Postponing reform again
Despite support for charter-school fix, legislative leaders take a pass
Charter-school reform once again has stalled in Ohio, and the blame lies with legislative leaders who failed to advance a bill that Ohio’s taxpayers and students need .
House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger’s decision not to allow a vote on House Bill 2 before the summer recess means that another school year will begin without the reforms desperately needed to hold charter schools accountable for their academic performance and their use of taxpayer dollars.
It is a disappointment to all those who want to see Ohio shed a national reputation for having one of the worst-managed charter-school programs in the country.
H.B. 2 is the strongest reform measure ever put forward, thanks in large part to changes made by the Senate, which passed it Thursday night and sent it back to the House, where a vote to accept the changes was expected to follow. Supporters say it had enough support in the House to pass unchanged.
So why isn’t it waiting for Gov. John Kasich’s signature today?
Rosenberger, a Clarksville Republican, and Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, said they want the bill to go to conference committee, which is what happens when the two chambers support different versions of a bill and those differences have to be worked out. But there is no good reason to hold the bill up when the Senate’s changes strengthened it greatly and a majority of House members favor those changes.
There’s no mystery, however, about who does benefit from derailing or at least delaying charter-school reform: the same for-profit charter-school operators that have resisted reform all along.
Some charter-school operators wield enormous influence. White Hat Management owner David Brennan and Altair Learning owner William Lager, have given lawmakers a combined $1.4 million in campaign contributions since 2009. White Hat operates Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy, an online charter, as well as the Life Skills drop-out-recovery schools; Altair operates the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), the state’s largest online charter school. All have performed abysmally.
Re-opening the bill for further debate now gives these interests another opportunity to weaken it.
One possibility for mischief is a behind-the-scenes push to have the state Department of Education change the way it evaluates the academic performance of charter schools. Currently, Ohio uses data on individual student performance, from one year to the next, to measure progress.
But operators of some schools — which, not coincidentally, score low by that measure — want the department to consider a more-simplistic method, used in California. Instead of using individual progress, California evaluators look at the performance of a school Postponing reform again | The Columbus Dispatch:
