Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, July 31, 2006
Charter school exceptions .. or loopholes?
Reporting today’s story about the charter school cap and charter sponsors in Ohio, I learned a few things I didn’t know about our pioneering, year-old charter school authorizer law. Among them:
• Good charter schools outside Ohio can bring more charter schools to our state. OK, I followed the logic in Ohio’s new law that says a charter school management company that has a good performing school (rated in continuous improvement or better) can win permission to open a new school. So suppose a company has 20 schools in Ohio and two of them are scoring well, they can win permission from the state to open two more schools.
But here’s what I didn’t know. Suppose none of that company’s 20 Ohio schools are scoring high enough to earn it any new schools, but the same company operates two schools with a good state rating in Pennsylvania. Based on the performance of the out-of-state schools, the company could still earn the right to open two new schools in Ohio.
• There is confusion over whether the Ohio Department of Education has the right to monitor and review the performance of most of the state’s charter school sponsors. Language in House Bill 364, which last year created this new sponsoring arrangement, apparently was not clear in defining the education department as the overseer of sponsors who were already operating in the state.
The education department is so unsure, it asked the state board to send lawmakers a resolution urging them to create a legal fix to make this line of accountability clear. But as of right now, there technically is no accountability for most charter sponsors.
• A year into the new sponsor law, performance reviews for sponsors are just getting off the ground. Setting aside the question of the education department’s legal power to oversee sponsors for a moment, officials told me for the story they are just now devising a process to review sponsors.
The new sponsoring law places a great deal of responsibility on those sponsors. They are in charge of the day-to-day monitoring of the schools under their purview and the law makes it the sponsor’s call to decide when a school should be placed on probation, shut down or other action taken.
The education department says it is dead serious about holding sponsors accountable and will expect them to take corrective action with low scoring schools. This issue is absolutely crucial to the future of the charter school movement in Ohio. Bad charters make the case against them easier and dampens the charter school lobby’s clout with lawmakers.
• School districts can create “conversion” charter schools at will. Under conversion, a rarely used option, districts can take an existing school and allow it to operate independently under contract with the local school board. The school is still considered part of the district — for instance its test scores still count in the district’s averages.
The new Dayton Technology Design High School is a conversion school, although it’s an odd case in that there was really no existing school that was converted. It’s a new school completely, but it uses “existing resources” of the school district. Or at least that’s how it was explained to me.
Expect more districts to use the conversion charter option as No Child Left Behind sanctions favor creating more charters as a remedy for poor test performance. The conversion process is fairly painless and still allows the district a measure of control.
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Fine print in cap allows for more charters
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
An Ohio law passed last year limited the number of charter schools to the 285 that were open as of last summer. Or did it?
This fall, there will be 305 charter schools open in Ohio. One Dayton school is among 28 that will launch this fall.
How is the charter movement continuing to grow? The same law that created a “cap” allows three avenues for new schools, even if the number exceeds that cap.
“I don’t believe the intent was to stop growth,” said Todd Hanes, executive director for community schools at the Ohio Department of Education. “I believe the intent was to slow growth.”
There are three ways charter schools can be added despite the cap:
• Companies operating charter schools can open one school for every school they manage that is performing well by state standards — even if the original school is not in Ohio.
• Schools that applied to open last year but did not receive charters in a lottery are on a waiting list and can earn a charter if any charter school closes. About nine schools opened last year closed and three merged with other schools.
• School districts are always permitted to convert schools into charter schools. The Dayton Technology Design High School, launching this fall, is a conversion school.
Ohio’s charter movement continues to change rapidly, with Dayton leading the way.
Statewide about 15 percent of charter schools changed sponsors after just one year of a new sponsoring law, but in Dayton, nearly a quarter of all charters changed sponsors.
Those shifts have created concern that poor-performing schools could evade accountability by jumping to new sponsors and the state education department is just now putting in rules to try to prevent it.
“We’ve seen a lot of sponsor-hopping,” said Lisa Zellner of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “Bad schools fear they are going to be shut down, as they should be, leave one sponsor for another hoping their funding won’t be interrupted.”
Todd Hanes, Ohio’s executive director for community schools, said sponsor shopping is not allowed. Sponsors overseeing poor schools have an obligation to address the problems.
“I don’t necessarily see this as a loophole in the law,” he said. “First and foremost, good monitoring is an expectation of good sponsorship. Beyond that, schools do move.”
Charters have newfound mobility after changes to state law last year. The education department now approves sponsors that oversee the schools.
Sponsors can be school districts, universities or nonprofit groups and each can manage up to 50 charter schools.
The state continues to approve new sponsors — nine since last summer — bringing the number to 67 across Ohio.
In Dayton, the biggest change came when four Richard Allen charter schools switched to Kids Count of Dayton, a new sponsor group, from Cincinnati-based St. Aloysius Orphanage.
Krista Allen, superintendent overseeing Kids Count’s nine schools statewide, said it was founded by the board of directors for the West Park Academy, a Dayton private school.
But two other local charters with past academic or management troubles also changed sponsors after one year.
Academy of Dayton’s contract was not renewed by the Toledo-based Ohio Council of Community Schools for poor academic performance but found a new sponsor in the Cleveland-based Ashe Cultural Center.
Rhea Academy, involved in a financial disagreement with the state auditor, also changed to Educational Resource Consultants in Cincinnati from the Columbus-based Buckeye Community Hope Foundation.
Hanes said his office will soon launch an evaluation process for sponsors that would keep a school on probation, suspension or termination from changing sponsors. And evaluators will be looking at how sponsors handle low-rated schools.
“Without question, the expectation would be to place on probation any school failing to meet the expectations of the sponsor,” he said.
Sponsors that fail evaluation could see the schools they operate reduced or other sanctions. But one curve ball is that the education department may not have authority over all the sponsors. The state board of education has asked lawmakers to make it clear that it can evaluate sponsors that were operating before House Bill 364 was passed. Now just 18 sponsors are directly accountable to the department, Hanes said.
Even so, evaluations will start this fall for 20 sponsors.
Zellner said more oversight is needed as the state will spend half a billion dollars for charter schools this school year.
“It’s good to see them moving forward on these things,” she said. “The question is if we are in a situation where it is already too little and too late.”
UPDATE: Click here for more on the new sponsor rules.
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