If anyone thought that the frequent scandals in the charter sector in Ohio would bring about a new era of accountability and oversight for charter schools, think again. The Ohio Department of Education has hired a charter school activist to run the state’s charter school office.
The Ohio Department of Education has hired charter school advocate RaShaun Holliman, the head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, to lead its charter school office.
He started Monday in the position once held by Joni Hoffman, a longtime employee of the department who was part of last year’s data-rigging controversy involving online schools.
Hoffman and Frank Stoy, another key official in the charter school office, are retiring.
Whether Holliman will just promote charter schools, as he has in previous jobs, or will force Ohio charters to have better quality is unclear. He did not return a call to the OAPCS office and biographical information provided by the state and by that organization does not show any previous enforcement work.
The former principal of the Focus Learning Academy charter school in Columbus worked for the Georgia Charter Schools Association, where he handled communications and outreach, before returning to Ohio in late summer to head OAPCS.
But that non-profit organization that was once the leading voice for charter schools in the state has lost members and officially announced this week that it will shut down at the end of the year.
The hiring drew a few objections, given the national ridicule of Ohio’s $1 billion charter school industry both from comedians and political commentators, as well as from national charter supporters.
“You don’t hire an industry insider to be a tough new sheriff for the industry they were just advocating for,” said former state representative Steve Dyer, a frequent critic of charter schools. “It’s certainly an image problem.”
The funniest line in the story is this one:
Chad Aldis of the Fordham Institute, an organization that promotes charter schools but also quality standards for them, understood that concern, but was less worried. Hirings of officials from traditional public schools happen all the time, he noted, without raising alarms of favoritism for those schools.
So, hiring an experienced superintendent to lead the state’s education department is equivalent to hiring an industry insider to police a scandal-ridden industry. The overwhelming majority of children in Ohio attend public schools, which consistently outperform charter schools. Will the new director of charter schools crack down on the frauds, grifters, thieves, and cheats in the charter sector? Or is this just another example of industry capture of the regulatory agency?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fordham Institute is an “authorizer” in OH… I don’t think I could count on them to be treating the issue in a “bipartisan” way… They have an allegiance bias that goes along with everything they say write and all of their board members do as well (interlocking boards with power)…. I thought we learned about “allegiance” bias in the tobacco scandals but maybe not; we have to repeat a lot of lessons from history.
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can’t remember if I read this here or on Bill Phillis E&A… but I copied it out to be vigilant in MA (no on #2)…”OHIO “7 billion funded boondoggle that started as a $10 milliion experiment” ( it told about 15 years? or almost 2 decades?)
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“Hirings of officials from traditional public schools happen all the time, he noted, without raising alarms of favoritism for those schools.”
What’s missing in THIS picture. This is the same thinking that says the city of New York should GIVE school space to charters–because such space is provided for public schools. The statement reveals a gross lack of understanding of the whole idea of “common good” and public education as an essential-one of those goods and as essentially different from private enterprise.
The “public education” idea goes both ways: (1) providing funding, space, and resources for the institution of education for all and (2) educating the public so that everyone benefits from living in a civilized culture.
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Some spokesmen are paid to not understand.
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Corporate Charter school advocates are no better than the Christian crusaders of the 4th Crusade who went to the Middle East to save Christianity and ended up sacking the Christian Capital of Constantinople in 1204 AD, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire
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GREAT ANALOGY, Lloyd. TRUE.
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Industry capture of the regulatory agency. Trumpian move.
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Sorry, but quoting Fordham on “favoritism” for charter schools is ridiculous. They exist for favoritism on charter schools.
I don’t know why they just don’t identify as advocates for charter schools. They are in no way advocates for public schools. They barely mention public schools unless it’s for use as an unfavorable comparison to charter schools or private schools.
Here’s the basic situation in Ohio. We have two groups in state government and lobbying circles. We have advocates for charter schools and vouchers, and then we have “agnostics”. What we DON’T have are advocates for public schools. Public schools are just considered a kind of unfashionable “default” system that no one is much interested in other than for possible future use as “backup” for choice systems and also (of course) as data production and collection centers. When the data is collected from the children in public schools it’s then used to lobby for more charter schools and vouchers.
You know what we could really use in Columbus? An advocate for public schools. The schools 93% of kids in the state attend right now. Those other schools.
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What would cause Fordham to “worry”, ponder, search its soul? In terms of value consistency, when does Fordham plan to use its resources to stop, the monopolies that all of Ohio’s newspapers have and, to upbraid Walmart, for its monopoly market positions? What a conundrum, a mission to create competition, while receiving its financial support from and, promoting its agenda in, monopolies. Fordham can get its solace, from politicians like Sen. Sherrod Brown, a man who cares deeply about “Americans uniting based on our nation’s shared values.” Reflection would lead to the question, how do those shared values, survive the content of religious cult charter schools, foreign national-run charter schools, for-profit, on-line charters (un-accessed by mostly truant students), and Silicon Valley’s big retail, schools-in-a-box?
The test for conscience, is “Would you want to explain, yourself, to your family?”
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Wait until DeVos is in charge. The whole country will get ed reform like Ohio’s and Michigan’s:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399
Not ONE WORD on public schools. The only thing I could find on DeVos and public schools is when she wrote an op ed demanding that every public school in Detroit be closed.
How does this happen? How do we get a huge group of people who are paid to “improve public schools” yet none of them ever mention public schools unless it’s to scold public school parents on testing or urge closure and replacement of public schools? Nuts, right? Yet that’s where we are.
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It happens because we have devolved into an oligarchy. The billionaires and corporations are calling the shots for everyone else. Obama tried to put up a guise of democracy, but Trump has no such pretense. He is planning a hostile takeover of all things public.
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To answer the last two questions:
No!
and
Bingo!
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