Country's Largest Federal Charter School Grant Provides 4% of the Awarded Money

Ohio's infamous Charter School federal grant application and award from 2015 will fall well short of the nation-leading $71 million it won.

The only two years grants have been doled out -- last school year and the year before -- have resulted in less than 4% of the money being given to grow high-performing charter schools.

Why?

Because there simply aren't enough high-performing charter schools to justify anything near $71 million. As I and others said at the time of the bizarre federal award.

There are 8.

That's right.

Eight charter schools that have received money from the federal grant. That's about 2 percent of all charter schools in the state.

And only $2.8 million of the $71 million granted has been given out. Now, Ohio has already told the feds that they won't be able to spend $22 million of the $71 million. But how will they give out the remaining $46 million or so that remains in the Ohio grant?

Simple.

They won't.

What a shock that a grant that was given based on misleading information given by a guy who was trying to protect the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (and had to resign over it) ends up in absolute disaster for taxpayers, the feds, the state, kids and families.

Go figure.

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.

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."

Ohio's Record with Federal Charter Grants Not So Great

When I last left you, I was cheering about the passage of House Bill 2 -- Ohio's most important charter school reform bill since the program began in the late 1990s. It was quite a heady day.

Since then, there continues to be controversy over the $71 million federal grant Ohio received from the US Department of Education to expand high-performing charters here. In fact, the feds have held up payment until the Ohio Department of Education explains its actions and apparently false statements it made in its grant application. And there remain concerns that the bulk of the funding will go to boost charters in Youngstown -- an area of the state that has a particularly poor performing charter sector.

I have consistently said that while I have grave concerns about the veracity of several statements in the grant application, I also believe that Ohio should take this opportunity to build upon HB 2's success and use the funding to grow our rather paltry high-performing charter school sector. I have also said that I'm really concerned about whether the Ohio Department of Education -- as currently constituted -- has the ability to properly administer this windfall.

After all, the guy who wrote the application and misled the feds on it is gone, and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction is set to retire shortly. Given that ODE has recently dropped the ball on charter accountability, I'm not overly confident they can do this, especially now when an influx of federal money could help bolster the state's new reforms.

To its credit, the Fordham Institute looked at a previous iteration of the federal grant ODE received and found some encouraging things. The charters that got the grants tended to be higher performing and closed at smaller rates than charters overall. However, nearly 1 in 4 recipients still closed up shop after getting their grant. So it's still not a great outcome, just better than Ohio's nationally ridiculed charter sector overall.

However, there's a major caveat with what Fordham wrote -- the data stem from a 2007 grant that ended in 2013. This is 2015. The department that received the 2007 grant is nothing like the 2015 version. That grant Fordham examined essentially was administered during the Strickland Administration, whose ODE enjoyed relative staff stability, not to mention the State Superintendent tenure of Deb Delisle, who was later chosen to head up the US Department of Education's Primary and Secondary Education division -- the folks who administer the charter grants ODE got this year. 

This is a very, very different ODE. The department is now going to be seeing its 5th leader since Gov. John Kasich took office four short years ago -- and the second leader to leave under a cloud of controversy. This department needs help, a policy leader rather than a political appointee and more than anything, stability.

But beyond the simple fact that the ODE that oversaw the implementation of its 2007 grant isn't the same one that will be overseeing this one, there remain more concerns about Ohio's ability to handle this grant.

These federal charter school grants have been given since 1995. Over those 20 years and more than $3.3 billion granted, only California and Florida have received more federal money to expand high-quality charters than Ohio, which received funding in 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2015. And the next highest -- New York -- would have received less even without Ohio's recent $71 million grant. Yet despite a more than $270 million investment, Ohio's charter sector has become a national joke. Meanwhile, Massachusetts -- the state whose citizens are suing because there aren't enough charter schools because they're such a great option there -- only received $50 million over the 20 years.

States that have received at least $100 million in federal grant money
meant to expand high-performing charter schools in their states

The graphic at the left tells the story of the amount Ohio's received to expand high-quality charters here. Yet, despite this investment, the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes found that 40% of our state's charters are in "urgent need of improvement."

We should be doing better than having a couple great charters in Dayton, a dozen or so in Cleveland, a couple in Columbus and a couple in Toledo.

That's not to say there hasn't been improvement in the charter sector since 2004, though, just not enough to put the sector on par with local public schools. And who knows whether the federal grants had anything to do with the improvement.

Be that as it may, the year prior to the state receiving its 2004 grant saw charters receive an average Performance Index score (Performance Index is the state's single proficiency calculation) of 62.01 (120 is the highest, 30 is the lowest). Ten years (and two federal grants) later in 2013-2014, the average charter school Performance Index score was 78.89.

In the 2003-2004 school year, the top 5% of charter school Performance Index scores was 94.78. Last year, the top 5% was 105.41. So it appears that the higher performers are getting better by about 11%. However, the bottom 5% also saw marked improvement from an average 32.8 in 2003-2004 to an average 52.95 last school year -- a more than 62% improvement.

There were far fewer charters 10 years ago, so the top 5% of schools were actually 5 schools, but there have been improvements. However, before you get too excited, even with that improvement, only 7 Ohio school districts received lower Performance Index scores than the average charter school in the 2013-2014 school year. Remember that Ohio charters took kids and funding from every district in the state last year.

And the top 5% of school districts' Performance Index scores in 2013-2014 was an average 109.89 -- higher than even the highest performing charter schools.

So while there have been improvements since 2004, there remains a crying need for ODE to get its act together and properly administer this $71 million grant. 

The past may be prologue, but it is not necessarily the future.  ODE has to fulfill its obligations and keep an eagle eye on the $71 million to ensures it goes to charters that deserve the investment, not to those schools that have brought our state national scorn.