New Sponsor Ratings Reveal Flaws in Ohio Charter Reform

The latest Ohio Charter School Sponsor evaluations are out, and once again there are serious incongruities with overall and academic ratings. Some of the sponsors (non-profit organizations that oversee Ohio's charter schools) with the highest academic ratings may be forced to close as soon as next year because their overall rating is poor or ineffective.

Meanwhile, some sponsors with effective ratings -- meaning they can keep taking on more charter schools -- have D or F grades for academics.

This system comes from House Bill 2 -- Ohio's most far-reaching attempt to reform its nationally ridiculed charter school system. The goal of the evaluation system was to put the screws to the non-profit sponsors, which are supposed to ensure the academic performance of its charter schools, but had mostly just been interested in collecting their 3 percent fees from the schools and let the schools do whatever.

The evaluations rate sponsors on a four-tier scale. The tiers from top to bottom are: Exemplary, Effective, Ineffective and Poor. If they rate in the top two categories, they can keep running charter schools. Rate in the bottom two and they may be forced to shut down. But it looks like there remain kinks in the evaluation system -- kinks I was concerned about from the very beginning of the House Bill 2 debate, despite my overall support for the bill.

What you can see in the chart to the left is a couple things: 1) All the highest rated academic sponsors are public entities -- primarily school districts and 2) While 6 of the 9 highest rated academic performers received an effective or exemplary rating, 2 were deemed ineffective and one was rated poor, meaning it will be banned from operating anymore as a sponsor.

This outcome is not in the spirit of House Bill 2 -- the landmark charter school reform law that set up this system. However, it is in the actual law. Why? Because there are three elements to the sponsor rating -- academics, adherence to current Ohio regulations and compliance with national sponsor standards set by the national charter school sponsor lobbying organization.

Sounds fair, right? Except all three measures have to be weighed equally under the law. Quick, what's your GPA if you get an A and two Fs? Right. B-. But what if you're an English major and you get Fs in Shakespeare and Chaucer and your A is in Bowling? Shouldn't it matter that you're failing at your primary function? Likewise, what if you're getting an A in Shakespeare, but you get Fs in Calculus and Chemistry?

I see the state's charter school sponsors' primary job as ensuring the academic quality of the schools they oversee. If they can dot their bureaucratic i's and cross those t's, fine. But it doesn't matter nearly as much to me as whether their kids are learning.

This is why I've pushed for greater importance to be placed on the Academic portion of the evaluation than the other two, mostly bureaucratic, portions. This way, Scioto County Career Technical Center could still sponsor its school because the school is doing very well. The Department of Education could then work with the sponsor to help dot its i's a little better. But shutting down one of only 8 out of 45 Ohio charter sponsors to receive an A for academics seems misguided and prime bureaucratic bungling.

Likewise, I would like to see sponsors with D or F ratings not be able to be considered Effective, thereby being allowed to open more charter schools.

I understand that many of these poorly rated sponsors have far more schools than the ones with higher academic ratings. However, there is also an argument to be made that with more schools, there's more leeway for failure -- one school's failure shouldn't be as important if you have 20 others that don't. Sponsors with one school sink or swim with that one school's performance.

It is also remarkable that of the 17 sponsors with D or F academic ratings, only 7 are rated overall as ineffective or poor. So while the top end of the academic rating scale is primarily populated by the top two overall sponsor ratings, the bottom end of the academic rating scale is not likewise populated by poor overall ratings.

This tells me that academically poor performing sponsors have figured out the GPA conundrum I mentioned earlier, and that if they simply pay more attention to bureaucratic details, their academic performance won't matter. That's because academics are only 1/3 of your rating. Bureaucracy is worth 2/3 of your rating.

I have said and will continue to say that a sponsor's academic rating should count for 50 percent of a sponsor's grade, with the other two counting 25 percent each.

Until this adjustment (or something like it) is made, we will continue to put some of the best academic performing sponsors on notice and let slide many of the worst performers.

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.

Kasich Education Vetoes a Mixed Bag for Kids

While Gov. John Kasich's line-item veto of the Ohio Legislature's freeze on Medicaid has rightly eaten up much of the veto discussion, Kasich also vetoed 11 different education provisions in House Bill 49 -- the state's beinnial budget. For a complete rundown, look here. But I would like to focus on a couple things.

CHARTER SCHOOLS

In several of the vetoes regarding charter schools, Kasich said he struck the provision because it was unfair, or treated schools differently, or lowered standards. My issue with this reasoning is, well, that's kind of been the story of Ohio's charter school system. Ohio charters have been treated differently, held to lower standards and been unfairly funded at the expense of children in local public schools since 1998.

So why the sudden call to conscience? I don't know. But let me take a few of the vetoes in turn.

1) He vetoed a provision that would have allowed charters to count student growth as 60 percent of its student achievement measure rather than the current 20 percent. He claimed this was because it would hold charters to a lower standard than local schools. But that's only true if you believe that student growth is not as effective a measure as straight performance. And while there are real concerns with how student growth is calculated and used, putting more emphasis on that measure could encourage schools to spend more time with more students rather than just focusing on high fliers whose high scores would help a school's rating more than growing the lower scoring students. That's not a horrible public policy outcome. And we have always held charters to different standards than local schools -- that's been part of the point with charter law and criticism of it.

2) He vetoed a provision that would have allowed sponsors that were stripped of their ability to sponsor schools this school year to sponsor them again this year if they scored 3 out of 4 or higher on academics. His reason? Because they would still score poorly on the other bureaucratic measures under which they are now evaluated. But this is exactly the problem the legislature was trying to address -- you have some of the highest rated sponsors for academics (arguably the most important of the three charter school sponsor measures) unable to continue sponsoring schools because they don't meet the bureaucratic measures. Instead, with his veto Kasich essentially is putting a greater emphasis on whether a sponsor fills out forms correctly than whether the schools they oversee serve kids well. I fail to see how that outcome upholds quality for kids.

SCHOOL DISTRICT FUNDING

Several of Kasich's vetoes would directly harm the funding for kids in local school districts.

1) He vetoed a provision that would have helped ease the removal of Tangible Personal Property (TPP) tax reimbursement payments to districts, forcing many districts to deal with much steeper cliffs. He claimed schools have had enough time to cope with this loss. Kasich has never really understood why removing this formerly $1 billion a year payment for kids in local schools was so detrimental. I think it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding (or deliberate misunderstanding) of the 2005 law that eliminated the TPP. In exchange for the elimination of the TPP (which went mostly to kids in school districts), the state agreed to make school districts whole with Commercial Activity Tax payments until a real replacement could be developed. It's that last part of the agreement whose promise Kasich broke in 2011 when he decided to eliminate the reimbursement payments, cutting funding to kids in local school districts by $1.8 billion in that budget. The last year before Kasich, the TPP payment was $920 million. Now it's all but gone. Which is why when lawmakers claim they've increased funding to schools, they NEVER include this lost revenue. Anyway, Kasich's draconian adherence to this false narrative about TPP continues to be one of his greatest failings. And kids will suffer for it.

2) Kasich vetoed a couple provisions that would have allowed school districts to apply for state matching funds for new buildings at lower local share matches if they phased them in over time. He claimed this would have created inequities among districts. Which is a nice sentiment, but the whole reason the legislature did this is because of the current system's inequities. Some districts are caught in a nether zone where they are considered too "wealthy" for a big state match, but also too poor to fund the whole thing -- hence the current inequity. However, if they could go for a smaller bond issue, kids in those districts might be able to access the same new buildings as many other districts in the state. Again, this punishes districts who are neither wealthy nor poor, but are less wealthy than the wealthiest.

HOSING APPALACHIA. AGAIN.

Throughout Kasich's turn in the Governor's office he has found new and creative ways to hurt rural Appalachian schools. When he developed what was supposed to be his signature "Achievement Everywhere" school funding plan (a plan that was dumped unceremoniously by his own party), the plan disproportionately hurt rural Appalachian districts. He used school funding formulations that would downplay the poverty in Appalachia. And now he vetoed a provision that would allow school districts to give state tests in paper rather than computer formats. Rural Appalachian districts simply don't have enough computers to give tests over computers effectively or efficiently. We also know that kids who take paper tests tend to do better than those who take them on computers. So Kasich is forcing kids in mostly rural Appalachian districts to take more time taking tests and in a format that's biased against them. All in the name of what? "Standards"?

Part of his decision I think stems from Kasich's sharing of the school reform bias toward assessments that show kids doing worse. I've discussed this before, but just because kids to worse on a test doesn't mean that test is more accurately assessing their proficiency in a subject. Does anyone honestly believe that a test showing that only 1/3 of students are proficient readers is a more accurate read of how kids are doing than one that suggests 85 percent are?

Kasich made some decent vetoes on education provisions. His veto of a provision that would have forced College Credit Plus students (kids who take college courses in high school) to receive a C or higher to receive college credit when college students can receive credit for a D makes sense.

His veto of a provision that would have exempted some special education private schools from state assessments was generally fair.

His veto of a provision allowing Education Service Centers to sponsor schools from all over the state was also a small victory.

But overall, Kasich's vetoes were cloaked in a veneer of fairness that hides
the unfair and inequitable approach his administration has used in education policy since 2011.

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.

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.

Why the Delay in Rating Ohio Charter Sponsors?

Recently, there has been much made of the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) rigging the state's charter school sponsor (authorizer in every other state) ratings. Those ratings are critical to any meaningful reform of Ohio's nationally ridiculed charter school system because all the reform efforts currently underway rely on forcing sponsors to do a better job of oversight, or else.

However, if ODE doesn't put together a reliable and accurate rating system, then much of the reform effort will be for naught. That's what makes what David Hansen -- the state's former charter school czar and husband of Gov. John Kasich's presidential campaign manager -- did so pernicious. By rigging the system to benefit poor performing, for-profit operators, he jeopardized the entire charter school reform effort, further cementing Ohio's place as the nation's charter school backwater.

After Hansen resigned, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Richard Ross, withdrew the sponsor evaluations that had been done, and instead of including the scores from the poor performing schools Hansen had apparently illegally discounted, determined to re-invent the wheel. This week, he appointed a three-member panel to help guide the development of a charter sponsor evaluation system.

Here's the thing: The sponsor evaluation system was passed in late 2012. The first evaluations had to be completed by January 1. We're going on three years of development here. Why do we need another 6-12 months with this panel to develop an evaluation system -- a delay that could put off by another year, or even two, any meaningful reform. This would, of course, give big political contributors who run many of the failing schools two more years of collecting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

At KnowYourCharter.com, I put together three suggestions for sponsor evaluations.

1. Take the GPA of all the schools under the sponsor's aegis based on the state report card
2. Develop an index based on the percentage of students in schools sponsored by the agency who are in schools that receive a C or higher grade on four key report card measures
3. Use the same overall grade formula that the department will be using for school districts on the new report card

All of these ideas I developed in the course of an afternoon. I'm not saying these are the only three ways of doing it, but ODE has had three years to do this. And they need more time? 

What the ratings systems I developed demonstrate pretty clearly is this: Ohio's charter school sponsors reflect the overall system -- there are a few quite high performing sponsors, but the overwhelming number of them are poor performing.

ODE needs to get this right. And they need to do it now. They've had three years. Our kids can't wait any longer while bumbling (or worse) bureaucrats delay the education reform Ohio's children desperately need.