North Side charter school board quits amid concerns

Following the mass exodus of the board of a North Side charter school, the sponsor of Imagine Columbus Primary Academy says it might close the school.

The North Central Ohio Educational Service Center said Tuesday it is considering “remedial action” against the school’s Virginia-based management company, Imagine Schools Inc., because the school board failed “to hold a meeting since January.”

In a letter sent Tuesday to Imagine, Educational Service Center Superintendent James Lahoski gave operators five days to respond to concerns, warning that the school could be put on probation, have operations suspended or its contract terminated.

Charter schools are privately operated with public tax dollars. Under Ohio law, the schools must have a board that meets at least six times a year.

The action comes less than 24 hours after Imagine appointed five new board members to the Columbus Primary school board on Monday night. They replaced six members who resigned in recent weeks amid ongoing concerns about a high-cost building lease, teacher turnover and adequate services for students.

(Read more that the Dispatch)

Trio found guilty in bribery scheme involving charter school

A federal jury found three defendants guilty on Tuesday in a bribery and kickback scheme at a now-defunct Ohio charter school.

Government prosecutors had charged that two board members, the superintendent and an outside contractor for Arise! Academy in Dayton had shared nearly $500,000 and other perks as part of the scam.

Testimony in the two-week trial ended on Friday in U.S. District Court in Columbus. The jury began deliberating on Monday.

Shane K. Floyd, 42, the school’s superintendent and chief operating officer and a resident of Strongsville, near Cleveland, and board member Christopher D. Martin, 44, of Springfield, were found guilty of bribery, conspiracy to illegally use federal money and lying to the FBI.

Consultant Carl L. Robinson, 47, of Durham, N.C., was found guilty of bribery and conspiracy to illegal use of federal money.

A fourth defendant, board member Kristal N. Screven, 39, of Dayton, pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge on May 8.

(Read more that the Dispatch)

Even Scaled Back, PARCC Still Has Big Problems

The Fordham Foundation has a good blog post detailing the impacts that PARCCs proposal to scale back testing would have

The spring 2015 testing window for PARCC extended from mid-February to mid-May. That’s a long time. Of course, schools were not required to administer exams throughout the full testing window—they could use as few or as many of the days within the window as they needed. But for students, parents, and educators, the three-month window probably made “testing season” feel unusually long and drawn out. (In contrast, Ohio’s old state exams were administered over the course of roughly one month.) It also meant that testing interrupted classroom instruction for more of the school year—and earlier.

The reason for the long testing window was fairly simple: The assessment system included two exams. The first, the “performance-based assessment” (PBA), was given in February–March, and the second— the “end-of-year assessment” (EOY)—was given in April–May. The PBAs focused on students’ application of knowledge and skills (e.g., solving multi-step problems, explaining mathematical reasoning), while the EOYs focused more on traditional assessment items like reading comprehension or straightforward multiple-choice math problems. See for yourself the differences in the sample PARCC exams.

But starting in spring 2016, PARCC will be administered in one thirty-day testing window, occurring in the traditional testing period of April–May. Importantly, while the earlier PBA testing window is erased, some of PARCC’s performance-based tasks will be preserved in next year’s summative exam.

This is clearly movement in the right direction, but fixes just a fraction of the problems PARCC has, and has created. We detailed these problems, with our suggested fixes a few weeks ago. We identified 4 broad areas that needed to be addressed. Testing time, technology problems, test content problems, and high stakes.

Law makers cannot simply cut back on some tests and think the job is done. Are we still going to have schools struggle to deploy tech heavy testing solutions, on unstable software platforms with inadequate bandwidth? Combining the PBA and the EOY testing into a single test is likely to exacerbate the content problems, not alleviate them - and yet more change applied to a system under constant change isn't an appropriate environment to have mis-matched stakes for students, teachers and schools.

The Ohio legislature needs to address the full range of problems, not just the politically convenient changes PARCC has recently proposed in the face of losing millions of dollars in funding.

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)