Ohio Fails to Move Forward to Oversee Charter School Sponsors
After years of delay and the waste of millions of public tax dollars awarded to poorly operated charter schools, finally early last October, the Ohio legislature passed a bill to regulate charter schools. Here is how the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell described the new law’s provisions that include, “changes designed to distance the often-cozy relationships between for profit charter school operating companies and the school boards that govern the schools.” The big charter management companies that have had “sweeps” contracts that forward over 90 percent of the schools’ operating budgets to the management company without reporting about how the money is used will now be required “to provide more information to the public about how they spend tax dollars they are paid to run the schools.” And there is a new “White Hat” rule designed to correct the situation that arose last month when “an Ohio Supreme Court ruling… allowed prominent for-profit charter operator White Hat Management to keep desks and computers it bought for schools using tax dollars, even after the schools closed. The court let White Hat keep the property because its contract with the school allowed it. The new provision blocks any such agreement and requires that leftover assets from closed schools, after bills are paid, go to the Ohio Department of Education to distribute to school districts.”
What was left out of Ohio’s new charter school regulations was any way for the state to regulate the sponsors that have proliferated in a state that permits non-profits to collect oversight fees for charter schools they approve and agree to oversee. Too many of these organizations have been neglecting their responsibility as sponsors at the same time they have been collecting so-called “walking-around-money” for the job they have persistently neglected to perform. David Hansen who was Ohio’s former chief of school choice designed a plan to evaluate charter authorizers by the test scores of the students in the schools the sponsors oversee, but he quietly left out the huge, notorious on-line charters from his rating system. The on-line academies are politically powerful, and Hansen was forced to resign last July after it was widely reported in the state’s newspapers that he had favored the politically connected. Richard Ross, until January when he retired as Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, spent several months last fall developing a new rating system for charter Ohio Fails to Move Forward to Oversee Charter School Sponsors | janresseger:
