One of the most valuable sites online is KnowYourCharter in Ohio.
This post lays out the waste of taxpayer dollars gobbled up by charters.
Time to close the spigot of money going down the drain in Ohio, leeched away from public schools to fatten charter operators.
Ohio has long been a hotbed of for-profit charter schools.
While Ohio requires that all charter schools be technically non-profit, Ohio law permits these schools to hire for-profit management companies that come in and, in essence, run the schooland take control of the school’s taxpayer funding.
For-profit charter school operators have been at the forefront of Ohio’s array of charter school scandals. From White Hat Management’s long history of dodging scrutiny while maintainingpolitical influencei, to Imagine Schools’ boondoggle on school rent agreementsii to the collapse ofWhite Hat’s political successor, Altair Learning Management, that ran the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow – the epic collapse of which was widely reported last year and continues to generate headlines even today. It was recently reported that not one of the more than 4,666 students enrolled in ECOT’s final year actually attended the schooliii. Yet Ohio taxpayers paid ECOT to educate those kids for half a year.
But long overdue change is in the wind. Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder told assembledmedia shortly after he took the gavel that “I know they are technically nonprofit, but that secondtier, those management entities, I believe should be nonprofit.”1
The Know Your Charter website has updated the state data found on the website so parents, students, officials and media can compare the performance of charter schools and local public schools and districts. As part of that new data release, the Ohio Charter School Accountability Project examined how the 178 Ohio Charter Schools run by for-profit management firms2perform and spend money compared with the costs incurred by local public school districts.
The results are eye-opening.
- Schools run by for-profit operators spend a hefty $1,167 more per pupil than school districts on non-instructional administrative costs3.
- That’s 73 percent more money per pupil being spent by for-profit operators outside the classroom than the typical Ohio school district4.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Schools run by for-profit operators spend a hefty $1,167 more per pupil than school districts on non-instructional administrative costs”
And their teachers make less than public school teachers make. Which should really raise questions about how much they actually “value” teachers, despite all the rhetoric about “empowerment”.
“Empowerment” doesn’t help with a rent or student loan payment. Flowery “progressive” sounding language might be covering for race to the bottom wage reality. Real people need decent wages because real people have actual expenses. All the “we LOVE teachers!” politicking in the world won’t change that.
Maybe turning over public policy to 15 billionaires wasn’t so smart after all. They have no clue what living on 40k a year means. None.
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Speaker Larry Householder told assembledmedia shortly after he took the gavel that “I know they are technically nonprofit, but that secondtier, those management entities, I believe should be nonprofit.”1
I’m genuinely shocked they finally admitted this after 20 years. It’s true, but they’ve always denied it.
We were all supposed to pretend the thin layer of “nonprofit” in state law actually meant something, and it never did. I’m genuinely pleased Ohio is finally having an honest discussion of what privatizing public schools means.
I don’t think ed reformers can ever properly regulate hundreds of charter schools all over the state from Columbus. This quasi-government system they designed won’t work. It’s bad government. They can tweak it as much as they want. It’s poorly designed and it won’t ever work properly. But no one is ever going to admit that, because Ohio has now poured hundreds of millions of dollars into it.
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And they can’t regulate charter schools locally, because to do that would be to admit that they’re recreating local school systems, and just replacing the public schools with charters.
They’d end with a traditional Ohio public school governance system, but with contractors replacing public schools. And that looks a lot more like privatization for privatization’s stake and a lot less like “innovation”.
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