Revere school board requests changes in Ohio laws on charter schools

For the five members of the Revere Board of Education, enough is enough when it comes to charter school regulations in the state of Ohio.

The board last week unanimously passed a resolution asking Gov. John Kasich and the Ohio General Assembly to “enact meaningful laws to ensure greater accountability and transparency among Ohio charter schools.” Essentially, the board was requesting laws that would fundamentally level the educational playing field and hold charter schools to the same standards as those required of traditional public schools.

“As a board, we are enacting a resolution to change state law regarding charter schools,” board member Diana Sabitsch said before reading the lengthy document into the meeting record.

In addition to changing state law, the resolution requests actions to stop the proliferation of poor-performing charter schools and to establish a separate funding stream for those schools that “does not drain valuable resources from Ohio’s public education system.”

(Read more at Ohio.com).

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.

Read more at 10th Period

Senate hears from proponents of tougher charter-school rules in Ohio

Concerned that Ohio’s charter schools do not provide enough detail about how they spend taxpayer money, the state auditor, Ohio newspapers and a Cleveland-area charter operator urged the Senate to take action.

A Senate subcommittee continues to debate a pair of bills designed to make a major overhaul of Ohio’s much-maligned charter-school laws, which critics say have turned the state into the Wild West of charter-school operations.

The Senate version of the bill, which is more wide-ranging than the House-passed version, contains a number of recommendations from Auditor Dave Yost. He stressed on Wednesday that the nonprofit and for-profit operators who receive most of a school’s money to run day-to-day operations need to provide more detail.

The current requirement, Yost said, is very general. He proposed a more-detailed accounting of how operators spend taxpayer money.

“It’s just one piece of paper,” he said. “It does not disclose any proprietary information or disclose how the company is run. The footnote just shows how money is being spent on instruction."

The Senate bill includes Yost’s operator requirement, but the House resisted operator-disclosure provisions, arguing it did not want to impose public reporting standards on private companies.

Breakthrough Schools, a nonprofit operator that runs 10 charter schools in Cleveland and will soon run 11, offered broad support of the charter-school bills and also called for more openness.

“Of primary importance is transparency,” said John Zitzner, a founder of Breakthrough Schools. “ Students attending schools that are sponsored and operated in a transparent, responsible manner will be more likely to succeed.”

(Read more at the Dispatch)

How Ohio funds charter schools has caused some disput

The billion dollar mark illustrates how important the charter -or community school- system has become in Ohio.

Not only is state spending on charter schools going up, nationwide investors think there is profit to be made. The real estate company Entertainment Properties Trust usually builds movie theaters, ski resorts, and retail properties. But here was the CEO, David Brain, a couple years ago on CNBC saying charters schools are the strongest part of their portfolio.

“The industry is growing about 12-14% a year so it’s a high growth, very stable, recession resistant business. It’s a public payer. The state is the payer on this category. And you do business in states with fiscally sound treasuries, then it’s a very solid business.”

But how the state funds charters is a matter of some dispute in Ohio. The state sends money to each public school district for its own schools but also for any charter school that kids in that district may attend. Ohio starts by earmarking a foundation of $5800 for each and every public school student and then holds back some of that. The Ohio Department of Education Budget Director Aaron Rausch says the percentage a district gets to keep will vary.

“There is a state share percentage that is applied to the calculated aid for a traditional public school that is between 5 and 90%.”

A poor district might get more than $5 thousand dollars per student in state aid while a rich district could get less than $500 a student. But if a child in that district goes to a charter school, the district may have to pass along more than it gets from Columbus. Damon Asbury of the Ohio School Boards Association says charters will get the full $5800.

“So that charter school student is taking with him or her a lot more money than the kids who remain in the district. They therefore have fewer resources for the remaining students because the charter school is taking a disproportionate share.”

So where do districts get the extra money to send to charter schools?

“Local tax revenues.”

(Read more at NPR)

Senate’s charter-school bill praised by past critic of Ohio laws

The co-author of a scathing 2014 report assessing charter-school laws in Ohio said new legislation aimed at improving charter-school oversight and accountability would “significantly strengthen” state regulations.

Andy Smarick of Boston-based Bellwether Education Partners found that after more than 15 years, Ohio charter-school laws favored for-profit management companies, are wrought with lax oversight and allow poorly performing schools to remain open while doing little to attract the kind of superior charter schools being established in other states.

“Chartering is doing extraordinarily well elsewhere,” Smarick said yesterday in addressing a Senate subcommittee that is hearing testimony on a pair of charter-school bills, including one passed by the House. He noted that urban charter students in several states are outperforming students in traditional urban districts.

“But as you know, the same researchers found that the charter results in Ohio are not nearly as strong,” he said. “Your urban charter students aren’t benefiting from the gains we’re witnessing elsewhere.”

Smarick said Senate Bill 148 would address a number of key problems with Ohio charter-school laws, by improving the ability of the state to hold sponsors accountable, including a new rating system; ensuring that sponsors don’t use state funding on non-school functions; preventing sponsors from selling services to their schools; and stopping “sponsor hopping,” in which a poorly performing school closes but quickly reopens simply by finding a new sponsor.

(Read more at the Dispatch)

Legislators refer e-school attendance-tampering allegations to education department auditor

State lawmakers said Monday they have referred allegations to authorities that an online charter school failed to dis-enroll hundreds of chronically truant students in order to pad its rolls.

Ohio Virtual Academy, which serves about 13,000 students statewide, said it follows all state reporting laws and enrollment guidelines.

Reps. Bill Hayes and Teresa Fedor, the House Education Committee's top Republican and Democrat, told The Associated Press they have forwarded an anonymous whistleblower's email to state Auditor Dave Yost, whose office has made school attendance fraud a priority.

A school's enrollment dictates the size of its monthly payments from the state.

"My question is how long has it been going on. For years? I don't know," Fedor said. "This is a serious gap and it's a serious issue if these e-schools are getting money that they shouldn't get."

Hayes also involved the Ohio Department of Education and alerted the school, whose authorizer said it is conducting its own review.

The whistleblower provided a list of more than 400 specific students listed as truant, some for most of the school year. The email comes amid highly charged debate at the Ohio Statehouse over charter school regulations viewed as among the weakest in the country. Recent legislation has tightened up the law and a pending bill with bipartisan sponsorship has a hearing this week.

(Readm ore at Tribtown.com)