The Ohio legislature should firmly reject a push by the state’s largest e-school operator — a heavyweight GOP donor — to allow charter schools to escape new accountability standards.
The state adopted those standards in October as its charter-school reputation was circling the drain. Ohio had become a national laughingstock for its weak charter-school oversight, and it was embroiled in scandal. A high-ranking official at the Ohio Department of Education was caught inflating ratings of online-charter sponsors, deceiving the legislature and taxpayers. And a $71 million federal charter school grant was left in limbo as a result.
The cure — House Bill 2 — put the state’s charter schools on the road to respectability. Now, barely three weeks after those reforms took effect on Feb. 1, the wheedling is underway to water them down.
Representatives of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) are said to be leading efforts to insert favorable exceptions into another bill that could get a full House vote on Wednesday. William Lager, the founder and operator of ECOT, was the second largest individual donor to Republican lawmakers in the last election cycle, giving $393,500, plus another $202,000 in 2015.
It is no small irony that the bill up for consideration, Senate Bill 3, seeks to exempt 120 of the top-performing districts from some state requirements. Successful schools have earned some slack. But it takes real nerve to suggest cutting failures a break.
Among the changes the charters wish to see slipped into the bill is a delay for attendance-tracking requirements at e-schools. The schools want credit (and money) for offering at least 900 hours of instruction to each student enrolled, regardless of whether students actually participate in all those hours.
Tax dollars should be tied to actual performance.
The idea of paying e-schools for hours offered rather than for instruction received is “simply preposterous,” said Chad Aldis, a vice president with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which sponsors 11 charter schools in Ohio and has been a voice for reform. “At a time when the legislature has cleared up a lot of the things that crept into our charter-school law, this would be a huge step backward.”
The charter schools also are arguing for a “safe-harbor provision” that would shield them temporarily from being downgraded under the new evaluations. Of course, charter sponsors knew these evaluations were coming for years. Meanwhile, students don’t get a timeout.
And the charters want Ohio to track academic progress using the “similar-students measure," which, not surprisingly, made California’s failing charter schools look better. Instead of comparing student achievement using common, objective standards— performance on state tests, graduation rates and value added (how much a student improved over a school year) — challenged charters would be compared to schools with similar students. Giving schools a built-in excuse for failure, because they serve kids who are poor or speak limited English, is not a recipe to improve education.
Charter schools are pushing back because they know they’re going to look bad. But looking bad isn’t the problem: Failing to educate kids is.
When the reforms were passed, the Fordham Institute predicted the following: “If implemented with fidelity, the bill’s provisions hold the promise of dramatically improving the educational outcomes for 120,000 students who attend more than 350 Ohio charter schools,” Fordham said last year. The key word here is “fidelity.”
Lawmakers should stiffen their backbone, tell the charters “no,” and stay the course.