11 charter schools still await fate
When the state rated 21 Ohio charter-school sponsors as “poor” in October, those sponsors were to permanently lose their authority to oversee charter schools.
Eight months later, with this year’s evaluations about to begin again, the Ohio Department of Education is still working on what will happen with 11 “poor” sponsors, including Hamilton Local, London, Newark, Pickerington and Reynoldsburg schools.
According to the department, 10 of the 21 cases are resolved:
Five sponsors, including Groveport Madison schools, appealed their “poor” ratings and reached settlements.
Lima City Schools, Rittman Exempted Village Schools and the Summit County Educational Service Center didn’t appeal and the department’s Office of School Sponsorship became the overseer of their schools.
Southwest Licking and Lakewood Local schools, both in Licking County, closed their digital academies before the ratings were issued.
On Wednesday night, the school board for Groveport Madison approved a settlement with the state that will convert Cruiser Academy, a dropout-prevention charter, into a regular school with the same mission of helping at-risk students recover credits. Students from other districts can attend, but only if their superintendents make an agreement with Groveport Madison. The school will have its own state report card because it occupies a building separate from the district’s other schools.
Under the agreement, if Groveport Madison eventually decides that it wants to sponsor again, it could apply.
Likewise, the Pickerington Board of Education voted in May to convert its dropoutprevention charter school, the Pickerington Community School, into the district-run Pickerington Alternative School for next fall. It will offer the same kind of curriculum, but only Pickerington students who are referred by a high school counselor or administrator will be eligible to attend.
Its academic results will be figured into the district’s state report card. The Reynoldsburg school district has opted, at least in one case, to transfer its sponsorship responsibility. St. Aloysius Orphanage of Cincinnati is expected to take over as sponsor of Everest High School, said district spokeswoman Valerie Wunder.
She said the district is still working out what to do about its other four charter schools: A+ Arts Academy, Brookwood Academy, Patriot Academy and the Virtual Community School.
Every charter school in Ohio must have a sponsor. Sponsors do not run the schools. Instead, they contract with the school’s governing board to oversee operations, making sure that they’re complying with laws and teaching students effectively.
The state designed this tougher evaluation system a few years ago in response to a data-rigging scandal. The department’s director of school choice, David Hansen, resigned after it was discovered that he was excluding certain schools to make some sponsors look better.
The new system scores sponsors on three equally weighted areas: student performance, compliance with rules and laws and use of quality practices.
Out of 65 sponsors evaluated, 39 were rated “ineffective” in October, which is a step up from “poor,” meaning that they can take on no new schools and must improve.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education research nonprofit that itself sponsors charter schools, was one of only five sponsors to be rated “effective.”
However, Chad Aldis, Fordham’s vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy, said the evaluation system could stand to be tweaked. For one, the academic measure, taken from the state report card, looks at measures that correlate “too closely to poverty and doesn’t property credit charter schools that show strong student growth,” he said in an email.
Aldis also said the process of gathering the paperwork on the compliance side last year was “too laborious” and hasn’t changed for this year.
Last July, Aldis told The Dispatch that four people in his office spent the better part of 30 days preparing for the evaluation. This year, he said, the staff started the process a few months ago, and also hired another staff member and an intern to help.