Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- There's no clear magic bullet in Ohio's new charter school reform bill that will go up for final approval from the state House and Senate Wednesday, but it addresses recent charter school controversies.
The bill makes several small changes that, as a whole, will tighten operations of a $1 billion charter school industry that lags behind traditional public schools and is the subject of national ridicule, even from national charter school advocates.
Among the items adjusted or added to the final compromise version, reached Tuesday afternoon, are a new "White Hat rule," an adjustment to how ratings of charter school oversight agencies are calculated and a cautious approach to a charter school request to evaluate schools with a new measure.
Still intact, with only minor adjustments, are changes designed to distance the often-cozy relationships between for-profit charter school operating companies and the school boards that govern the schools.
Among them:
-- Limits were put on contracts that schools can sign, aimed at preventing conflicts of interest.
-- Private and for-profit charter school operators will have to provide more information to the public about how they spend tax dollars they are paid to run the schools. In some cases, schools pay operators 90 percent or more of the tax dollars received, but the operators have been able to keep how they spend the money secret.
The books won't be anywhere near as open as a public school district's, but they will have to provide more detail.
-- The Ohio Department of Education will start to publicize which operators run each school and give information to the public about the academic performance of the schools that each operator runs. That will let families know the track record of the Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure | cleveland.com:
