Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio summarizes what is wrong with the charter industry in Ohio. Under the guide of helping “poor kids escape failing schools,” charter operators have created a profitable business running mostly low-quality schools. Deceptive marketing and contributions to key politicians keep the hoax going, stealing money from taxpayers and public schools to fatten the wallets of entrepreneurs.
“Charter schools –alternative schools meant to provide better educational options for parents and children while creating healthy competition for local public schools – have been hijacked in Ohio by profiteers and huge campaign contributors whose great talent is making money and winning elections, not educating kids. The results have been the poorest performing charter school sector outside Nevada.
“How bad is it? Some charter schools in Ohio can remain open even though they only graduate 2 out of 155 children. Meanwhile, more than half a billion state dollars that were meant for districts went instead to charters that performed the same or worse than the district last year.
“However, there is great hope that meaningful charter school reform is coming to Ohio. This could mean that my home state’s well documented status as the country’s most notorious charter sector could soon change.
Senate Bill 148, currently being merged in the Ohio Senate with another reform bill, takes meaningful and significant steps toward fixing many of the most obvious transparency and accountability issues with Ohio law.
“Despite its shortcomings on funding and tightening closure standards (due to how far behind Ohio is than any bill weakness), this is without a doubt the most comprehensive and courageous charter school reform effort offered by Ohio Republicans in three decades.”
Dyer warns that the biggest profiteers and their lobbyists could still weaken or torpedo the reforms, allowing charter scams to continue uninterrupted.
Nothing will really change, he writes, unless the funding formula for charter schools changes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s great but “helping poor kids escape from failing schools” hasn’t been true in Ohio for a long time. The best charter school in my general area pulls kids from a wealthy and really successful district.
My school district isn’t “failing” and we get huge churn from Ohio’s cybercharter “sector”. Obviously that makes the job of the public schools more difficult.
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Ohio political website, Plunderbund, asks Ohioans to contact their state senators to stop discriminatory funding that favors charter schools, in the Senate’s version of the State Budget Bill (House Bill 64), p.1525. The removal of the “state share index” component from the bonus of the local schools would eliminate favored charter treatment, relative to performance bonuses.
My preference is to stop tax support for the underperforming, fraud-ridden, political-corrupting charter schools, in entirety. They serve oligarchy not, democracy.
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I also have a personal request to Ohio media. Stop quoting national ed reformers on Ohio charter schools.
Charter schools are (supposedly) public schools. They have on-site managers. I want to hear from the person I’m actually paying, not some ed reform group headquartered in DC.
When a question is raised about a public school, media interviews the superintendent, principal or school board. When a question is raised about a charter school we get quotes from DC think tanks or lobbyists.
Where are the actual leaders of these schools? They are publicly-paid. They should be forced to go on record re: the schools they’re running.
I don’t care what Fordham or StudentsFirst think about Ohio charter schools. I want to hear from a specific, named, publicly-paid charter school manager just as I do when public schools are discussed.
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Amen. With the notable exception of reporters Doug Livingston, Laura Bischoff and Josh Swigart, Ohio newspaper coverage of charter schools is a case study in journalistic failure, from the one-sided quotes of out-of-state PR machines, to the failure to identify multinational corporate and plutocratic funders, to the practiced avoidance of links among campaign donations, discrimination against public education, taxpayer fleecing and inaction by the Ohio Board of Education and politicians on congressional education committees.
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The media echo chamber for so-called education reform, in Ohio and everywhere else, is a textbook example of what Noam Chomsky (using a phrase initially coined by Walter Lippman) calls “manufacturing consent.”
The ostensible purpose is to inform; the real purpose is to set the terms of debate, so that the policy objectives of the Overclass appear
to be “natural” or “inevitable.”
They are neither, but rather are political and economic goals originating in the greed and will-to-power fever dreams of a very small, insular group of people, who then put into play a well-funded philanthropic/political/media/academic/advocacy industrial complex whose sole reason for existence is to bring about their wished-for hostile takeover of public education.
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To clarify, here’s an example. One of our local school principals was prosecuted for theft. We heard from that principal, the superintendent and two school board members. Named. Individuals.
Ohio taxpayers get this opaque mush when it comes to charter schools- “Imagine Schools responded” or “Kids First Dayton” responded” or “so and so from Fordham said ‘charter schools are great!”
What are we supposed to do with this information? I have no idea who these people are. Where are the charter principals? The individual board members? The people who are supposedly running these schools? Hiding behind what amounts to an organizational shield is ludicrous in a supposedly “public” entity.
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Like the Iraq “adventure” costing us trillions, some say as high as 5 to 6 trillion dollars time future veterans health cares are counted, costing us credibility, countless lives and misery, now we can see what lack of “accountability” by the corporate media costs us. Now after it is shown that corporate schools are the disaster of educational quality and taxpayers money has been squandered, the “adventure” of corporate thought is should also be apparent. That corporate media does not adequately cover the story results in such debacles as these.
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His solution is no solution at all. Leaving public schools to “market forces” is the appeal that Ohio’s charters currently make. The teal solution is to change the state constitution requiring an all elected state board of education,thus, separating public schools’ from the governor’s clutches.
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Today, Dayton Daily News reporter, Laura Bischoff, wrote, “Last week, ODE rated, as ineffective, the sponsor (of a charter school that the state auditor said fraudulently received $1.18 million over three years)… ODE states, If the sponsor wants to move out of the ineffective overall rating category, it can, by improving its practices…”
Ohio, an embarrassing state.
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