Let's Not Get Too Excited ... Yet

Yesterday, my respected colleague at the Fordham Institute -- Chad Aldis -- posted a blog that painted quite the rosy picture of Ohio's shift toward charter reform. And while the steps that the Ohio Department of Education is taking seems like a shift, I'm less apt than my friend to get overly excited here.

This isn't an indictment of Chad. He's been a fighter for reform recently, especially about authorizer transparency. But I'm less excited about the department's stance than he.

First of all, the closures ODE initiated only happened because a sponsor shut down and the department took over sponsorship of these schools. So the department is acting like a fairly responsible charter sponsor. And that's nice. Except ODE only sponsors 21 of 400 charters. So there's that.

Again, having the department tell 4 charters they're going to be shut down is nice, but those 4 represent 1% of Ohio charters. When they shut down two schools last year for non-academic issues, that was nice too. And the three sponsors ODE warned against opening any new charters last April? They oversee less than 10% of all charters in Ohio.

Perhaps this speaks to the benefits of a Massachusetts-like charter regime where the only sponsor is the department of education, instead of the scores of sponsors Ohio has. But I digress.

The state's current charter reform legislation -- as I've said many times -- is the most bold and courageous charter reform effort offered in 3 decades by Ohio Republicans. Yet it still does not address the two most pressing issues: funding and tightening closure standards.

I chalk that up to Ohio being a national laggard on these issues than a real legislative shortcoming. But it demonstrates just how far we need to go as a state.

And I've said before that I'm encouraged that ODE has changed language on its website to call it "Quality School Choice", as well as the efforts Chad mentioned in his blog.

My bottom line is this though: the three sponsors whose crackdown Chad touts still oversee schools that educate about 8,600 children. And 2 of the schools Chad mentions as closing were open just a few weeks, while the other 5 accounted for $9.6 million of the nearly $1 billion spent last year on charters. That's barely 1% of all the money spent on charters last year.

As for how long these closed schools were open, the V L T Academy and Cleveland Community School had been open since the 2005-2006 school year. Imagine Cleveland and Imagine on Superior have been open since 2010-2011. Villaview has been open since 2006-2007. Those schools still ended up having 9,450 children go through their doors over the years. And they still may not be closing because the schools can appeal the state's ruling.

Closing down a couple schools here and there is a good step, but hardly the crackdown that's necessary. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found recently that the best way to improve a state's charter sector is close as many poor performers as possible, and quick. More than 1/2 of the money spent on Ohio charters last year came from the same or better performing districts.

Ohio E-Schools are a disaster. Look at this chart showing how E-Schools are dragging down overall charter school performance based on how many report card ratings the charter is better or worse than the district that sent them their kids.

And let's not forget that local taxpayers have to subsidize charters that perform the same or worse to the tune of $180 million because charters get so much more state money than their students would have received in their home districts that those districts have to fill in the gap with local revenue.

These are the big issues. 

When ODE starts going after the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow -- who took all  $100 million or so it got from districts that performed better, or White Hat schools, which got 1 A, 5 Bs and about 70% Ds and Fs on the state report card, or the E-Schools in general, which educate about 40,000 kids and receive more than 95% of their funding from higher performing districts, or the sponsors that oversee 50-60 schools rather than 4 or 5, then I'll call it a crackdown.

Some perspective. 

Since 2000, 197 charter schools have been shut down -- about 13 per year. Of those 197 charter school closings, 101 were done voluntarily. Only 24 were due to the state's closure law. Sponsors ordered the other 72, but only 8 were explicitly for academic reasons. Primarily, sponsors have closed charters for lack of financial viability or failure to comply with their contract.

So these closings and warnings that ODE has recently announced during its "crackdown" don't even constitute a half-year's worth of charter closings, historically.

I'm not saying what ODE is doing isn't valuable. It is a step in the right direction, though a creakingly small one. 

I am saying that we should pump the breaks on the crackdown talk until ODE is given the authority to actually crack down on the poor performing charters that have drained so many resources while poorly served students for far too long. The current legislation would be a nice step toward doing that.

But until then, I fear it's spitting in the wind.

Ohio Charter Schools' Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week (andit's not even over yet)

Talk about a rough week. Take a look at the news stories coming out about charter schools this week.

On Saturday, the Akron Beacon Journal (again) led the way on enterprise reporting on this topic by publishing an analysis of 4,263 audits done last year by the Auditor of State revealed that 

"No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio."

 Yikes.

Among the findings:

• While charters only accounted for 400 of 5,800 audits, they accounted for 70% of the misspent money
• $25 million in misspent money remains unpaid
• For every $1 misspent found by private auditors, public auditors found $102

The misspending is probably worse than what the audits turned up because so many charters were next to impossible to audit, according to the Beacon Journal.

Then came a Columbus Dispatch editorial (historically, no friend of the charter critic) that called out charter school sponsors for wanting to hide their expenditures to oversee the sector, except in limited cases -- an argument not much different from one I made about the same time.

Later that same day, the Dispatch revealed that the troubled North Side Imagine charter school might be shut down because its board just up and quit. This is the same school that was found last year to be spending an exorbitant amount of money leasing the property from a subsidiary of Imagine Schools -- a practice that was found to be illegal in Missouri. Imagine Schools, Inc. run schools in 11 states and are no stranger to controversy.

Meanwhile, the same day, the Dayton Daily News reported that three former Dayton-area charter school officials were convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges in connection with their operation of the Arise! Academy. 

They all face at least 15 years in federal prison for steering lucrative contracts to each other. 

Yesterday, the Plain Dealer reported that 3 charters have been put on notice that the state's looking to close them, including another 2 Imagine schools. That's not all.

"All three are failing to manage their budgets properly, ODE also said in the letters, and the Villaview and Cleveland Community School partnership could face ethics charges."

As a follow-up, this morning, WKYC-TV in Cleveland reported that not 3, but 4 charters -- including another Imagine school in Canton -- would be suspended for failing to meet performance requirements.

And finally, yesterday, the Beacon Journal told the tale of how private auditors sent out by the State Auditor's office failed to catch more than $1.3 million that had been outright taken from one area charter school, calling into question whether private auditing firms should even be used as a substitute for public auditors.

What did the private firm miss? Try this:

"It was an abrupt turnabout: A private accounting firm had given the charter school a clean bill of financial health, finding “no material weakness” despite missing information later discovered by the state. Among the state’s discoveries were employee contracts that lacked signatures, a cruise boat company had charged the school for too many attendees for a training session (nothing in the audit suggested training on cruise boats might be inappropriate) and half of the receipts were missing."

These stories all have been told before, though not as rapid-fire and in as quick succession. What they indicate is pretty clear: We desperately need real, substantive charter school reform. Now. The Ohio Senate is currently considering SB 148, which would be a meaningful improvement on the current situation. However, it still doesn't make it easier for the state to shut down poor performing charters, nor does it fix a funding system that far too often forces local property taxpayers to subsidize the state funding losses to woefully underperforming charter schools.

To be clear, there are a few quite exemplary charter schools out there. And I want to see them thrive in more places around this state. So this is in no way directed at the Breakthrough Schools, or DECA or Columbus Prep, or the Toledo School for the Arts. This is about the more than 3 out of 4 charter schools that simply aren't cutting it.

Again, I am not anti-charter school. I am extremely concerned about the state of Ohio's overall charter school health.

So let's at least get this Senate bill done. Judging from this week's worth of news stories, I imagine that Ohio's lawmakers and education advocates will be dealing with charter school issues for many more moons. It is indeed a shame that Ohio's sector is such a mess, both academically and financially. But when you turn over the program to big campaign contributors whose greatest talent is making money, not educating kids, is this result really so surprising?

Let's do what we can to fix this now. Forget politics. This is about saving kids. And we've got tens of thousands who need to be rescued from this system that has -- in the vast majority of cases -- lost its way amid profits and power. 

While some Ohio charter critics may rejoice at this awful spate of stories for the sector, I ache for the kids and parents who this is hurting. They deserve better. And so do the taxpayers who are seeing nearly $1 billion of their state money and hundreds of millions of their local tax money go to pay for and subsidize these operations.

It's a tragedy. An entire generation of kids has now gone through this utterly broken system. 

I shudder to think of the consequences.

Imagine Schools to Teachers: "Let Them Eat Cake"

I'm rarely surprised anymore. That's one of age's few gifts. But today, I was just stunned by what the for-profit charter school operator Imagine Schools told one of their school boards yesterday. The board told Imagine that they would rather pay their teachers more money than the exorbitantly high rent they're paying Imagine for their building. The Imagine Schools spokesman said the board should think of other ways to "celebrate" the teachers "such as having cake for them at the next board meeting."

I'm sure the school's teachers will appreciate their sheet cake. The $26,929 those school's teachers make a year, by the way, is about $1,000 under the poverty line for a family of 5, and would qualify these teachers for welfare benefits in many cases. So I'm sure they will love their cake because it will help them pay the rent.

Or not.

Imagine Schools needs to brush up on French History. Telling people to eat cake rather than pay them hasn't worked out so well.