Two Youngstown charter schools seek unionization

Education in Youngstown may once again face changes- but this time from two charter schools.

Summit Academy and Summit Academy Secondary Schools, in Youngstown, announced on Friday the decision to form their own teachers union.

The potential union, the Summit Academy Youngstown Education Association filed authorization cards with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), vying for the opportunity to participate in the Valley's education as an exclusive bargaining representative.

An NLRB-supervised election to certify SAYEA should take place within a month, according to a news release.

According to the release, if a majority of educators and staff vote to form the Summit Academy Youngstown Education Association (SAYEA), it will be the first charter school union in Youngstown and will be affiliated with the 121,000 members of the Ohio Education Association.

The release says that the decision of educators and staff to seek representation was inspired by the mission of Summit Academy, namely the commitment "to providing an extraordinary, safe, and nurturing learning environment where students will reach their full potential."

According to the media release, teachers at Summit Academy feel that the unionization would help them advocate for their students, many of whom are disabled.

Charter schools misspend millions of Ohio tax dollars as efforts to police them are privatized

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

A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.

Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival .

And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.

That’s because Yost and his predecessors, unable to audit all charter schools with limited staffing and overwhelmed by the dramatic growth in the schools, have farmed out most charter-school audits to private accounting firms.

Last year, these private firms found misspending in one of the 200 audits of charter schools they conducted, or half of 1 percent, while the state’s own police force of auditors found misspending in one of six audits, or 17 percent of the time.

“You don’t even have to understand audits to know that something is broken there,” said Kyle Serrette, director of Education at the Center for Popular Democracy.

(Read more at the Akron Beacon Journal)

‘Cap’ on state aid shortchanges central Ohio districts, school officials say

Ohio uses a formula to allocate money to schools based on their needs, taking into account the number of poor students, non-English speakers and special-education students, as well as property values and other criteria.

Based on that formula, Columbus City Schools should be getting about $360 million a year in state financial aid, according to district Treasurer Stan Bahorek. Instead, it gets $275.5 million, about 76 percent of what the formula says, because state lawmakers have “capped” the amount that state aid can increase for any district in a single year.

And because lawmakers haven’t applied the same cap to charter schools, that means Columbus must pass along significantly more money for each charter student than it gets for students who choose to remain in the district. Once Columbus has passed through $136.8 million to charters, nearly $22 million for private-school vouchers and about $2.8 million in other deductions, it gets to keep a little more than $122 million to educate its students.

The charters get more state aid to educate their 18,000 students than Columbus gets to educate its 48,500 students.

“If we were getting the $360 million (that the formula allocates), the numbers would make a little more sense to us,” Bahorek said. “For a school (system) that’s on the cap, this is why it’s so painful.”

(Read more at the Dispatch)

Big Change Coming For Next Year’s Round Of PARCC Tests

A consortium of state education leaders have voted to make a big change to the standardized test known as the PARCC. The PARCC’s Governing Board, which includes state education commissioners and superintendents from around the country, has decided to scale back on testing to just one window late in the year. This year there were two testing periods, with the first in February.

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