Heights considers charter school legislation

The Licking Heights Board of Education is considering legislation school officials hope will spur state legislators to hold charter schools more accountable.

The legislation appeared on the agenda for the board’s March 24 special meeting, but the board did not take action on it. Instead, members asked the district’s administration to tweak it prior to the upcoming April 21 regular meeting.

Heights Treasurer Nick Roberts said the legislation is driven by the fact “there’s limited accountability and transparency to (charter) schools now.”

Roberts provided the board with a chart showing the perceived difference between state public school funding and state charter school funding.

Heights currently receives $1,694 in base state aid per pupil, according to the chart. It receives $2,556 in overall state funding per pupil.

By contrast, the state average for charter school base state aid is $5,800 per pupil. The overall state funding average is $7,607 per pupil, according to the chart.

(Read more at the Newark Advocate)

Ohio charter-school-reform bill does not go far enough

This is the year when key officials -- from Gov. John Kasich and Ohio Democratic and Republican state lawmakers to opponents of charter schools and even some charter-school proponents -- had promised to reform the state's troubled charter-school system.

But the recent passage of House Bill 2, which allows sponsor-hopping among established charter schools and rejects Ohio Auditor Dave Yost's proposal that operating management companies should have to report some of their finances signals that, for all of the grand talk, Ohio's charter school reform may end up being far from comprehensive or significant.

The Senate should rise to the rescue. Ohio Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Republican from the Dayton-area, will present her bill soon and it must do what HB 2 has failed to do: Rein in charter schools so that youngsters get the best education possible and so that taxpayers can see where their money is going.

HB 2 does have some decent provisions -- it limits school leases to no more than 5 percent above market value, and forbids charter sponsors with the lowest ratings from the state from overseeing schools.

But it doesn't get to the core of the problems of Ohio's charter school system -- a system that spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars per year on schools subject to little public scrutiny or oversight and that are, in most parts of the state, even weaker academically than their public-school counterparts.

(Read more at Cleveland.com)

House passes bill to reform Ohio charter schools

Attention on overhauling Ohio’s oft-criticized charter-school laws now turns to the Senate, where Democrats, state Auditor Dave Yost and charter supporters hope to see additions made to a bill that the House passed on Thursday with broad support.

House Bill 2 includes roughly three dozen changes aimed at transparency, accountability and oversight of charter schools that are spending upward of $1 billion a year in state taxpayer money to educate 100,000-plus students.

“There is no such thing as a perfect bill. But this is a good bill that moves us in the right direction,” said Rep. Mike Dovilla, R-Berea, a prime sponsor.

Dovilla said the bill is the most-comprehensive charter-school legislation in a dozen years. A wave of recent studies and media reports have highlighted issues with charter-school academic performance, attendance counts, lease deals and lack of transparency.

In addition to the House bill, Gov. John Kasich included charter-school provisions in his two-year budget, and Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, has held informal meetings with experts to craft legislation likely to be introduced early next week.

(Read more at Dispatch)

How money is corrupting charter school purpose

The new charter school movement is a compilation of money, marketing and the mistaken use of the free market theory, which is suppressing the schools’ founding ideology that supported innovative, energetic educational think tanks and lab schools to enrich and inform public education.

The new charter school movement lacks innovation, has minimal quality control, promotes conflicts of interest, is a breeding ground for fraud and makes for-profit corporations wealthy on our tax dollars.

I supported the creation of charter schools. However, the charter school movement has morphed into a money machine and is bad for altruistic charters as well as traditional public schools. I think parents deserve choice. However, I also believe we should strive for quality choice, which means we need a strong authorizing board that values quality and sets high standards.

The word has gotten out that charter schools are huge money-making machines. Corporate and education management companies are raking in millions from taxpayers. Taxpayers, regardless of whether they have children in schools, might want to start paying attention to the huge amount of taxpayer dollars these companies are consuming with absolutely no transparency and no accountability. Hard-earned dollars are disappearing into a black hole.

Read more here

Some fixes still needed

State lawmakers are on the verge of enacting significant, much-needed reform to Ohio’s weak and ineffective system of charter-school regulation.

A strong version of House Bill 2 could be remembered as the turning point at which the legislature got serious about making charter schools a high-quality educational alternative, rather than just an opportunity for certain donors to make hay.

Unfortunately, the bill, despite a number of excellent provisions, was set back on Tuesday by an amendment that reopens a loophole through which failing charter schools for years have clung to existence. The bill as introduced had language aimed at stopping “sponsor-hopping”; that’s when a bad school with a responsible sponsor knows the sponsor is about to shut it down for its poor performance and, to avoid that fate, quickly finds another, less-ethical sponsor.

The original bill would have stopped this by requiring a poorly performing school to seek approval from the Ohio Department of Education before changing sponsors. But that provision was removed. The amendment says that ODE permission to change sponsors would be required only in a school’s first four years of operation, or if it had changed sponsors any time in the previous five years. This means that a school established longer than four years could change sponsors at will, no matter how poorly the school is performing.

That could allow a badly run charter school to continue spending tax dollars to ill-serve students for years.

If this change isn’t undone by the House before it votes on the bill, the Senate should be sure to do so.

(Read more at the Dispatch).

Will The Sun Ever Shine On Charter School Spending?

Ohio House Bill 2 has now been relegated to “lip-service” status on charter school reform after the GOP-dominated House Education Committee refused to adopt any meaningful changes (including recommendations by Republican State Auditor Dave Yost). When it was introduced, it was allegedly a bill that would be demonstrating that Ohio Republicans, including Governor Kasich, were serious about turning the corner on Ohio’s charter schools and becoming serious about holding them to the same level of accountability as Ohio’s real public schools.

Instead, House Bill 2 has fallen flat. As reported by the Ohio Education Association this week [emphasis-added]:

In the most recent action on HB 2, the House Education Committee adopted 20 amendments to the bill at its Tuesday, March 17 hearing. Most of the amendments consist of the Governor’s charter school recommendations proposed in the state budget bill (HB 64), which are heavily focused on charter school sponsor accountability.

Notably absent from the additions made to the bill were most of the reform recommendations submitted to the committee by State Auditor Dave Yost (R). The Auditor’s proposals were based on his recent on-site audits of numerous charter schools, which raised a variety of concerns about the lack of accountability and transparency.

Fellow Republicans on the House Education Committee rejected the State Auditor’s recommendations for more transparency on how tax dollars are spent by charter schools, tighter student truancy laws for charters, more accountable charter school governance and measures to prevent charter operators from using these schools as a “back-door means to acquire real estate.” The committee also rejected numerous amendments proposed by Democrats, some of which were attempts to include the Auditor’s proposals in the bill.

(Read more at Plunderbund).