If schools were like shoe stores, they would open wherever there was a good location and close if they didn’t make a profit.
Public schools, on the other hand, are community institutions, like parks and beaches. They should not be closed if they have low scores; they should get help.
In Columbus, Ohio, charter schools are indeed like shoe stores. This year alone, 17 charter schools in that city closed their doors.
Nine of the 17 schools that closed in 2013 lasted only a few months this past fall. When they closed, more than 250 students had to find new schools. The state spent more than $1.6 million in taxpayer money to keep the nine schools open only from August through October or November.
But while 2013 was unusual, closings are not rare. A Dispatch analysis of state data found that 29 percent of Ohio’s charter schools have shut, dating to 1997 when the publicly funded but often privately run schools became legal in Ohio. Nearly 400 currently are operating, about 75 of them in Columbus.
What a waste of taxpayer money. Why would a school open and close in only a few months?
Looking back, some in the charter-school community and at the Ohio Department of Education question whether some of the new schools ever should have opened. How, they wondered, did this happen?
Many point to the sponsors. Nonprofit groups, universities, school districts and educational service centers can act as charter-school sponsors or authorizers. They’re supposed to be the gatekeepers; they decide which schools can open and whether they should close if they’re not adequately serving students.
“The way it works right now is, if a school has a sponsor and they sign a contract, that school can open,” said John Charlton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education. “We don’t have any approval or denial power.”
Five of the nine schools that opened and then closed abruptly in the fall were sponsored by the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center, based in Marion and Tiffin. The ESC appears to have lacked a rigorous vetting process.
The ESC, which provides staff members and other types of services to school districts, gave the go-ahead to Andre Tucker to open two Talented Tenth Leadership academies. They opened in August. In October, after the state pointed out serious problems, the ESC forced the schools to close.
It turned out that Tucker had been charged with felony theft and ordered to pay restitution in Florida and had money problems with an earlier charter school.
Gosh, don’t you think someone might have noticed that the guy to whom they were handing over children and public money had a criminal record?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sounds like shoe stores could sponsor and operate charters.
This is amazing that Ohio has no approval process.
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“universities”
I’d like someone in power, someone who supposedly represents public school kids in this state, to look at the university sponsors. Obviously, the non profits are completely unaccountable, but I wonder why I am supporting public universities who rubber stamp these schools, because it isn’t just damage to charter students in Ohio, it’s damage to all public school students.
Do university authorizers get some kind of management kickback? What’s the incentive structure here?
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Charter schools are one aspect of the ed reform agenda in Ohio, but the real lasting damage will be what they’re doing to existing public schools:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/public/2013/11/1105-columbus-school-levy-defeated.html
“Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman has repeated over the past several months that business, labor, civic and faith leaders were aligned behind Issue 50, the Columbus City Schools’ levy.
But voters weren’t behind it. They defeated the 23.5 percent property-tax increase yesterday that would have shared local money with charter schools for the first time.
The measure went down 69 percent to 31 percent, with all precincts reporting, despite the months-long work of Coleman’s Education Commission, a new state law and a multimillion-dollar campaign. A companion issue that would have created a new district auditor position answerable to city, county and school district officials also lost, 61 percent to 39 percent.
It was the first loss for a Columbus City Schools levy in 23 years.”
The levy would have pulled still more money from public schools and transferred it to opening (and closing) charters, by allowing these rubber-stamped, deregulated schools to share in property taxes.
Voters trounced the ed reform initiative, but what no one mentions is existing public schools were harmed, again, by a risky and reckless ed reform political gambit.
Charters are one story in Ohio, but based on the fact that 90% of children attend the existing public schools that ed reformers have turned their backs on, I think the bigger story is how ed reform has directly harmed the children who attend Ohio public schools.
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Closing public schools and opening charter schools is based on a business model. That the charters subsequently close because they are unsustainable, might suggest that the business model doesn’t work in education as promoted, leading one to acknowledge the wisdom so clearly recognized and stated on this blog that education is not a business after all.
“Public schools, on the other hand, are community institutions, like parks and beaches. They should not be closed if they have low scores; they should get help.”
Well said.
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Approvals and closures work the same in Michigan. It’s totally up to the authorizer and the state has no ability to close schools for underperformance. A member of the State Board of Ed pointed this out when it was noted that charter expansion among poor performing chains were growing very quickly.
It appears that the only means for closing a charter in Michigan is lack of profitability. An authorizer has NO incentive to close any school if it is generating money. And to those who say that a bad charter school will lose “customers”, you would be wrong in many cases. Charters are often slick marketers who know how to game stats and results to give the right impression. They also exclude certain populations to promote these so-called better results.
Onr thing about school choice that proponents will never say is that the term “school choice” is highly accurate. The school chooses its students. Parents don’t necessarily choose the school. My neighbors had an odd personal beef with a school administrator at the local traditional public school and applied to a charter. They didn’t get in. They had to settle for their third choice. Which was 25 miles away. (Needless to say, they ended up back in the regular old public school three years later citing the fact that their charter was plagued with high teacher turnover and excessive measures regarding discipline.)
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Thanks again for spotlighting Columbus, Ohio and these atrocious privatization practices.
Except for a grassroots movement to defeat the levies 50/51 (which, due to it’s vagueness, had at least 1/2 the almost 9 mill levy funds going to support privatization) there has been little effort to push back by the community.
I’ve been working on figuring out where and when some outrage (with action) might occur. Today I read an article which may present a clue as to the lack of action: http://www.alternet.org/economy/big-money-and-populism?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
Confusion, disbelief that anything serious is going to happen, and the thought that if only the right people are elected everything will work out seem to be at play here on a local level.
In Ohio’s ALEC created law (known as the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, formerly Senate Bill 316) Columbus is the “pilot project” for closing public schools and (most likely) giving them over to charter companies in the next 2-3 years based on test scores (the test by Pearson, of course).
This looks like it follows a model of what happened in Chicago with the 50 public school closures where 42% went on to re-open as charter schools. This appears to be the intent. Big business charter owners are targeting Columbus City Schools for their money making ventures.
With what is happening with Kansas City right now I’m not sure Columbus is going hold out much longer.
So much of this political movement toward privatization is cruel in it’s targeting of impoverished urban communities nationally. Classist and racist are terms that come to mind in the face of this.
Columbus charter schools model a racially segregated society quite well. The schools that closed were undoubtedly mostly filled with minority students.
Numerous newspaper articles, multiple charter closures and lousy charter business practices have yet to convince the local public to organize or make a concerted effort at saving public schooling as we know it in Columbus.
I only hope that at sometime in the near future there will be evidence of action from the community.
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Take the money and run
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Teachers have to be fingerprinted and have a spotless record in order to walk into a classroom.
Can you imagine the gall these people had? It’s preposterous at this point, but I still challenge us to organize better in order to slow down and eventually stop this insanity. How?
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Do private, on-line “universities” get to approve charters too?
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