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.

Only in Ohio is Charter Authorizer Transparency Controversial

I have been quick to credit the quality-based charter school community for their efforts to bring around needed and substantive reform to the sector. Whether it's been Students First, the Breakthrough schools in Cleveland, or the Fordham Institute, the quality-based charter school community have been real lions in the fight for kids in charters. They have been quite willing to join forces with charter critics on common sense reforms.

The change in tenor on this topic is refreshing and incredibly hopeful.

I was dismayed when I read in the Columbus Dispatch late last week that the association representing charter school sponsors (what Ohio calls an authorizer) doesn't want to have to explain how they spend the taxpayer money they receive to oversee charter schools.

The Ohio Association of Public Charter School Authorizers claimed that only the poorest performing charter school sponsors should have to report that. But how useful will that be if we can't compare how the worse performers spend their money vs. how the best ones do?

That's right. It isn't useful.

Of the 67 sponsors listed in last year's annual report, 25 are prohibited from sponsoring more schools for poor performance or failure to comply with state requirements. Those sponsors oversee 78 schools -- 21 of them by the North Central Ohio ESC and another 11 by Richland Academy. That means that of the 78 schools overseen by the worst sponsors, nearly half are overseen by 2 sponsors. the remaining 23 sponsors oversee a total of 46 schools, or 2 per sponsor.

Meanwhile, 43 sponsors are allowed to keep sponsoring schools, accounting for 317 charter schools -- 231 of which are overseen by 5 sponsors.

This points to my primary concern about focusing on sponsor performance: More than half of all charter schools in Ohio are sponsored by just 5 non-profit organizations. There is little, if any, chance that these big sponsors will ever be shut down. So why can't we taxpayers, who fund these guys, at least see how they are spending money to oversee the largely failing schools they're supposed to be supervising?

To his credit, Chad Aldis of the Fordham Institute, pretty well hammered the OAPCSA's position.

“The idea that they can spend their funds on whatever they choose runs directly counter to trying to put as many dollars in the classroom as possible,” he said.

And here's another thing: The idea that one should be able to take our tax dollars and spend it however they see fit without taxpayers like you and me being able to scrutinize that expenditure is nuts. I'm sorry. It is.

This is the kind of argument that has driven me mental for years on this Ohio charter school situation. No-brainer items like having charter school sponsors, who get about $30 million a year to oversee charter schools that are consistently outperformed by local public schools, detail how they spend their money overseeing this largely failing education sector is actually controversial.

It's a sad commentary on our charter school situation. But I find hope in this: once again, the quality-based charter community has stood for kids and taxpayers while fighting for a bill pending in the Ohio General Assembly that would include this no-brainer provision.

And that is indeed an excellent development.

School Funding: Here We Go Again

Every time I think we've perhaps turned a school funding corner as a state, something happens that undoes all that. Or at least expands the length of the block we need to turn.

Take this year's state budget. When Gov. John Kasich introduced his initial plan, it called for about half of school districts to get less money than they did last school year. That is not a good outcome. 

The Ohio House, to their great credit, recognized that the Kasich formula was inadequate, so they did what responsible legislators do when there's not enough money in an inadequate formula -- they created a guarantee that no district would get less than last year and they lowered the upper limit on how much any district could get as an increase over last year. And, most importantly, they set up a school funding commission (I think the 1,287,643rd established since 1991) to look at the issue.

This was a reasonable, rational and responsible way to approach this school funding issue. It's not perfect. And I really didn't like the extra $25 a kid for E-Schools for capital funding. But on the big issue of how to pay for educating our state's 1.8 million kids, the House plan was about as sound as it could be, given the tremendous shortcomings in the current formula.

Then the plan hit Ohio Senate, which is where some of the most important, significant and positive charter school reform legislation is currently being crafted by some of the state's best legislative leaders on the issue. And now it looks like Ohio Senate President Keith Faber has decided to (once again) dictate school funding policy in the state, regardless of what his committee and subcommittee chairs think.

On Friday, Faber told the Columbus Dispatch that he wants to undo the House plan and eliminate any guarantees and artificial caps on increases because he wants everyone to be on the formula. Look, that makes sense ... if you have a funding formula that makes sense. Right now, Ohio does not.

The formula, as currently constituted, is simply an arbitrarily increased version of the Building Blocks formula from the mid-2000s. That formula took into account three items -- instructional, support and operational costs -- to calculate a per pupil funding amount. The total in the formula's last iteration from 2007 was $5,732. The amount has simply been arbitrarily increased to $6,000 in this proposed budget.

To give you an idea of how inadequate that amount is, if you simply did inflationary increases on the Building Blocks from 2007, the per pupil amount would be $6,581.

But the Building Blocks only looked a few of the educational costs schools need. The next formula -- the Evidence Based Model -- looked at about 2 dozen educational costs and found that the per pupil amount should be closer to an average of $6,817 (as high as $8,333 in the K-3 grades).

Again, both formulas (Building Blocks adjusted for inflation) -- one developed by Ohio Republicans and one by Ohio Democrats -- both came up with numbers greater than the current state formula.

I'm not here to say there's a magic per pupil figure. And I think focusing on just the number is a mistake. What I care about is the process of developing a per pupil amount. That is where this current formula is so woeful. It doesn't even pretend to measure what kids need. It simply bumps up per pupil amounts by round figures ($100 a year) with zero regard for actual cost or need.

My issue isn't with the $6,000 per pupil figure (though I can't figure how that would be adequate) so much as it is with the current formula's lack of a rational approach to funding based on, well, reality.

Whenever examining a school funding formula, you have to answer the following three questions: How is the formula calculated? How do we ensure it remains adequate and at the cutting edge? How do we de-politicize school funding?

Answers to these questions are what any school funding fix must have. And, frankly, the House plan does address some of them. But it appears that Faber simply has no interest in dealing with really any of them.

Faber told the Dispatch that there may be districts with huge percentage increases because some districts are growing while others are shrinking. What does this mean? It means wealthy, growing districts will get huge increases because they're the districts with the least state funding, so any increase will be a big percentage. 

But other districts -- likely poorer districts -- will see funding cuts to pay for those increases.

In Kasich's original school funding plan from two years ago (that his own party scrapped), Olentangy -- one of the state's wealthiest districts -- received a more than 300% increase in the as-introduced version.

Granted, 300% increases in Olentangy make up a fraction, in terms of dollar amount, of a 5% increase in Cleveland. But the look was an awful one -- paying for large relative increases in districts best able to provide local support at the expense of districts least able to do so. This was especially true when a week prior to the formula's introduction, Kasich told an assembled throng of superintendents that the exact opposite would happen, leading to some superintendents to claim Kasich outright lied to them.

But it appears that Faber wants this reverse Robin Hooding to happen. Like if a few kids leave your district, that's your fault, so we're cutting your money. 

Look, I get that if you have a district of 4,000 kids and 1,000 have left over the last decade, you probably don't need the buildings you once had, nor do you need the staff, etc. But if you're a district of 4,000 and you lose 50 kids across all grades, your expenses will not go down. Why? Because that's not enough kids to warrant the closing of a building, or even the laying off of a teacher or the reduction of an electric or gas bill. That's losing about a kid per classroom.

Faber wants to double down on a formula that really isn't a formula just because he can. He seems to have little interest in actually trying to figure out how much it costs to educate kids, or what they need to succeed in today's knowledge economy. He just wants to eliminate guarantees, which hurts Ohio's neediest kids, and give massive increases in our wealthiest communities, which help our state's most fortunate children. 

I simply do not understand this approach from a policy perspective. It runs contrary to every goal of every serious education policy thinker I know on every side of the issue. Punishing kids because economies change and we live in an aging state makes zero sense to me. The point of a school funding formula is to provide the necessary resources for kids to succeed in all zip codes, not just a few. And I know well-meaning Senators on both sides of the aisle understand that.

It is indeed unfortunate that the state's most important Senator, though, does not. He should listen to his caucus' policy leaders on this. But, judging from his comments, I fear that instead of turning a corner, we just have to keep walking, hoping that the gap between buildings we see on the horizon is a corner capable of being turned, not just someone's open garage.

UA's Former White Hat Executive's Curious Resume

Last week, I wrote about Todd Rickel -- the University of Akron's newest vice provost who is charged with re-shaping the university. I detailed how during Rickel's time as the head of White Hat Management's academic operation, he oversaw some of the worst performing charter schools in the state and country.

Well, something very interesting just showed up: Rickel has two different resumes posted at the University of Akron (if one disappears, I'll post them for you to see).

No biggie, right? People update their resumes all the time. One is from his application for the job he ended up getting. The second is an updated version.

Except here's a weird thing with Rickel's: He now claims he spoke at two conventions he never mentioned speaking at in his application resume. And he no longer claims to have been a speaker at conventions he mentioned in the application.

In his application, he claimed to have made 2 presentations in 2012 and one in 2013. They were three concurrent panel sessions at 3 different conferences. In 2012, he claimed to have made a presentation at the United States Distance Learning Association's (USDLA) National Conference ("Technology, Retention and Sustainability in Practice") and the annual convention for the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) ("Higher Education Partnerships: Mutual benefits across two and four year institutions"). In 2013, he claimed to have presented at the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Academic Resource Conference ("The Sustainable University").

Prior to 2012, he hadn't made an academic presentation since 2003 when he did one at the University of Phoenix where he has worked off and on for several years, and several at Kent State -- his alma mater where he had taught as an adjunct. In other words, he had no experience presenting at a major convention or conference outside of places where he was employed.

Which is what makes his updated resume ("last updated 14 February 2015") so interesting. On his new resume, he claims he spoke at 3 conferences in 2012. Nothing in 2013. The conferences were the WASC Academic Resource Conference in 2012, the USDLA conference and the Community College Baccalaureate Association's 12th Annual International Conference.

The panels he claimed to have led were completely different too. The WASC panel was "Partnering without Tears: Co-Sourcing for Student Success and Mutual Profit". The USDLA panel was "Beyond Facebook: Creating the NextGen Social Media Communities of the 21st Century". The CCBA plenary panel was "Community College Baccalaureate Degree Inflation: Careful What You Wish For."

The only conference he claimed to be at in both resumes was the 2012 USDLA conference, but the sessions were completely different.

Looking at it now, if one were applying to turn around a university with retention and financial challenges like UA, wouldn't having the sessions mentioned on his application resume -- about retention, sustainability, and partnering -- sound a lot better than stuff about community colleges and Facebook and mutual profit?

I looked online to see if I could find the conferences' agendas. They had been wiped from the organizations' sites. I couldn't even find them in the Wayback Machine. I'm sure there are more tech savvy people than I who are out there and can find these things better than I.

I'm just wondering why he didn't mention them all in the application? Wouldn't you want to show that you led 6 rather than 3 sessions at national conventions since 2012? I mean in both resumes, he mentioned he was part of Kent State's sail club. It's not like he's making editorial decisions in other parts of the resume.

Usually when you update a resume it's to add current achievements that happened after the application resume. It's not to change which three convention sessions you gave, or switch up where you gave these completely different panel sessions.

I don't know if there's any funny stuff going on here. But it sure begs a few questions about why these changes were made -- questions Rickel should answer so that the UA community can be assured that the man helping re-shape the university has done what he claims.

Because, as mentioned in my earlier post, his background at White Hat was anything but stellar for kids' academic performance.

Ohio E-Schools: Ohio's Baddest Apples

Four years ago, I helped write an Innovation Ohio analysis of Ohio's E-Schools that was one of the first examinations of the statewide impact of those schools on Ohio's kids and districts. Needless to say, E-School performance was dreadful. The report kind of put IO on the map and was cited by many national outlets and in Diane Ravitch's most recent book.

Fresh off the revelations that the Ohio Virtual Academy -- the state and nation's second-largest for-profit school -- may have been fudging their enrollment data to get paid, I decided to take another look, this time with our partners at KnowYourCharter.com. The results are worse now.

Here are the highlights:

• More than half of the money going from better performing Ohio school districts to worse performing charters goes to 6 statewide E-Schools
• 98% of all the children attending charters that performed worse than their feeder districts on all the state’s report card measures went to the same six statewide Ohio E-Schools – at a cost of $72 million
• Local Ohio taxpayers have had to subsidize $104 million of the cost of Ohio E-Schools because students in E-Schools receive so much more per pupil funding from the state than would their local public school.

What else is remarkable is that the school districts that have the most similar rates of poverty also outperform E-Schools. By a substantial margin. And E-Schools provide a substantial portion of the money and children lost to the worst performing charters in Ohio.

Charters would still be a problem in Ohio, and their performance would remain worse than districts overall. However, the gap would be narrowed.

The money is really what gets me. Charters get paid enough now to provide 15:1 student-teacher ratios, $2,000 laptops to every student and still clear about 35%. Instead, they only spend 17% of their funding on teachers. What else is there in an E-School, which has no buildings, janitors, lunch ladies, buses, etc.?

I commend Sens. Lehner and Sawyer for taking on E-Schools in their Senate Bill 148. It's a modest attempt, but given the fact that both Mssrs. Brennan (who runs OHDELA) and Lager (who runs ECOT) have contributed more to politicians over the last 16 years than any other individuals (while collecting about 1 in 4 charter dollars spent during that period), I admire the willingness to take on this issue.

I am also a realist. And as long as big campaign contributions are made, real reform will be a huge challenge. But here's hoping that this legislature is up to it. Our kids and taxpayers can't afford this anymore.

Should University of Akron Put Faith in Former White Hat Executive?

For those of you who aren't aware, there are major changes happening at the University of Akron. From potential name changes to mission shifts, it appears the same university that produced the CEO of Goodyear (Charles Pilliod), perhaps the most influential rock band of the last 15 years (the Black Keys), the author of New York Times bestsellers (Michael Buckley) and comedian George Wallace needs to change the way it does business.

Amid all this discussion is a forgotten fact: Ohio (like many states) has dramatically divested itself from higher education over the last 20 years, just as its leaders have given lip service to the idea that we need to boost our academic attainment. For example, when I first went off to college in the 1990-1991 school year, Ohio spent $1.2 billion providing state support of instruction for the state's higher education institutions. Adjusted for inflation, that would be the equivalent of $2.2 billion this year. Instead, the amount was $1.8 billion. During the 2000s, the University of Akron saw its per pupil subsidy drop by nearly 25%. So could the drop in state aid be contributing to our state's universities' financial woes?

Perhaps.

Anyway, while I'm not opposed to changing things, I deeply question how new University of Akron President Scott Scarborough could put so much faith in Todd Rickel -- the  vice provost and executive dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology. 

It is Rickel, who calls himself an "Education Futurist" on his LinkedIn page, that causes me the greatest deal of pause. Why? Because, according to his resume posted at the UA website (and his LinkedIn page), he was the "Chief Learning Officer" for White Hat Management at the apex of that company's dominance of Ohio's charter school sector in the mid-2000s. He also served as the company's Executive Vice President of Life Skills High Schools and its Vice President of the company's Distance Education Group -- overseeing Ohio's worst online school (it had the lowest Performance Index Score of any online school last year), the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy (OHDELA).

During his time at White Hat, the company was receiving $110 million a year, on average, from Ohio taxpayers. Meanwhile, the schools' performance -- for which Rickel was directly responsible -- was dreadful.

When Rickel was at White Hat, the state did not have an A-F report card system. It had a very similar scale though: Excellent, Effective, Continuous Improvement, Academic Watch and Academic Emergency. Excellent was like an A, Emergency like an F.

Well, here's how White Hat schools performed under Rickel's leadership:

As you can see, White Hat had a far higher percentage of Academic Emergency ratings than even Ohio's urban school districts. They had exactly 1 Excellent rating and 2 Effective ratings.

And you can see that Ohio's local public school districts smoked Rickel's schools overall.

Looking at different metrics doesn't help Rickel's case much either.

Look at his schools' Performance Index Scores. The PI measures proficiency test success. And as you can see, the average PI score of 50 in White Hat schools is 1/3 lower than urban districts and about 1/2 as good as districts overall. 

To give you an idea of what a score of 50 means, it would require that about 68% of students score in the basic range and 32% score in the below basic range on state proficiency tests. Those two categories are the two below proficiency categories Ohio uses to calculate its Performance Index Score.

 Annual Yearly Progress also demonstrates Rickel's failure at White Hat to close achievement gaps and serve traditionally underserved students.

White Hat was failing to meet AYP at a 90% clip during Rickel's tenure. That is frankly horrendous. Not saying the 70% rate in Ohio's urban districts is great, but it is nearly 25% smaller.

And under his tutelage, Life Skills began earning its well-earned moniker of worst-performing charter school group in the state. Life Skills High Schools -- a dropout recovery chain -- routinely received the worst Performance Index scores in the state. That is until the state stopped using PI to hold dropout recovery schools accountable. Under Rickel, they were no different.

Why do I bring this up? Because it is Rickel who is now telling folks at the University of Akron how to deliver their education experience. That's right. The people who educated some of the best minds in the region and country are being told what to do by a guy who ran several of the worst performing K-12 schools in the state.

And UA is paying Rickel $295,000 a year to do it -- the highest salary of three new administrators brought in by Scarborough in February.

Why would a respectable university turn over these major decisions to a guy with this background of educational failure? 

Simple. Look at who runs White Hat. David Brennan. Brennan has an endowed chair at the University of Akron School of Law (where I graduated in 2005) and has been the state's most prolific campaign contributor over the last three decades to state lawmakers (all but 1 of his donations have gone to Ohio Republicans). 

There is little question that in the Akron area -- where Brennan is from -- he remains a powerful influence, though his power statewide seems to be waning as William Lager, who runs the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, picks up the mantle of Ohio charter school political king maker.

All I'm saying is if you're going to turn over the reins of change to someone, would it be someone with Rickel's history? 

But at least I think I've figured out why he calls himself an "education futurist". Given his past failings, I suppose his interest in future gazing is understandable.

Ohio's Charter Schools Just Don't Work, Part V. But Can They?

Today is all about solutions.

Over the last several days, I've taken a look at Ohio's charter schools. How they cost kids in local school districts significant sums of state funding while performing far worse academically. How the excuses explaining Ohio's charter school issues don't hold much water. How even urban buildings perform better in many cases that Ohio's charter schools overall. And finally, yesterday, how even the highest performing charters in the state don't outperform the state's highest performing school districts, nor do they outperform the state's highest performing urban buildings and the state spends barely a fraction of its charter funding on these high performers anyway.

Let me say that I'm not developing the quintessential list of fixes. I'm putting together what I think will help the charter sector improve the quickest and best way. We're going on 20 years of charters in Ohio. We've had little if any true reform of these things over those now three decades. We can't afford any further delays.

There needs to be a three-pronged approach to fixing Ohio's ridiculed charter school sector.

Close down failed charter schools earlier
In the 2013 CREDO study on national charter school performance, the authors determined that "the use of the option to close bad schools represents the strongest available tool to improve overall sector quality ... the impact on quality that accompanies closure is more dramatic and enduring than efforts to improve the current stock of schools."

What does that mean? It means closing failing schools quickly will quickly improve the overall performance of the state's charter school sector. However, in Ohio, a charter can stay open for 6-7 years (depending on grade) before it's closed. And the failure is a very low bar -- getting a report card F grade in certain categories. So a charter can stay open if they get Ds every couple years.

There's a pretty straight forward solution to this issue. The state gives a two-year "honeymoon" period where charters don't receive report card grades for its first two years of existence. In addition, once the school is determined to be failing, it gets to stay open for the year before it closes. Eliminate some or all of these three years and schools would have 3-4 years to prove their worth. That's plenty of time. Given our state's limited resources, we just can't be pumping millions into these schools. As the CREDO authors observed: "we do not see dramatic improvement among existing charter schools over time."

So something closer to 4-ish years should do the trick. And Ohio has a couple loopholes in place already that would simply need closing.

I would also advocate for a tougher closure standard, in accordance with what CREDO found that

"in many places, the standards of performance are set too low, as evidenced by the large number of underperforming charter schools that persist. The point here is that, as with students, setting and holding high expectations is an important feature of school policies and practices. More focus is required of authorizers and charter school governing boards to set high performance and accountability standards and hold charter schools to them."

Develop a charter school funding formula that allows high-performing charters to thrive while not adversely impacting the opportunities for children in local public school districts
This is the (literally) $1 billion question. How to fund these schools that don't get local revenue so they can succeed? Well, some would argue they should get local revenue. However, there are a host of issues with that premise. For example, would their local capacity be deducted from their state aid amounts, as local public school districts' are currently? And what about the charters that take kids from more than one district? Whose local revenue would cover that school's cost?

However, judging from state expenditure data, Ohio's charter schools may have enough to spend about the same in the classroom as districts. Except they don't. Because they spend a ton more per pupil on non-instructional administrative costs. If Ohio charter schools spent the same per pupil amount on administration that districts did, they would have enough to spend the same on instruction as districts, even without local revenue.

The issue then is whether that instructional spend is adequate for kids, and there's real question about that. But be that as it may, Ohio's charters are receiving enough money now that they could be spending the same on instruction as school districts. They just don't.

The key to funding both charters and local public schools is this: an accurate formula that reflects the real cost of providing high-quality educational opportunities to children at the school they are attending. In the charter sector, Ohio's charters get paid based on what the child's home district would have been for that same child, trouble is that that expenses are far less in charters. FOr example, they pay their teachers about 60% less and don't pay for busing. Yet they are paid by the state as if they paid their teachers 40% more and busing.

Ensuring an accurate measure of cost in both sectors will mean that the right amount of funding will flow to the child based on where the child goes to school, not where they live. There should also be substantial bonuses for charters that are doing a good job. So the overall structure works like this: fund low performing charters at the level where you can't make huge profits off failure, while funding high-performers at a level that would ensure their continued success.

Ensure absolute accountability and transparency of Ohio's charter schools
Charter schools have a conundrum. They are funded almost exclusively by public funding. Yet they are run by private entities, either non-profit or for-profit companies. However, this structure leads to concerns that they really aren't public schools at all, simply publicly funded, privately run schools.

If charters want to be considered public schools, then they need to act like it. Have open meetings that everyone can attend. Publish all their financials. Be as open for public inspection as any public school. If it walks like a duck, right? Unfortunately, right now, charters simply don't walk or quack like public school ducks. And they should.

These three principles should drive any reform effort. And the current measures in the Ohio General Assembly meet many of their goals. Yet, we still are largely dodging the closing failures quicker and funding issues. And to achieve true reform for our kids we simply must deal with these issues.

In future posts, I will give my thoughts on each of the measures currently being considered -- the most promising of which is Senate Bill 148.

But for now, let it be known that I believe charters can work in Ohio. They have worked. But spending almost $1 billion is simply an unwarranted extravagence, according to the data. We could have a far more effective school choice program for this state at a significantly lower price tag, freeing up resources for interventions we know work on a large scale.

This is our charge. Make charters work. Those that don't, shut them down. Those that do, let thrive. And let's stop having this sector that educates barely 10% of our students eat up 90% of our education policy discussion. It's time to move on.

The world, as our children will shortly learn, is not this patient.