Loophole in House budget mystifying

A mystery amendment tucked into the Housepassed state budget would let some online charter schools avoid having their poor academic scores drive down a sponsor’s performance rating.

But even the representative who sponsored the

amendment says he doesn’t know how or why controversial language was added to the proposal — one that appeared to be trying to benefit Ohio e-schools, including, potentially, ECOT. And the Senate already is eyeing how to kill it.

“If it indeed does create some kind of staggering loophole, I think we need to deal with it,” said Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, said Wednesday, adding she already was drafting an amendment to strip it out of the bill.

Chad Aldis, the Fordham Institute’s vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy, said the change “basically makes academic accountability for any school that transfers under this provision nonexistent. Given the House’s strong support of charter school accountability, I can’t believe this would have been intentional.”

Suspicions grew when the full amendment was not included in the Legislative Service Commission comparison document that summarizes changes to the budget bill — appearing only after the full House voted on

the bill Tuesday. It also was not part of the shorter, bulletpoint amendment summary that House Republicans distributed to the public.

The Legislative Service Commission mistakenly omitted the amendment from its summary, said director Mark Flanders.

On occasion, an amendment will not function as the author hoped, requiring a redrafting. But in this case, Rep. Keith Faber, R-Celina, said the controversial portion of his proposal was essentially produced out of thin air by the Legislative Service Commission, which drafts legislation for the House and Senate.

“It wasn’t in anything we submitted to have drafted,” Faber said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

Faber said he has talked to the commission’s supervisor but has not gotten a good answer, because the drafter was out of the office.

Faber said he wanted a simple amendment to allow the Auglaize County Education Service Center to hire the Jefferson County ESC to run its online dropout-recovery school.

However, the language drafted included a paragraph that would allow an e-school to change sponsors without

having its past academic scores negatively impact the new sponsor’s ability to continue overseeing charter schools.

That would be a big change to current law, where sponsors rated “ineffective” for three consecutive years, or rated “poor,” lose their ability to sponsor charter schools.

Some saw this as a potential benefit to e-schools, particularly larger ones like the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Because of its size and poor academic performance, ECOT is likely to drag down the rating of any organization that sponsors it, and some wonder if that eventually could leave it without a sponsor and force it to close.

“It’s not ECOT’s amendment, and it doesn’t benefit ECOT,” said school spokesman Neil Clark, adding that the school’s grades are too low to allow it to transfer to a new sponsor.

Faber added: “It certainly wasn’t the intent to apply to ECOT or anybody else.”

Rep. Andrew Brenner, R-Powell, chairman of the House Finance Committee, said ECOT was pushing for an alternative to Ohio’s value-added academic growth measure, but not for sponsor changes.

He expects the amendment will be fixed in the Senate, likely by mid-June. The mystery amendment has opponents in both parties.

“It just goes against all of the strengthening of standards bills that we’ve put forward,” said Sen. Joe Schiavoni, D-Boardman. “We’ve started to make some progress and this would take a step back.”

The budget bill does address one issue that greatly interests ECOT, which is battling the Department of Education in court over how its enrollment should be calculated. The department says ECOT owes it about $60 million because it could not properly justify its enrollment.

A House-added amendment would require the Joint Education Oversight Committee, a panel of 10 lawmakers, to hold public hearings and conduct an annual review of the department’s attendanceauditing manual.

The manual would be deemed ineffective if the committee determines that schools cannot reasonably comply with its changes.