First Posted: 3/20/2015
This is a moment of rare opportunity in Ohio politics. Everyone — Republicans and Democrats, Gov. John Kasich, strong advocates for public schools and supporters of school choice – agrees that Ohio’s charter schools need fixing.
But first, it is important not to confuse private schools with charter schools. They are not one and the same. Private schools charge tuition; Charter schools are publicly funded primary and secondary schools. They are considered public schools, so tuition is free. However, charter schools have more flexibility in how they operate than traditional public schools. In Ohio, a charter school is operated under a contract with a sponsoring entity.
The Ohio charter school system, which receives roughly $1 billion in public funding and serves more than 120,000 students, has become a national embarrassment.
“Be very glad that you have Nevada, so you are not the worst,” Stanford University researcher Margaret Raymond recently said at a national conference on school choice in Colorado, according to a report at Cleveland.com.
The myriad problems with the system have been well-documented but most jarring are too many poor outcomes in a weakly regulated system fueled by the power of political money. A study at Stanford found students learn less in Ohio’s charter schools than in traditional districts by a margin of nearly three fewer weeks of equivalent instruction in reading and more than a month in math.
House Bill 2, now moving through the Ohio Legislature, is an opportunity to get things right. While the current version of the bill improves upon the original, it still falls short of improving accountability for the spending of public dollars. Transparency equals accountability, and the problem is particularly acute with the common practice of sponsoring organizations paying third parties to operate the schools.
Advocates of greater secrecy are simply wrong when they say taxpayers should have no meaningful ability to track what happens to the money after it gets to those third-party operators. To hear them talk, it’s no different than the school district hiring Bob’s Lawn Service to maintain the football field. You wouldn’t be able to see Bob’s financial records, so why should you be able to see the school operator’s books?
Well, it’s not Bob’s Lawn Service. State Auditor Dave Yost has it right when he says that charter operators aren’t cutting the lawns, they are taking over the essential functions of providing a quality education – a core responsibility of government under the Ohio Constitution. Extra scrutiny should come with that territory.
We would require that checkbook-level detail be available under Ohio’s open records law to track the expenditure of public funds by charter schools, just as it is for public schools.
Anything short of that will not provide the necessary accountability for what is happening to almost $1 billion in tax dollars and, more importantly, to our children. The Ohio House of Representatives should amend House Bill 2 to ensure that happens.
