Policy Matters Ohio Report on Another Charter School Management Company

John Higgens at the ABJ digs into a timely Policy Matters Ohio report on Imagine Schools, a Virginia-based education management organization (EMO) that has set up an run charter schools in Ohio, including one in Akron near the old Rolling Acres Mall. Complaints from the operating boards of the schools sound very much like those of the White Hat schools currently suing their EMO.

From the executive summary of the report:

Imagine Schools, Inc., is privately owned by Dennis Bakke, a high-profile and outspoken supporter of education vouchers and charters. In 2004, Bakke bought an existing management company, renamed it Imagine and set out to expand. Bakke is former chairman of AES Corporation, a global energy generation and distribution company and author of the popular business book Joy at Work. He made news in 2009 when an internal memo he wrote was published in news reports; in it, Bakke told Imagine managers and school leaders that Imagine-managed schools are “our schools” because the taxpayer money flowing to the schools is “our money.” He also encouraged his employees to disregard and minimize the power of appointed school boards.

In Ohio, Imagine school board members have resigned in frustration over what they describe as corporate disregard for the governance role, mandated by law, that charter school boards are to exercise over their schools. “We finally concluded that what was desired from the administration [of the school] was for the board to be a rubber stamp rather than a governing body,” said one former board member interviewed for this study. [emphasis added.]

Higgens piece relates the report about Imagine to the situation with White Hat:

The striking similarity between the Imagine report and the White Hat lawsuit is the power that both for-profit corporations hold over the nonprofit school boards that are their employers — at least on paper.

''One huge issue is how hard it is for these school boards, these governing boards, to break away from Imagine or White Hat,'' said the report's author, Piet van Lier.

Best of all is White Hat's response:'''This is not the place to argue about the politics of charter schools,' according to White Hat's statement. 'That is properly left to the legislature.' Probably true that a legislative solution would be best, but if one is proposed you can bet on a phalanx of White Hat lobbyists working to kill it.

Personally I don't think everyone involved with charter schools is out to make a buck. Some good people work for charters and occasionally good people even start them. But it's increasingly clear that the current model in many states including Ohio is allowing some EMO operators to bilk the schools and by extension the taxpayers.

Charters Sue White Hat

Another story I'm working on is the lawsuit launched by ten White Hat charters against the company. John Higgins at the ABJ does an excellent job of laying out the issues.

This arises from a law that mysteriously passed during the '06 lame duck session that essentially gives contract protection to education management organizations (EMOs) the for-profit corporations that are contracted to run many charter schools, and in some cases (such as White Hat) appear for all practical purposes to be one and the same as the charter school.

For example the White Hat website doesn't portray the company as a management company, but gives the impression that the company owns Hope Academies and Life Skills. On the website, those schools are called "ventures" of White Hat, as opposed to, say, clients.

As Plunderbund points out, White Hat founder David Brennan has been a leading contributor to Republican candidates, including the current top of the slate. The press release accompanying the lawsuit accuses White Hat of leveraging that political capital to get the sweetheart protection law.

This is actually the second time charters have sued to have the law overturned. So one thing I'm digging into is what happened the first time.

The EMO protection law is terrible for everyone involved -- for taxpayers, for students in charter schools, charter school advocates. Hopefully this lawsuit will finally shame the legislature into getting rid of it.

Jim Renacci Loses Dealership; Incoherently Politicizes It

Republican Congressional Candidate Jim Renacci has announced that his GM dealership in Wadsworth will close. OK, not so much "announced" as "turned into a bizarre, internally contradictory campaign talking point." His press release, reproduced here on ANN, asserts the following:

The GOP candidate for the 16th Congressional District is closing the doors to his Wadsworth car business -- a casualty, he says in a news release, of GM's deal with Uncle Sam.

Today, Jim Renacci announced that his Wadsworth Chevrolet dealership, which was targeted for closure following the government takeover of General Motors in 2009, will close its doors next month. Renacci was first notified in May of 2009 that the dealership was one of over a thousand nationwide that would be terminated.


* * *

Renacci stepped in and acquired it in an effort to save local jobs and shortly thereafter he successfully stabilized the once troubled business. Nevertheless, Renacci's franchise was ultimately dismantled as a result of the government takeover of GM.

"When the Obama administration first made clear its intention to take over General Motors and to dictate to small business owners whether or not they could continue to operate privately owned businesses"”which in some cases had been their family's livelihood for over 50 years, I feared we were witnessing one of the darkest days in American capitalism. And today, as I was forced to face my employees and tell them that we lost the fight and they've lost their jobs"”it was clear that my fears were not misplaced. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to overcome the government's "˜restructuring plan' from the outside"”but I am now left even more committed to restructuring our government's plans from the inside," Renacci said.

Wow. We have so much wrongness here it's like on of those "How many mistakes can you find in this picture" puzzles.

Take just the opening graf in which he claims the dealership is a casualty of GM's deal with the government. I think he's overstating the extent to which the government dictated dealer closures as a condition of the bailout. It's more like the bailout enabled closures that the company wanted to make. When the closures were announced, it was GM brass insisting that they needed to trim their overextended dealer network to cut costs and right size the company. It's car companies that are now fighting state efforts to pass dealer protection laws.

But more fundamentally than that, if GM hadn't made the "deal with Uncle Sam" Renacci would have lost his franchise anyway because there wouldn't be a GM any more. The choice wasn't between a bailout and running the company a different way, it was between a bailout and no more GM. Most of the time when Republicans criticize the bailout they are at least honest enough to acknowledge that GM would have gone bust, they just dispute the administration's assessment that it would have wrecked the economy.

The coherent criticisms of the bailouts have either maintained that free market principles are so important that the risk of big firms folding is worth it, or argued that the bailouts were too kind to the companies -- that they didn't put austerity conditions on the bailed out firms. Renacci seems to have found a third way -- the government should cut spending everywhere except that it should provide unconditional bailouts where they would benefit him personally.

Finally Renacci's little snit goes against his whole campaign theme. In his latest KNR ads he avers that when times are tough, you have to tighten your belt. Well, if GM is going to tighten its belt, it needs to shed some tonnage. Belt tightening isn't as much fun to talk about when you are the fat that gets trimmed, eh Jim?

Credit where it's due, at least he didn't revive the debunked conspiracy theory about only Republican dealerships getting axed.

In case you thought Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22 was too broad brush, no. He's alive and well and running for Congress in the Ohio 16th.

Charter Schools and Unlikely Ally for Strickland

Interesting post last week on Flypaper, the blog of the Fordham Foundation, a free-market oriented, pro-charters think tank with roots in Dayton. They propose some logrolling regarding Gov. Strickland's proposal to freeze the tax cut for a year. As FP correctly notes, a ten percent cut in ed. funding would devastate Ohio charters.

The proposal is to get charter backing for the tax plan in exchange for passing/signing a Husted bill poking holes in the current charter moratorium. FB says it would allow sponsors of "high-performing" charter schools to set up new schools.

To the extent this is a real trial balloon it's something worth considering. Recall that the charter industry ran attack ads against certain legislators deemed unfriendly during the budget battle. Having the charter industry as an ally, however temporary, would be a help at a time when friends are hard to come by.

I'd be all for a little legislative logrolling, but the Husted bill has serious flaws. First off, in addition to allowing new brick-and-mortar charters the bill would also lift the lid on more e-schools. Just because. Of course the fact that eschools make tons of money despite poor performance might have something to do with it.

As for the brick-and-mortar provisions, they need to be tightened up. The current language would set the threshold at having schools in continuous improvement. That's hardly high performing. And a sponsor can open new schools for each schoolin continuious improvement, regardless of the shape of its overall portfolio. 100 school in Academic Watch and 2 in continuous improvement? No problem, open two more. Much better would be to allow only those sponsors with a generally clean bill to open new schools.

But the thought by Fordham is a nice one. The post as a whole has predictable snark coming from a Republican-leaning outfit -- it's not a tax hike if taxes don't go up and saying the fiscal crisis is Strickland's fault is laughable. But all that said, Strickland will need all the help he can get to make this work. If the charter honks are willing to reach across the aisle, it's at least worth a listen.

Closing Charter Schools

The Education blog Quick and the Ed¹ notes a headline in today's WaPo "Charter to Close Over Academics" and notes that we don't see that headline applied to traditional public schools. Setting that aside, fact is, we hadn't seen it applied to charter schools in Ohio until Marc Dann started going after them.

Last week's Ohio Gadfly² published a piece on their experience as a charter school sponsor forced to close schools.³ It's long, but it gives a lot of detail about the difficulty closing charter schools for academics (as opposed to financial mismanagement which was the basis for all the closings pre-Dann.)

• Theory collides with reality. Closing a school seems pretty straightforward: parents will send their children to good charter schools, and the poor ones will close for lack of enrollment because parents won't send their children to a bad school. This premise doesn't necessarily hold true. And, when a school does close, the reality is a complicated, confusing, painful, and expensive process for all concerned. What makes it tough is that you're dealing with stakeholders who are emotionally and financially attached to the school. For example, parents made a conscious decision to send their child to the school and the choice is being taken away from them. Teachers lose their jobs and are tossed into a tough labor market. You're forcing people to participate in the death of something about which they care deeply.

• School closure is costly. This is true not just in terms of extra dollars spent by the sponsor and the school's governing authority, but also in terms of the amount of time that the sponsor, governing authority, and school staff need to devote to closure. The governing authority still needs to close the year out and complete all required financial reports, tax forms, and audits. Then there's the staff time associated with reviewing and submitting innumerable bureaucratic forms and documents to the state and federal governments. For the sponsor, the major expense is the time devoted to overseeing closure. This can take more than a year, and this is if the closure is done amicably and does not include costly lawsuits.

• Responsibility falls up. If the closure is mutually agreed to, the school's governing authority and sponsor work together to do a tough job well. The buck, however, ultimately stops with the sponsor. If the closure is not amicable, the sponsor is still on the hook for ensuring that teachers show up to teach and students show up to learn. The sponsor must explain to teachers, parents, students, and the state why the school is being closed. The sponsor has to pull the trigger on whether or not to close a school before the end of the year and to ensure that proper closing procedures are followed, all state and federal reporting requirements are met and assets are distributed fairly. A sponsor that chooses to close a school against the will of the governing authority is, we assume, in a very lonely spot faced with a hostile board, disgruntled staff, angry parents and students, and curious media.

• Communication is critical. The key players--state, sponsor, governing authority, and operator--must be on the same page so that all stakeholders hear consistent messages. Rumors abound, and, when you've got different people making contradictory statements or giving bad information to parents and the public, things likely will go downhill fast.

All of the above are reasons why relying solely or even heavily on the free market to ensure charter school accountability has failed in Ohio. In fact, Ohio's charter system suffers from three inter-related deficiencies.

1. For years the Department of Education did little to police the quality of the people setting up charters or their plans for doing so. As a result, dozens of charters were set up with no real chance for success.
2. The philosophy for holding charters accountable was essentially laissez faire economics -- the market would guarantee accountability. For various reasons, including those listed above, that hasn't worked.
3. The law has left it to sponsors to regulate charters, but has done little to hold sponsors⁴ accountable. In fact an number of sponsors have fallen through a legislative donut hole and are literally accountable to no one. Furthermore, sponsors get money from keeping charters open and stop getting money when they close, so the economic incentives built into the system are perverse.

There have been a couple of attempts to tighten reins on charters and, in particular, put real teeth into sponsor accountability. Unfortunately none has gone very far. More unfortunately, when Democrats start dealing with charters, they stampede to a moratorium, which does nothing to solve either the problem of bad set-ups or of holding existing charters accountable.

We need to be talking about this. Charters aren't going away in Ohio and can provide some real benefits if done right. We are far from doing this right.

¹Not necessarily conservative, but interested in reform in a way that includes general friendliness to charter schools.

²Published by the Thomas Fordham Foundation which is both charter-friendly and conservative.

³By the way, one of the charters mentioned as closing -- East End Community School -- is actually being absorbed into Dayton Public Schools, which also should have been mentioned in another piece in that issue. In fact the issue as a whole in uncharacteristically sloppy.

⁴ To review, sponsors, are separate entities from either the schools themselves, or from for-profit education management oranizations (EMOs) like the dread White Hat. The law basically privatizes regulation by vesting authority in sponsors, but without and oversight.

Another Sad Measure of Ohio's Charter Schools

The Newsweek school rankings came out this week. The top "non-elite"school by Newsweek's measure is BASIS Charter in Tuscon. There are a half-dozen charter schools in the top 40. And through the entire list, none from Ohio, according to the list compiled by Jill.

Charter schools shouldn't be a left/right thing, and in many states they aren't. Charter schools done right offer the right kind o choices to parents and students, and may be helping to break the dysfunctional structures that hold many districts back. That's why Barack Obama gave a recent education address at a charter school in Denver. It's why a group like Democrats for School Reform embraces charters.

But the charter system in Ohio is predicated on the belief that the market alone is sufficient to regulate schools and ensure quality. Ohio's experience is a strong indication that it is not.

Akron Says No to Brennan

ABJ reports that City Council has turned down Brennan's "offer" that the city take a million dollar loss on a loan he wrangled for his downtown hotel. City Council's position drop dead position is that they have to get the principle back.

Let's review. Brennan is a conservative Republican on the tiny government genus. He not only spreads lots of campaign cash to R candidates, he was a prominent sponsor of the ill-begotten TABOR proposal.

And at the same time, his basic business model is to work the government to either pay the whole freight on his business ventures (White Hat, etc.) or as in this case, to subsidize and assume the risk. Mr. Freemarket owes much of his impressive wealth to his talent for drawing from the public trough.

Meanwhile, rich or not, he's happy to let his hometown eat the loss if he decides to send the hotel business into bankruptcy. Of course, the bankruptcy option is part of business. Just like lobbying.

Ohio's Crappy Charter School System, Exhibit 4395

. . . is a story in today's Dispatch that millions in charter school start up money cannot be accounted for. Specifically, $2.55 million in "planning grants" went to schools that were never actually set up.

The Ohio Charter School system was set up to act exactly like a free market. OK, a free market in which the government pays for the "customers" and paid some of the set up costs of the "businesses." That kind of market. An Iraq reconstruction kind of market.

Charter school advocates try not to talk about Ohio. In other states charter schools actually work -- so much so that liberals like the purveyors of EduWonk and Quick and the Ed like them. But in Ohio the system yields one failure after another. That's why an editorial in Minnesota about charter school accountability notes that, "Ohio seems to have more problems than other states, but it is a good reminder that we need charter schools to be accountable."

So what can we learn from this? First, we can learn that the pure free market model does not work. In particular, during late-nineties and early 00's, the guiding philosophy was to let anyone who could fog a mirror set up a charter school and let the market sort them out. That has given us dozens of chronically failing schools that thus far can only be shut down when they run out of money.

And now we have another problem. Ohio apparently gave money out without vetting the recipients. Exactly no one familiar with the history of Ohio charters is surprised.

By the way, a second problem with the free market model is the cost of letting the market do its magic. Businesses in a market don't automatically succeed because they are in a market. A market works by forcing bad businesses to close. That's fine when we are talking about, say, electronics stores. When Fretter and Sun closed up shop, they did little permanent damage to the polity. But when a school closes down, it causes considerable disruption to the families involved and to the public school system that has to absorb children who have not been receiving a decent education. A third is that changing vendor involved considerable transaction costs. And a fourth is the Market for Bad Education.

More Ida Wells Woes

Ida Wells Academy, Akron's troubled-but-still-not-closed-but- really-really-close-to-turning-it-all-around-we-mean-it charter school, is in more trouble. Again, the focus is on financial difficulties -- and the Lighthouse Academy -- sponsored by the same organization and worse on state tests -- remains status quo. As it has always been.

When Attorney General Marc Dann filed lawsuits, the school privateers howled in protest. How did they justify opposing efforts to shut down failing charters? They noted that Ohio has a new law that will shut down chronically failing charter schools starting after July, 2008.

Well, maybe. The statute says a school that has been in academic emergency "shall be permanently closed." The new law doesn't specify how that will happen, but appears to put much of the onus on sponsors. The Ida Wells experience doesn't give much

Which is why the AG's lawsuit is important. For one thing, there's no reason not to start closing chronically failing charters now. For another, Dann has signaled that he is taking charter oversight seriously -- something that hasn't historically been true of elected executive officers. When the time comes to apply the new closure law, we won't be relying on sponsors who historically haven't lived up to expectations.

Progress Ohio Precursor Accuses Brennan of Buying Votes in CO

The Beacon Journal is reporting that ProgressActionNow, the group in Colorado that gave mitotic birth to our own ProgressOhio, is accusing charter school impresario David Brennan of "buying" a vote on the Colorado School Board. For some time, members of the Board have been trying to shut down a Life Skills Center there. (Apparently people in Colorado think a graduation rate in the twenties is a bad thing. Must be the mountain air.)

Recently the Board voted 4-3 to give Life Skills time to get its act together. ProgressActionNow notes that one of those votes was that of member and former Colorado legislator Bob Schaffer. According to the ProgActNow site, Schaffer's voting record has long been notably abject in his fealty to business interests.

The charge in this case is a familiar one: Brennan has given serious campaign money to Schaffer. Like most intersections of campaign contributions and friendly votes, this is less "scandal" than "the way things work." One can always argue that the candidate's governing philosophy preexists and attracts the contribution.

On the other hand, there is something particularly troubling about members of a regulatory board taking campaign contributions from people running regulated businesses. This is something fundamentally different than voting on legislation that happens to benefit a contributor in a certain industry. In some cases, these contributions are proscribed. For example, no health care provider that gets Medicaid money can give contributions to a candidate for Attorney General because the AG is responsible for enforcing Medicaid fraud issues.

And by the way, I'd be good with adding gambling machine companies to AG blacklist.

Cleveland Vouchers and Catholic Schools

Today's Beacon Journal runs an AP story about the Cleveland voucher program and Catholic schools in the Cleveland Diocese. Here's the meat of it:

More than 80 percent of students in at least seven Catholic elementary schools in Cleveland use vouchers to attend.

Vouchers have kept Catholic school classrooms filled with students, but the program is still not enough to cover the cost of sending a student to a diocese-run school, said Margaret Lyons, superintendent of the Cleveland diocese's schools.

A few take-aways. First, as I mentioned before, Catholic schools were lobbying hard for special ed vouchers. This is why. I don't think they were looking at educating the profoundly handicapped kids who drain school resources, but were looking at dyslexic and ADD kids and the money they would bring in.

If I were a conservative I'd be concerned about an institution becoming dependent on government spending. Voucher programs are creating new constituencies whose activity may ultimately lead to more, not less government spending on education.

As for this liberal, in principle I'm not against giving kids in schools full of dead-enders a chance at a better education. But I have grave concerns about the church-state implications. Make no mistake, the government is subsidizing Catholic education. Catholic theology is so embedded in the curriculum that simply excusing kids from attending religion classes does little to change things.

And of course I have concerns about whether the truly needy kids are the ones getting the vouchers. The available data says they are not.

Ida Wells' Extension Extended.

Shocked. Utterly and completely amazed. Ida Wells Academy, the Akron charter school that has never had a day not in some sort of trouble, has been granted by its new sponsor yet another extension to get its collective act together. No one saw that coming.

Budget Watch: Strickland Likely to Veto Special Ed. Vouchers

The budget passed its floor vote with a unanimous-minus-one vote last night. Still not definitive word from Strickland about special ed. vouchers, but word seems to be that he will veto. Last night Jill noted a quick mention in Openers that Strickland said he would "almost certainly" veto the program.

Then this morning, this in the Dispatch story:

A key item likely to be excised is a proposed voucher test program for special-needs students. The program would offer about 8,000 students with individualized education programs up to $20,000 apiece toward the cost of private-school tuition.

No source is given, but it looks like Dispatch reporters are hearing murmurs. All of this is consistent with the grapevine hum I'm hearing. Rest assured, special ed. vouchers will come up again. This is the second go round; Sen. Kevin Coughlin proposed much the same bill last year, and he's nothing if not persistent.

It's entirely possible that at some point we will have a special ed vouchers bill. This one is as bad as a proposal can be -- basically a new middle class entitlement. Even voucher supporters should think twice about it.

Ohio Senate's Unanimous Omnibus Budget Amendment Includes Special Ed Vouchers

Just got a copy of the Omnibus Amendment. The House version of the budget bill included a voucher program for special education students. At the beginning of Senate consideration the program was taken out in favor of a "study" of special ed. vouchers. But now it's back in the Omnibus Budget Amendment that Senate Finance just voted out unanimously. I haven't done a line-by-line comparison, but the essentials of the proposal are unchanged. (The proposal starts at section 3310.51 of the House version, for those of you following along.)

The Special Ed Vouchers Scholarship is another step in the road to universal vouchers. This time, the legislation makes no attempt to make voucher eligibility contingent on need. If a child has an Individual Education Program (IEP), the child can get a voucher, period. Never mind if, for example, the child's family is wealthy and already paying for private school. And never mind if the child's home school runs an excellent special education program. The proposal before the Senate would allow any family to receive money regardless of need. And without the unpleasantness of attending the public school for a couple of months.

Governor Strickland tried to draw a line regarding school privatization by zeroing out EdChoice and putting stronger controls on charter schools. The Special Ed. Scholarship proposal strides defiantly over the line. While he could do little when the legislature removed his proposed language that would have eliminated EdChoice and tightened charter school accountability, he can do something about this. He should use his power to line-item veto special ed vouchers.

DISCLOSURE: The organization I contract with -- Ohio Fair Schools Campaign -- has been lobbying on the budget bill including the various "School Choice" provisions. I personally have been researching special ed vouchers as part of my work and this post reflects some of that research, though I did not bill for writing this post.

Budget Hearings: Stupid EdChoice Tricks

OK, I have to tell you about the best testimony of the day. Then I'm pouring myself into bed.

Officials from Liberty Local School District testified about the EdChoice vouchers. Liberty has one elementary school – E.J. Blott – which was in Academic Watch a couple of years ago. As of the most recent Local Report Card, the school is in Continuous Improvement.

One of the eleventh-hour miracles performed by the One-Winged PsychoDemon Duckbeasts from Hell was to broaden eligibility for EdChoice vouchers – because when people aren’t interested in a program the obvious move is to expand it. Whereas originally the program was open to students living in a district that would send them to a school in Academic Emergency, the new rules opened the program to students whose home school had been in Academic Watch for at least two of the last three years.

So as of January people living in the draw area for E.J. Blott are eligible for EdChoice vouchers, though probably only if they take them this year because the school will probably continue in Continuous Improvement. Almost immediately, 34 kids transferred to Blott from local parochial schools. One is the child of the principal of the school he/she was attending. Two had parents who remained active in the parent-teacher organizations of the parochial schools. And one, a first grader, announced two her class that she was only at Blott for a short time because she was going to a much better school and Blott was her ticket there.

The tab will be somewhere around $200,000 per student to send them to schools they were already paying for.

Classic.

Committee members asked the inevitable question and unfortunately the witnesses weren’t well prepared with an answer. The inevitable question is: since these parents pay taxes for schools, don’t they have a right to have that money for their children’s education? Actually there are many answers to that question. Take your pick.

• Basic answer – the state shouldn’t be paying people for something they are doing anyway. Even if I grant it’s a good idea, we can’t afford all good ideas. By my calculations, giving vouchers to those kids who are not currently in public schools would cost between $1.5 and 2 billion.

• What parents have a right to do is send their kids to the schools they pay for – and they retain that right. Everyone pays taxes for something they don’t use or would rather not use. I’d just as soon not have to drive to Columbus when I go down there. That doesn’t mean that I get to take my share of highway money out of highway funds and apply it to chartering a plane.

• If the goal is “fairness” as opposed to the stated goal of giving poor families a way out of failing schools, let’s debate that point. Given that EdChoice was sold as a benefit for poor kids, this is clearly an abuse of the program. Or it belies the true purpose of the program.
  
  Take your choice.
  

Ida Wells Community School Gets Another Reprieve.

To my utter and complete lack of surprise, Ida Wells Community School has been given more time to get it's financial house in order. If you haven't been following the story, the Akron charter school has been living on borrowed time -- at increasingly attractive interest rates, apparently.

First, the school's original sponsor, Lucas County Education wanted to close it down. In response it changed sponsors to Richland Academy for the Arts. Then Richland started looking at the books and making noises about shutting them down.

The latest turn is reported in today's Beacon Journal. The school has another thirty days to clear up problems or Richland will -- Really this time!! -- pull its charter.

Complain to a charter schools honk about school accountability and you hear the following:

Hey, charter schools have to meet all the same requirements as regular schools and they can get shut down if they don't suceed and regular schools never are and by the way the free market is the best way to regulate anything.

Go ahead and ask one, you'll see. It's like they are reading it off of a card.

Look into how charter school accountability actually functions, the picture is not as bright and sunny as proponents claim. Ida Wells Community School is an example. An ABJ article from a couple weeks ago gives a good thumbnail history of the problems -- financial irregularity, gallons of red ink and bad test scores.

Ah, the test scores. While the record of Ida Wells is currently in Continuous Improvement, with two indicators met over 2005-06(one being indicator attendance) and a Perfomanc Index of 70.7. The second indicator met was Sixth Grade reading on which they scored a perfect hundred despite doing no better than 54 in any other grade level, and despite a 50 on the previous year's fifth grade reading indicator.

But with all that, it's not academics that have Ida Wells in trouble. Contrast Ida Wells' scores with those of another Richland Academy school, Lighthouse Academy which is in Academic Emergency with no indicators met and a Performance Index of 60.1. Richland hasn't even hinted that it's looking at closing Lighthouse.

Supposedly the new charter accountability law passed last session by the One-Winged Psycho-Demon Duckbeasts from Hell tightens all this up. Supposedly a school that fails to get out of Emergency or Watch for three years running will be shut down. But it's the sponsors who exercise what passes for accountability over the schools. Based on the experience so far, there is little reason to be optimistic.

And the market? I think Jean Schmidt has the best answer for that: If we are giving people money out of a sense of the societal good, society has the right and the responsibility to make sure that the money is being spent wisely.

Oh wait. She wasn't talking about charter schools, she was talking about food stamps. Choice is such a fickle thing.

Rod Parsley's Voucher-Receiving School Doesn't Meet State Standards

From today's Dispatch. H/t PFAW Right Wing Watch:

About 500 students attend Harvest Preparatory Academy. Thirty-six teachers and two aides educate them.

But only eight are licensed, the Ohio Department of Education says. And more than one-third of staff members hadn't had a background check more than midway through the school year.

The private Christian school must meet state requirements or face serious consequences: It could be kicked out of the statewide voucher program or, worse, lose its state accreditation. That would mean students couldn't earn a state-certified diploma and might struggle to get into college.

PFAW highlights this for the Darn Good Questions file:

“Harvest Prep has a problem, and we knew about it,” said a state department of education spokesman, although apparently only now is the department conducting rudimentary inspections of voucher-funded private schools, and beginning to uncover basic certification problems.

I'll add this to that file: One of the problems with the voucher program is that there is no check on discrimination by the schools participating. Parents get accepted into the school, then apply for the voucher. Parsley proudly proclaims he is a "Christocrat," and that he believes his version of Christianity is the only true faith. Does Harvest Prep nonetheless accept students of all creeds? Or is Parsley's school allowed to take state education money and discriminate on the basis of religion?

Charter Schools Suing for Right to Fire White Hat

I'm trying to follow up on a truly extraordinary story in today's Beacon. It seems that a number of charter schools that contract with White Hat management are suing to invalidate a state law that, among other things, allows an education management organization (EMO) to appeal a decision by a charter board of directors to either terminate or not renew a contract with the EMO. If the charter board loses the appeal, they face an automatic death penalty:

Under one provision, Education Management Organizations (EMOs) such as White Hat -- which receives a fee from charter schools for managing their operations -- are allowed to appeal a charter school board's decision to terminate or not renew a management contract.

The appeal can be made to the school's sponsor or directly to the State Board of Education if the sponsor has been involved for less than six months.

If the sponsor rules in favor of the EMO or charter school operator and against the board or governing authority, then the sponsor is required by law to fire the board. The law then requires the EMO to appoint a new board.

The new law was part of H.B. 79, a lame duck bill that was amended to carry all sorts of interesting things past the Governor's desk. I confess to missing the death penalty bit when the law was passed.

The lawsuit also challenges a provision limiting the number of boards of start-up schools on board member can sit on. It's unclear why the people discussed in the story are upset since they sit on boards of extant schools. For that matter, its unclear how one guy can sit on the boards of 19 different schools and believe that he is giving his position the time and attention it deserves.

The White Hat flak interviewed for the story may win some award for Most Disingenuous Spin of the Year:

Bob Tenenbaum, a White Hat spokesman, said he is not sure why the company is part of the lawsuit. ``The core question needs to be asked of the General Assembly. It was their decision to change the law,'' Tenenbaum said.

By reports David Brennan is the most generous Republican contributor in the state, but neither he nor his company have any idea why the Republican General Assembly would pass a law that so obviously tilt the market in his company's favor.

One thing that's not unclear: This is a bad law. I suspect that part of the Governor's strategy in proposing to eliminate EdChoice and ban for-profit EMO's is bidding high to get the most out of subsequent negotiations. Hopefully with the help light shone by this lawsuit, Strickland will be able to win an end to the EMO appeal provision.