Your charter schools

School choice. Doesn't that sound nice? It seems to ring of sounds we all hold dear: liberty, equality and the pursuit of excellence in education. The sad truth is, however, that Ohio's charter schools are a mess.

According to a study released late last year and commissioned by the pro-charter Fordham Institute, of the 68 criteria on which public and charter schools are compared, 56 of those criteria indicate that charter schools have a negative impact on students versus public schools. For example, the average Ohio charter school student completed 14 fewer days of learning in reading and 36 fewer days in math than the average public school student.

The results are so bad that a member of the pro-charter Hoover Institution told the City Club of Cleveland, "I am actually a pro-market kind of girl, but it doesn't seem to work in a choice environment for education."

Recent Ohio school report cards show charter schools receiving more Fs than As, Bs and Cs combined. Over 60 percent of the state's charter schools earned Ds or Fs last year, according to knowyourcharter.com, which gathers its information from the Ohio Department of Education.

Charter school performance is so bad that even Gov. Kasich has vowed to get tough with underperforming charter schools in 2015.

(Read more at the Sandusky Register)

School districts' plea to Columbus: Slash the number of tests our students have to take

The sheer number of state tests that Ohio students face each year is stifling creative learning, some educators say, and a coalition of Greater Cincinnati districts is lobbying state lawmakers to cut the number of mandated tests.

Mason, Deer Park and West Clermont school districts are among those lobbying to reduce the number of tests for students in grades 3-12 from two or three a year – depending on the grade level – to one. They recommend staggering English, math, science and social studies testing so that none take place in the same year. Some also want to eliminate Common Core-based testing for high schoolers, replacing those exams with the ACT college prep test for juniors.

"It would allow our teachers to be more innovative, creative and engaging with their instruction," Deer Park Superintendent Jeff Langdon told WCPO. "We're assessing our kids more than we ever have. And we're doing less teaching."

(Read more at WCPO.com.

More charter school controls wanted by the left and by Auditor Yost on the right

Charter school reform proposals are gaining broad support in Columbus, but there are voices on both the left and the right who say the $1 billion charter school movement in Ohio needs even stronger controls than what has been proposed.

Both Gov. John Kasich and Republicans in the Ohio House have made separate proposals to change the oversight and management of charter schools - public schools open to anyone, but which are privately-run.

A third proposal is coming soon from the Ohio Senate.

While both proposals so far are receiving praise for taking on some important issues, some want them to go further.

Auditor Yost wants clearer rules

State Auditor Dave Yost, also a Republican, said he plans to give the legislature his own suggested changes early next month. Those will include requiring more financial reporting by charter schools and the private companies that often run them, along with better definition of the role of those companies.

"I don't think that what needs to happen is on the table yet," Yost told The Plain Dealer.

Among Yost's concerns: that Ohio has no clear definition of when a charter school is acting as a private organization or when they take on a governmental role in educating children. That leaves private organizations receiving large amounts of tax money that don't have much accountability to the public.

The complaints from the left, coming this week from the Innovation Oho think tank and the Ohio Education Association, are mostly predictable. Both are groups that have been critics of charter schools.

But while they both want bad charter schools closed faster and want better financial reporting, they and most Democrats aren't fighting to shut down the charter movement, just the worst schools.

(Read more at Cleveland.com)

Ohio must stop increasing taxpayer subsidies for ill-regulated charters at expense of Ohio's public schools

There has got to be a better way to fund K-12th-grade charter schools than Ohio Gov. John Kasich's latest budget proposal that would further rob traditional public schools of millions of dollars in order to subsidize poorly regulated charter schools. The governor's plan would continue the cannibalization of Ohio's public schools.

That's especially so since the Ohio General Assembly itself has been all too willing over the years to pick the pockets of public schools to pad the pockets of the private interests behind for-profit charters and the lobbyists who represent them -- and far too unwilling to tighten Ohio's shamefully lax regulatory framework for charters.

This year, it appears charter reform supported by Kasich finally will emerge in the General Assembly. Increasing charters' taxpayer subsidy should await the results of that reform effort; pumping nearly $1 billion into their coffers, as the governor's plan envisions, is not the answer.

The Ohio General Assembly should also change a state law that puts traditional public school systems such as Akron on the hook for millions of dollars to provide special bus transportation to private and charter school students even beyond what they can afford to offer regular public students.

But let's go back to House Bill 64, the governor's two-year budget proposal. According to the Legislative Service Commission, a nonpartisan research group for state legislators, Kasich's budget would give charter schools nearly $1 billion in 2016 and 2017 by increasing the amount of state funding charters will receive for operating, base pay per student and facilities.

(Read more at Cleveland.com)

Legislators will change Gov. Kasich’s school-funding plan

Legislators are going to change Gov. John Kasich’s proposed school-funding plan. The only question is how.

House Republicans have turned to a soft-spoken veteran legislator and former Supreme Court justice to take the lead in deciding which levers to pull inside a complex proposal that would spend an additional $459 million over two years but leave more than half of all school districts with a funding cut.

“We are in the very preliminary stages,” said Rep. Bob Cupp, R-Lima, who served on the state’s high court from 2007 to 2012. “The (district funding) printouts we’ve seen have some anomalies. Until you pull it apart to see why it’s doing that, it’s hard to say whether it’s working properly or not.”

For example, of the new money in Kasich’s proposal, 74 percent would go to midsize and large urban districts, while rural districts as a group would see almost no new money.

The governor’s plan would provide maximum 10 percent annual funding increases to some relatively wealthy districts such as New Albany, Westerville and Indian Hill near Cincinnati, but it would cut funding for every district in Appalachian Ohio’s Perry and Adams counties.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled four times starting in 1997 that Ohio’s system of school funding relied too much on local property taxes, to the point that it left some students with an inadequate education. The court dropped jurisdiction of the case (before Cupp became a justice), and disagreement remains over whether the order was ever met.

(Read more at the Dispatch).

5 Reasons Charters Schools Need Real Reform

A recent Gongwer report serves to highlight the influence the charter school sector still holds over the Legislature, dominated by law makers who have taken political contributions from charter operators for almost 2 decades. In recent weeks it has become apparent that the Charter school lobby has been on a full court press, hiring the likes of former staffers for GOP House Speaker Batchelder to lobby law makers, and crisis communications companies like the one ran by Mark Weaver, a former high level GOP staffer.

The chair of the House Education Committee said Wednesday he is open to expediting the closure of failing charters, but also thinks failing traditional public schools ought to be addressed.

The comments from Rep. Bill Hayes (R-Harrison Twp.) followed testimony from the Ohio Education Association on charter overhaul legislation (HB 2*), which garnered additional support and has yet to draw an opponent.

Ohio Education Association President Becky Higgins said the measure is a starting point for strengthening charter laws. She outlined three principles that OEA and Innovation Ohio had laid out Tuesday as necessary for overhauling the community school sector. (See Gongwer Ohio Report, February 17, 2015)

She called for the accelerated closing of failing charters; making them subject to the same public records laws as other public entities; and a charter funding model that does not penalize district schools.

Chairman Hayes said after the meeting he would support faster closure if the state can identify when a school is definitely failing.

"But I'm also interested in...what are we doing about (district schools). Are we doing the same thing there?"

The effort to find equivalency between the crisis in the Ohio charter school sector and traditional public schools as a means to distract people from meaningful reforms has been a talking point promulgated by charter boosters since reform became a very real proposition. Parents, tax payers and law makers would be wise to ignore these efforts to distract from meaningful reform for a number of reasons.

1. There is no equivalency

Charter schools receive substantially more state aid than traditional schools, while being exempt from over 150 laws that traditional schools are subject to - all while picking and choosing their own students.

2. Measures to address struggling traditional schools have been taken

In 2012 we have the Cleveland plan to address Cleveland City Schools. In 2013 we had the Columbus Plan to address Columbus City Schools. Now, in 2014 we need a Charter School plan to address Ohio's charter school sector.

3. Ohio's Charter Schools are MUCH worse than Traditional Schools

According to the latest performance data from ODE, 80% of Ohio's Charter schools are failing - scoring a D or F on their performance Index score. Meanwhile, over 80% of traditional school buildings are rated C or higher. There simply is no quality equivalence here. Talk of such is nonsense designed to distract from necessary and meaningful reforms.

4. Ohio's Charter Schools are a criminal enterprise

Charter schools in Ohio have felons sitting on their unaccountable boards, and executives going to jail for theft and fraud on a constant basis. These are situations that simply do not exist in traditional public schools. There is no equivalency.

5. Ohio's Charter Schools have shady financial practices

Traditional public schools do not spend the majority of their revenues on rent, unlike a large number of charter operators, who are paying excessive rent to shell companies they control. Nor do Traditional public schools make profits so that the administrators can buy lavish Florida vacation homes, nor do traditional public schools spend money on trips to Turkey to further political causes. There is simply no equivalency to be had here.

Given just how much failure and fraud has been uncovered and reported, the days of giving the benefit of the doubt should be over. Anything less than directly addressing these very real problems is a failure on all our parts to protect the students who attend these schools and the tax payers who are paying for them.

Law makers need to ignore the rhetoric of the charter school lobby and deliver real meaningful reform that will banish the charlatans and incompetents from the Ohio educational landscape forever.