Thanks to Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy for alerting me to this shocking and disgusting story.
A charter school sponsor, the Ohio Council of Community Schools, is responsible for 50 charter schools. It was exempted from any accountability because it split from its partner, the University of Toledo.
“The council and the university have been partners for 15 years in sponsoring – creating and overseeing charter schools – after the state decided to let more organizations beyond the Ohio Department of Education sponsor schools. While the university was the official legal sponsor, it created the council as a non-profit to do all the oversight work.
“The relationship has been a controversial one, drawing accusations over the years of favoritism and nepotism. See below for more on those concerns.
“Most recently, the state rated the two as “ineffective” as a charter sponsor last fall after their 50 schools landed an academic rating of zero – the equivalent of an F – as a group. Those schools include 11 in Cleveland.
“If student test scores did not improve by the end of this school year, the partners would have been booted out of the sponsorship business.
“Not anymore.
“By splitting from the university, the Council moves on with a clean slate and the poor results will be assigned to the university.”
No results. No accountability. State money wasted. Children’s education harmed.
Who are the criminals in state government who permit this fraud to continue.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Phillis is a real gift for those of us in Ohio who care about public education. He’s my go to source of information, always reliable, always keeps his eye on the proverbial ball.
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I agree. Next step is to name the culprits in the legislature who are responsible for allowing the fraud and making sure that any up for re- election are given the boot. In my opinion, the BadAss teachers in Ohio should follow suggestions from Bill Phillis.
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White Hat Management and David Brennan are most likely involved with these charter schools. Brennan has had his hand (read: money) in Ohio Republican politics for years.
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The Council of Community Schools – no has any idea who is on this council, what they’re paid, or what they do to earn the money- they skim off a portion of each charter dollar.
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What did the University of Toledo actually do to justify taking a portion of each charter school dollar for 15 years? What work did they perform?
Does anyone in Ohio know, or do they just send the payment?
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Det Vos sidestepped the question about accountability in her hearings and she danced around everything else. So her and the congress that confirmed this POS are to blame. At the state level look who runs that and the governor. Corrupt POS that are getting money from these people. Vote them out of office people, WTF is the matter with you?
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As a former Libertarian who still, in some areas, lists in that direction, I have been slow to join the anti-charter, anti-voucher forces because I am a strong believer in the importance of variety and innovation in schooling. A highly diverse, pluralistic society and economy needs highly diverse options for students, and ecologies are preferable to monocultures.
And I have known some charter operators who weren’t charlatans, who didn’t force out poor kids and kids with disabilities and kids of color, who were dedicated educators who wanted to do something different and who ran schools that had quite a lot of accountability to their districts. Believe it or not, SOME of these exist.
However, I have heard Dr. Ravitch’s arguments loud and clear, and I have been swayed by her powerful and FREQUENT exposes of the graft and corruption and con games so common in this industry.
I would dearly love to see the public schools commit to providing a greater range of options to students and much more curricular autonomy to teachers, and, importantly, for the funding to made available to them to make that happen. That’s key. I know that a great many people in our public schools share this wish with me. We need schools to be places where students with unique gifts and talents can find paths suited to those, not places where they are identically milled under a monolithic standards-and-testing machine. And that does happen in some of our public schools now, sadly.
My turn from Libertarianism has been a slow process. As a Libertarian, I used to oppose minimum wage laws, for example, because I thought they would kills jobs and hurt the very people they were meant to help, but when I look at the actual economic studies, the argument that minimum wage laws depress jobs turns out not to be borne out strongly. To give but one example, a major study of fast food jobs in New Jersey after the passage of a major minimum wage increase found no significant effect. There have been many other such studies. Trying to figure out what the mechanism was there, I hit upon this: in a business that uses a lot of low-skill workers, there are major fixed capital investments that cannot be fully leveraged if one attempts to cut jobs in response to minimum wage regs–the marginal hit from the increase in low-skill wages just isn’t significant enough to counterbalance the loss from not utilizing the existing existing, fixed capital investment to its fullest extent. So, I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. It simply wasn’t the case that those laws would actually hurt the workers I cared about.
Facts are like weather. They have a way of eroding the positions of the ideologically inflexible.
One cannot read the facts that the premier muckraker of our time, Dr. Ravitch, has marshaled and continues to marshal without taking pause–very long pause.
What’s a government for? Nozick and others were wrong in thinking that its only legitimate functions are enforcing contracts and providing for the common defense. I am deeply, deeply thankful for our public schools and for those who defend them.
Let’s make them better and provide them with the resources and with the autonomy and flexibility to do that.
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Corrupt Ohio government where contractor schools donate to the state Republican Party and the following occurs but, no criminal investigation follows.
“The ODE found there was proper documentation for only 6,300 students -a gap of 59%” from the 15,300 students claimed.”
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