaw Ohio's charter school program rigged the application by hiding the performance of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow from the federal government, breaking state law.

That got Hansen resigned (fired), and was probably the moment that swung the pendulum against ECOT among Ohio's ruling political elite for the first time. That school year was when ODE started asking ECOT whether it actually had the kids it was charging taxpayers to educate.

But it also got Ohio in a pickle and twisting through about 2 years of haranguing with the U.S. Department of Education over the state's notoriously poor oversight of charter schools. Finally, last year, the state gave out a staggeringly low $1 million of that $71 million to just three of Ohio's about 400 charter schools.

Then the state just gave back $22 million of the $71 million, saying it just didn't have enough good oversight agencies running charter schools. A fine admission. But that was the case in 2015 when Hansen lied to the feds and said the state actually did have good oversight.

Well not much has happened since April 2017 in the media about this, so I decided to check up on the grant's progress. And it's not good. At all.

In its assessment of ODE done for the federal Department of Education last October, WestEd -- a consulting firm -- wrote this staggering paragraph:

"During interviews with the site visit team, ODE did not articulate a plan for the OCS (Ohio's Office of Community Schools) to disseminate best practices for recruiting, enrolling, serving, or retaining educationally-disadvantaged students."

What? This wasn't ODE forgetting to fill out a form. ODE officials sat down with evaluators and failed to articulate how educationally challenged kids would be helped by the federal grant. I mean, WTF? Isn't that the whole point of charter schools? I mean, that's the one I hear all the time.

Oh, but that's not all.

"At the time of the site visit, the grantee’s draft monitoring protocol did not include plans to ensure compliance with Federal and State laws related to educational equity, nondiscrimination, and access to public schools for educationally-disadvantaged students."

Seriously, WTF?

Is it too much to ask that Ohio have a plan to ensure that charter schools follow state and federal anti-discrimination laws? Or that they have a plan to make sure disadvantaged students get what they need in charter schools? 

One more:

"The draft RFA does not include plans for awarding subgrants based on innovativeness. Applicants are asked to explain the effectiveness of their proposed educational program, but not the program’s innovativeness. 

There are. No words.

Nor does there seem to be much independent oversight of this program now. The state had created an advisory committee made up of several experts meant to help the state navigate the program. According to the ODE website, "The Committee shall meet on at least semi-annual basis with the first meeting occurring thirty days prior to the department publishing its first request for application for the CSP Grant.  Thereafter the Committee shall meet in June and December of each year."

Yet, the only meeting minutes (which are quite scant, by the way. But I digress.) posted on the website are from March and April 2017. The last line of the April minutes says they were slated to meet in July 2017. No minutes from July, though. And no indication this group has met since April 2017.

Yet the state apparently took applications for grants for this coming school year. No word about whether they've been granted.

So after three years and constant communication with the feds, the $71 million charter grant Ohio got in 2015 amid much fanfare has been sent to 3 of Ohio's nearly 400 charter schools for $350,000 each.

And ODE still has no plan to ensure charters better serve at-risk kids or implement innovative learning, which was the whole point of the grant in the first place.

Look, I know federal grants are a pain. I know that David Hansen's lies to benefit Bill Lager's now disgraced ECOT put Ohio behind the 8 ball. But good Lord this is awful. And it speaks once again to just how far behind we are as a state on this issue and why the country still considers us the Wild, Wild West of charter schools.

We must do better. And we must demand better. This is embarrassing.

First $1 million of controversial $71 million federal charter school grant doled out.

After two years of fits and starts, the Ohio Department of Education has finally given out some of the $71 million federal charter school grant meant to grow high-quality charters in this state.

Unfortunately, as I have reported at Know Your Charter, nearly 1/3 of the federal money spent previously in Ohio went to charters that closed shortly after receiving he federal grant money, or never opened at all.

When Ohio surprisingly received the nation's largest single grant in 2015, it was a stunner because it came on the heels of several reports and scandalous actions that further cemented Ohio's status as a national laughingstock for charter school oversight and performance. It also didn't help that the official at ODE who filled out the application -- David Hansen, the husband of Gov. John Kasich's chief of staff -- resigned shortly after the money was awarded because he cooked the books to make Ohio's situation look better than it actually was.

As a result of this scandal, the feds held up Ohio's money for months as they and ODE went back and forth about the kinds of additional oversight needed to make sure Ohio actually sent the money to charters that weren't about to go under or would never open.

The three recipients of $350,000 each are brand new charters this school year: the Southwest Ohio Preparatory School in Cincinnati, South Columbus Preparatory Academy in Columbus and United Preparatory Academy East, also in Columbus.

The two preparatory academies are sponsored by St. Aloysius Orphanage, which Cleveland wants to ban from sponsoring schools in their city, but is considered an "effective" charter school sponsor by the state of Ohio because it has so many dropout recovery schools that get much more lenient report card ratings.

The other school is sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, whose VP of Policy and Advocacy, Chad Aldis, sits on the ODE advisory panel that oversees the implementation of the federal charter school funding.

Here's hoping this money helps turn the tide and starts growing Ohio's quality school options. But given Ohio's long history on this issue, I'll take Reagan's approach to the old Russian proverb: 

Trust, but verify.

House GOP Won't Move Voucher Expansion -- Trump's Signature Ed Policy Initiative

A House Subcommittee yesterday declined to move forward President Trump's proposal to invest $1 billion in private school vouchers -- a longtime policy darling of his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the only real Education Policy initiative President Trump has discussed. He announced the $20 billion plan last year at a then-poorly rated Cleveland Charter School.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies reported out a bill that did eliminate teacher support programs at the U.S. Department of Education -- a really bad outcome that will have long-term consequences for kids. But it did not head the nation down the road Ohio took 20 years ago.

Last school year, Ohio taxpayers sent about $568 million to private, mostly religious schools in the form of private school vouchers, busing, administrative cost reimbursements and auxiliary services. This despite the fact that several new studies show that kids who take vouchers do worse on achievement tests after they take the voucher than they did before taking it.

We at Innovation Ohio examined our state's voucher program recently and urged lawmakers to back off from more widely implementing these programs here and across the nation. While it looks like the subcommittee took heed of the mountains of evidence that demonstrate these programs hurt kids who take the vouchers and kids who don't because of the large sums of money these program eliminate from the public system, the bill still has a ways to go.

And the subcommittee did increase funding by about 8 percent for the department's Charter School Program (CSP), which in Ohio has not been very successful at expanding better educational options for kids.

Here's what we found in the report we did at www.KnowYourCharter.com last year:

• Of the 292 Ohio charter schools that received $99.6 million in federal aid, $30 million went to 108 schools that either closed or never opened
• Of those that failed, at least 26 Ohio charter schools that received nearly $4 million in federal CSP funding apparently never even opened and there are no available records to indicate that these public funds were returned
• The charter schools that have received CSP funding and received State Report Card grades in the 2014-2015 school year had a median Performance Index score that was lower than all but 15 Ohio school districts and would have been graded as a D

One very telling detail of the subcommittee meeting yesterday, though, was this final line from the74.org's account:

"Members did not discuss the school choice plans during the meeting."

USDOE Calls Ohio Charter Program "High Risk", puts Special Conditions on Nation's Largest Federal Charter School Grant

It what appears to be a first for the U.S. Department of Education, Ohio has been designated a "high risk" state for charter school oversight, which means the federal government will assert far more authority over how Ohio distributes the $71 million it received last year through the federal Charter School Program grant, which was the largest given last year.

When the grant was given, many immediately questioned how it could have happened, given the fact that Ohio's well-told story of struggling charter schools was well known. The person who sent in the application, David Hansen (husband of Gov. John Kasich's chief of staff and presidential campaign manager Beth Hansen) was forced to resign for illegally doctoring a new charter school accountability regime to benefit politically powerful online charter school operators. It was this regime that was the foundation for the USDOE grant.

There were other sleights of hand that many people identified in the application. However, while USDOE found that there were no "significant inaccuracies" in the state's grant (leaving open the possibility that inaccuracies did exist), there were several problems with Ohio's history with charter schools in general that forced the Department's hand. Specifically, the letter cites the following concerns:

1. The Hansen affair
2. Ohio congressional leader concerns
3. Issues found in previous audits of ODE's capacity to implement federal charter school programs (the only available audit I wrote about here in some detail)
4. Implementation issues of the additional oversight functions prescribed by House Bill 2 that could impact the state's ability to administer the grant

In addition, the feds urged ODE to "put into place additional mechanisms to help earn the public's confidence in its ability to act as a proper steward of its Federal grant funds on behalf of Ohio's families and students."

The feds also went out of their way to "strongly encourage" the state to put special mechanisms in place to increase transparency between non-profit charter schools and the for-profit entities with which they contract. The feds also made explicit that no online schools can receive the funding. The feds also expressed so much concern about Ohio's miserably performing dropout recovery schools that they told ODE that the feds themselves have to approve all grants given to dropout recovery schools.

The feds wrapped up by expressing confidence that ODE will be able to administer the grant. But they warned that if they fail to meet these special conditions, the state will be subject to strict penalties. They especially pushed ODE to work toward creating "the rigorous oversight of authorizers that was described in ODE's approved grant application."

While I'm glad Ohio will have the opportunity to use this federal money to expand higher performing charters, it is once again a reminder of just what a backwater we have been on charters and how far we have to go.

To add insult to injury, a charter school chain that has some of the highest performing charters in Ohio was rejected for sponsorship in Mississippi -- yes, THAT Mississippi -- this week for not being high performing enough for that state to sponsor.

When the best performing schools in your state aren't high performing enough for Mississippi, you've got problems.