Ohio Charter School Regulation: The Flimflam Continues
The Ohio state government’s long history of deception in the evaluation of charter schools drags on. We are a super-majority Republican state without normal checks and balances. The legislature, Governor John Kasich, and the state board of education are all in the pocket of the charter lobbies. There isn’t accountability. There isn’t even any transparency about which numbers are being used to evaluate charter schools or the ways those numbers are applied and misapplied when some kind of report is demanded.
In response to a request from the U.S. Department of Education, at the end of January, the Ohio Department of Education sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education to explain how Ohio regulates its charter schools. You may remember that in the fall, the U.S. Department of Education delayed giving Ohio the huge $71 million grant that the U.S. Department of Education had already awarded to Ohio in the summer for the purpose of expanding charter schools and taking over and charterizing the school district of Youngstown.
The U.S. Department of Education was shamed into demanding more documentation from Ohio when all of the state’s major newspapers covered and editorialized again and again about David Hansen’s charter rating system that “accidentally” left out the notorious on-line charter sector that includes the politically powerful Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, the Ohio Virtual Academy (a K12, Inc. operation), and some of David Brennan’s White Hat Management dropout recovery schools. The press had exposed that David Hansen (husband of Beth Hansen—then Governor Kasich’s chief of staff and now chair of Kasich’s presidential campaign) was the person who had written the federal grant proposal that won the award of $71 million. He submitted the grant proposal only days before he was, under great pressure from the press, fired for his “flawed” charter rating system. After all this, the U.S. Department of Education capitulated to pressure from the press in Ohio and demanded that, before Ohio Ohio Charter School Regulation: The Flimflam Continues | janresseger:
