Protecting charter sponsors didn’t help cause of school choice

The data-scrubbing and accountabilitydodging detailed in a special audit report released Tuesday by Ohio Auditor Dave Yost are several years in the past, and the good news is that sponsors of charter schools no longer are getting a pass for shoddy performance.

But the report from Yost’s office nonetheless is important reading as a reminder of what can happen when bureaucrats who are supposed to be watchdogs are instead inclined to push a political agenda.

In the Ohio Department of Education, for too long that meant boosting and coddling charter schools favored by Republican elected officials who collected millions in campaign donations from charterschool profiteers.

Ultimately, the extreme laissez-faire approach Ohio initially took to charter schools, notorious nationally among education advocates, hasn’t served the cause of school choice well. It enabled bad schools to proliferate and fostered abuses like those of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which have fueled opposition to charter schools.

The actions detailed in Tuesday’s report were especially destructive.

In 2015, David Hansen, school choice director for the Department of Education, was charged with carrying out the first statewide performance evaluation of charterschool sponsors — the entities entrusted to oversee charter schools and ensure that they are following state law and operating effectively.

Before the evaluations came out, it was discovered that Hansen cooked the books by simply leaving out some schools’ failing grades so that their sponsors would look better. It worked, in that two sponsors that should have gotten the lowest mark — making them ineligible to continue sponsoring — didn’t.

The State Board of Education — the elected members, not those appointed by Republican Gov. John Kasich — learned of the deception and demanded an independent investigation. They were right not to put faith in an internal probe by the education department.

Yost’s audit shows that no one in the department took responsibility for the investigation, and the man who was supposed to be responsible — Jimmy Sheppard, chief of staff to then-Superintendent Dick Ross — didn’t take it very seriously. He told Yost’s investigators that he didn’t realize he was in charge and that he didn’t keep any written documents of interviews or what was learned.

Ross was disappointingly uncooperative as well; he delayed for weeks turning over public records, including emails, that The Dispatch and others requested. He refused to talk to Yost’s investigators until he was issued a subpoena. He said he hadn’t known that Hansen was tossing out charter schools’ lowest grades, but the special audit found that Ross’ senior staff were aware.

The scandal derailed the sponsor evaluations for 2015, but three years’ worth of evaluations since then show that they’re working: Bad sponsors — those that allowed badly run or ineffective charter schools to stay open and didn’t help them get better — largely have been weeded out.

Sponsor ratings for 2015-16 covered 65 sponsors, 21 of which got the lowest rating of “poor.” The following year found only 45 sponsors still operating, eight of which were rated “poor.” In the 2017-18 ratings released in recent weeks, 34 sponsors remained and only one was rated “poor.” Even better, the majority — 21 — were rated “effective.”

That’s how accountability is supposed to work. Had Hansen’s attempt to protect sponsors of failing schools been successful, school choice in Ohio would be worse off.