Bill Phillis of the Ohio Equity notes that significant numbers of charters in Ohio are failing. He has a modest proposal: let high-performing districts take over failing charters.
He writes:
“A proposed plan for high-performing school districts to take over the failing Ohio charter school industry
The idea for this plan was concocted after reading Diane Ravitch’s blog referencing a proposal by the Superintendent of the Cypress-Fairbanks school district in Texas. He proposed that his high performing district takeover and manage failing charter schools in Texas.
Here is a plan for Ohio. Divide the state into five or more regions. Identify all of the top-rated school districts in each region and assign each low performance charter school to a district. For example–a designated district in central Ohio would take over the management of Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) and other low-performing charter schools in central Ohio. Ohio Virtual Academy and other low performers would be assigned a designated district in northwest Ohio. The charter sponsors would be eliminated to save costs and the management companies would be fired. Charters that don’t meet the expectations of the school district would be closed and students reassigned.
The public school districts, having eliminated the charter profit centers would plow those savings into the education of students.
This plan would have the added benefit of complete transparency and accountability.
William Phillis
Ohio E & A
Ohio E & A | 100 S. 3rd Street | Columbus | OH | 43215
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo…time to reverse the charter mistake…
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Yes, and maybe teachers’ colleges could benefit by taking over charters and trying to “reform” them.
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Communities raise funds for their public schools though levies on property. They are unlikely to be sypathetic with this plan. The whole funding system in Ohio has been declared unconstitutional a zillion times. You cannot just create “regions” from scratch and move the authority to manage schools around as if schools are just playing pieces in board game.
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The head honchos pushing the charters will never admit their mistake. Covering their posteriors in any way they can will be the modus operandi.
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Here is the editorial from The NY Teacher (UFT) which shows the power of the charters stems from the billionaire’s boys club .
Hedge fund gift will cost the public
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015 NEW YORK TEACHER ISSUE
http://www.uft.org/editorials/hedge-fund-gift-will-cost-public
Success Academy routinely raises millions of dollars from ultra-wealthy contributors, on top of the public funds it also receives. But a hedge fund manager’s recent gift to Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain stands out for its size: $8.5 million.
This lavish donation, which will be used to help the controversial charter chain expand, may ironically result in yet more public subsidies for this well-heeled network. Thanks to a 2014 state law pushed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the city must cover the rental costs of even the wealthiest charters if the city cannot find suitable space within public school buildings. The city’s rental costs for charters is expected to exceed $32 million for just the last school year and this one.
Hedge fund manager John Paulson’s gift highlights the inequities between charters and public schools. Success, like many other charters, fails to serve the same numbers of high-need students as district schools yet it is rewarded by billionaires eager to undermine public education. Meanwhile, public schools that serve all comers are denied even the public funding they are due. Gov. Cuomo has refused to allocate to New York City schools the $2.5 billion owed under the 2006 Campaign for Fiscal Equity court settlement.
If the Success chain takes advantage of the new state law, it will be able to use the $8.5 million gift for things other than classroom space, and the cost of additional space for its expansion will be on the public’s tab. Either public schools and students will have new charters squeezed into their school buildings, or the city will use its scarce funding to cover rent for Moskowitz’s new or expanded charters.
We’re sure this doesn’t bother Paulson, who is known for having made billions of dollars off the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 that led to millions of Americans losing their homes.
More recently, he’s cashed in on Puerto Rico’s financial problems by buying up government debt and purchasing large resorts, reportedly part of a larger plan to make Puerto Rico a tax haven and playground for the superrich.
Paulson is apparently an expert at monetizing public pain. Moskowitz excels at undermining public education. No wonder they found each other.
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The proposal in this article will never fly because individualistic, self centered and provincial Americans (think, “Virginiasgp”, “Tim”, “TE”, “Raj”, and the long gone but not forgotten and actually quite missed “Harlan Underhill”) only care about educating their own child and not just anyone’s child or all children.
I can just see some parents in a swanky MacMansioned suburb taking on children from the South Bronx. Personally, politically, and professionally, I think they should, but mergers like that are far too equitable and – brace yourself – collectivist for the average stinky upper middle class and upper class American.
This set up would give open-marriage minded Newt Gingrich a stroke . . . . now fancy that.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but why would a successful school district want to take on a failed charter? Why would they choose to have resources diverted from their successful school system? Are they supposed to “run it like a business so they can at least recover their costs? I have a suspicion that a public school system could not legally make a profit off it. I can perhaps see taking over a charter within their community, but trying to duplicate the reasons for their success in a school twenty miles away just does not make sense. What leeway do they have to changing the school to fit their model? How does the governance change? Does it become a public school or remain a charter? What happens to independent funding? Of course a public school running a charter that did not follow all the rules of that public system,…how does that work? Shut them down if they are not working! Do the hard work that no one wants to do to create a more equitable funding system and stop holding schools responsible for all of society ills.
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Exactly!
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If charters are not performing, then it makes sense to allow a good school district take them over. The charters are not always for-profit, Diane, thus it’s not as simple as plowing money back into the schools. But no child deserves to remain in a failing school, public or charter.
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Virginia, these days, a “failing school” is defined as a school with a high proportion of English language learners, students with disabilities, and other students who need extra help. Do you think it helps these children to close their school? What if the school is a home for them? What if the teachers are dedicated and hard-working and caring?
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“f charters are not performing, then it makes sense to allow a good school district take them over. ”
The key word is “allow.” If a public school district chooses to take over a failed charter that is one thing. Perhaps that could be a useful first option for failed public schools, some sort of partnership with a successful school district,rather than turning it over to a charter. Something tells me that, given the limited resources of public schools, taking over a charter is not going to be high on school districts’ lists of smart moves.
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“For-profit or “Not-for-profit”, a distinction, often without a difference, e.g. NFL.
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“Joni Hoffman, Ohio’s charter school director, worked on the charter school evaluations that left out the failing grades of online schools in violation of state law.
But she won’t say how much she knew about the decision to leave them out.
She won’t say if she knew that exclusion didn’t follow the law.
She won’t say why she participated in not following the law, if she indeed knew.
And, most importantly, she won’t say if she ever told state Superintendent Richard Ross what was happening.
Neither will a few other Ohio Department of Education staff who worked on the evaluations, or were involved in discussions about how to handle the F grades for the online charter schools.
For a week now, all four have declined to reply to a series of questions from The Plain Dealer about the evaluations.”
I’m surprised to find out Ohio HAS a “charter school director”. I have never once seen this person mentioned in any of the near-daily newspaper reports on Ohio charter schools- never a quote, never an explanation, nothing. We get quotes from paid promoters of charter schools, we get quotes from the national charter school lobbying groups who supply “experts” but never the state “director of charter schools”.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/09/staff_who_worked_on_charter_school_data-rigging_are_silent_as_state_school_board_has_questions_for_supt_dick_ross.html#incart_story_package
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Where are the prosecutors, like those, who so eagerly put the Atlanta teachers in the cross hairs for imprisonment? The Atlanta teachers were condemned, by neoliberals, for “stealing dreams” (based on performance on flawed tests, with arbitrary cut scores).
Can’t prosecutors find a law that covers, culprits whose actions potentially direct federal money to charter schools, based on inflated test scores? And, why aren’t the national neoliberals talking and writing about stolen opportunities in Ohio’s charter schools?
I’ll write to ask Kansas City Star, “columnist from the left”, Mary Sanchez, who wrote the article, “By falsifying test results, (Atlanta) educators robbed students”.
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I take it back, I found one mention of the state charter school director from 2012:
“As far as the Ohio Department of Education was aware, LEAD and LEARN were finished as charter schools.
“Liberty informed us that it was non-renewing and terminating the two schools’ contracts. So based upon that, we notified all the relevant offices that funding should cease with the end of the fiscal year and that’s what happened, ” said Joni Hoffman, who directs the state office overseeing charter schools. “That’s when it started to get very confusing. We had even sent out a notice internally that these two schools were closing. The two schools got lawyered up, as they say.”
The public school ended up paying the charter school 250k, no one seems to know why, and then the charter school “packed up the ipads” they purchased with public funds and (maybe) opened in another town, although no one knows whether they ever opened or not.
http://www.ohio.com/news/local/charter-school-with-troubled-past-wants-to-open-in-norton-1.254107
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I don’t know if the financial, political and practical logistics could ever work out, but poor students would perform better mixed in a middle class school. One of the reasons the narrative of “failing schools” was able to gain traction is that we never did integrate minority and white students. Instead, many remain in under funded, under resourced schools, and they are easy targets of privatization. Instead, they put the blame on the teachers, and this has made them vulnerable as well. The mainstream press has never pointed a finger at the government’s failure to pursue integration or even fair funding of minority schools.
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