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Another Ohio Charter School Scandal

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2015 //
4

The state education department in Ohio has taken control of eight charter schools and closed four of them for poor performance. Two of the closed charters are operated by the for-profit charter chain Imagine Inc. of Virginia.

 

The for-profit company has been criticized for charging its schools what the state has called exorbitant rent. The rent, in turn, is used to pay back private investors who buy up the charter school property then lease it back to the school management company….
The Romig Road operation, Imagine Leadership Academy, was on notice in 2012 that it would have to close in 2013 for poor academics. The charter school, instead, closed a year early, found a new school board and reopened under the same management company.
By creating a new school, the clock was restarted on its academic performance. And even though it is performing as poorly, or worse, than the two Imagine schools targeted for closure, the Ohio Department of Education cannot intervene.
Imagine Schools operates 17 charter schools in Ohio, including Imagine Akron Academy, a kindergarten school also taken over by the state after the Portage County Educational Service Center closed.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Ohio

Ohio: Charter School Officials Convicted in Bribery Scheme in Dayton, But, “It’s About the Kids”

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2015 //
18

There is a very serious problem associated with deregulation of public school funding turned over to privately managed charter schools. The absence of oversight and auditing facilitates criminal schemes, such as the one that was just revealed in Dayton, where three men were convicted of bribery and other charges.

 

A federal jury in U.S. District Court on Tuesday convicted three men of bribery and conspiracy charges connected to their work for Arise! Academy, a Dayton area charter school that operated from 2004 to 2010.
Federal prosecutors said two Arise board members — Christopher D. Martin, 44, of Springfield and Kristal N. Screven of Dayton — and school superintendent Shane K. Floyd, 42, of Strongsville conspired to steer lucrative, unbid contracts and make overpayments to Global Educational Consultants, which was co-owned by Carl L. Robinson, 47, of Durham, N.C.

 

 

Martin, Floyd and Robinson were convicted Tuesday in a jury trial of the bribery and conspiracy charges and Martin and Floyd were also convicted of lying to FBI investigators. Martin and Floyd face up to 20 years in prison while Robinson could be sentenced to up to 15 years.

 

Screven, 39, pleaded guilty on May 8 to one criminal count of conspiracy to commit bribery and faces up to five years in prison. Screven had originally been charged with conspiracy, bribery and witness intimidation for allegedly telling a witness to lie to the grand jury.
Arise! paid Global $420,919 over 15 months, starting in September 2008 at a time when the charter school had trouble paying its bills and staff, according to federal investigators.
In exchange for the consulting contract, Robinson paid Floyd and Martin thousands of dollars in cash and other benefits, like an all-expense -paid Las Vegas trip taken by Martin.
The defendants may be required to forfeit the $420,919 paid to Global Educational Consultants.
Floyd and Robinson knew one another well and had previously formed another educational consulting firm together — a fact they concealed from other Arise board members, prosecutors alleged.
Martin, who served as Arise board chairman, worked as an aide to U.S. House Speaker John Boehner.

 

Beset by financial problems and poor academic performance, Arise charter school closed its doors in June 2010.

 

This statement by one of the men who was convicted is priceless:

 

In 2009, when Arise paychecks were bouncing, vendors went unpaid and staff took a 20 percent pay cut, Floyd told the Dayton Daily News: “These pains, these wounds are great now; I understand that and I sympathize with the staff here to take a cut like that. But I do commend their determination and the willingness to still go about the business of educating our young people.”
“At the end of the day, it’s about the kids,” he said.

 

 

Remember that: “At the end of the day, it’s about the kids.”

 

 

Scoundrels used to wave the bloody flag (the blood of patriots, that is) and wrap themselves in their patriotism; now, they say, “It’s all about the kids.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Ohio Charter Schools: The Money Pit

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2015 //
18

Doug Livingston of the Beacon-Journal writes that Ohio’s charter schools are notoriously wasteful with taxpayer dollars. And he predicts it will get worse because auditing of charters has been privatized. For some reason, private auditors are far less likely to uncover financial abuses.

“No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.

“A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.

“Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival .

“And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.

“That’s because Yost and his predecessors, unable to audit all charter schools with limited staffing and overwhelmed by the dramatic growth in the schools, have farmed out most charter-school audits to private accounting firms.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio

Ohio: Imagine Charter Board Resigns Over Financial Issues

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2015 //
11

Six members of the board of an Imagine charter school in Columbus, Ohio, resigned en masse “amid ongoing concerns about a high-cost building lease, teacher turnover and adequate services for students.” They were promptly replaced by the for-profit chain.

The school paid an enormous lease fee to a management company owned the the charter chain.

“The previous board “explored” closing the school with 150 students attending after clashing with Imagine Schools over several issues, including the academy’s $58,000-a-month lease.

“The lease is with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools Inc., raising questions about a possible conflict of interest.

“Board members complained that the $700,000 annual lease consumes too much of the school’s $1.3 million annual budget. According to the Franklin County auditor’s office, the building, at 4656 Heaton Rd., is valued at $1,164,600.

“Schoolhouse Finance purchased the building in 2005 for $1.5 million and made $2.6 million worth of improvements, according to the auditor’s website. SchoolHouse sold the building in 2006 for $5.2 million to a real-estate investment trust, then leased it back from the trust to charge rent to the school.

“I am disappointed we couldn’t close the school. We felt it was the right thing to do,” said Leon Sinoff, a board member who resigned on May 27.

“The school opened in the 2013-14 school year, just months after another Imagine School that occupied the same building under a different sponsor was closed for poor academic performance.”

School opens, school closes, school opens. Through it all, the corporation’s profits grow.

Categories Charter Schools, For-Profit, Ohio

Innovation Ohio: E-Schools Are Terrible Schools with Politically Powerful Sponsors

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2015 //
17

In a report on the powerful and profitable virtual charter school industry in Ohio, Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio documents the failure of these schools. 35,000 students are enrolled in E-schools.

Not a single virtual charter school is rated A or B by the state. Most earn an F.

The graduation rates at the state’s nine virtual charters are abysmal. The worst-performing district in the state has a higher graduation rate than all the E-schools.

Dyer writes:

Since 2000, E-Schools have received well over $1 billion from the state that was originally slated to go to school districts. In return for this money, E-schools have delivered extremely poor student achievement results. And while the statewide E-Schools perform only slightly better overall than they did in the 2011 report, the tepid improvement is significantly tempered by the $60 million annual increase in their funding over the same period. In fact, the sector has grown from a $115 million program in 2006 to a $250 million program in 2014. At the same time, local taxpayers have been forced to subsidize their substandard performance.

Why does Ohio continue to fund these low-performing schools? Why are they never held accountable? Because the owners of the two biggest E-schools make generous campaign donations to important elected officials.

Categories Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: A Stellar Example of Data Mania

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2015 //
27

A strange affliction has taken control of American public education. Or perhaps it is better to say a group of people with a mindset from some fantasyland are now making policy, all geared to produce standardized children and standardized minds.

Here is an exemplar.

As I read this article, my eyes began to blur, the words lost all meaning. Who are these people? Why do they think that all children can be rated,ranked, and labeled by their scores on a standardized test? How do they define “proficiency”? What does it mean? Who decided?

One voice of reason: Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest says that “standards” are not objective, they are subjective.

If you can jump higher than me, am I a failure? If you can solve a crossword puzzle faster than me, are you better than me in general or just better at solving crossword puzzles?

I know that the people who are immersed in data and who believe in data like a religion, think they are being scientific. So did the eugenicisys of the 1920s,who thought they could use test scores to sort and label people and to decide who was allowed to reproduce; they thought they were “scientifically” improving the human race, like plant genetics or animal genetics. By the 1930s, they were recognized as quacks, but on another continent, a mad dictator loved the eugenics philosophy and drove the world mad.

Will anyone hear if I put in a word for humanism? For valuing the different gifts of each person? For loving every child, regardless of their test scores? For abandoning the nutty quest to have standards so high that most children are designated failures by arbitrary measures?

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Ohio, Standardized Testing

Ohio: A Must-See Report Card Comparing Charters and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2015 //
13

This website, called “KnowYourCharter” is powerful. It dispels the myth that charter schools are superior to public schools. A few are, but most are not. Even in some of the lowest-performing, most impoverished districts in the state, the public schools outperform many charter schools.

 

You can plug in the name of any school district in the state and see how the public school district compares to individual charter schools. They are compared by such factors as state funding per pupil, overall state performance rating, average teaching experience of teachers, and how much money the charters extract from the public system.

 

It takes only a moment to click the button. Open the link and you will learn more in a few minutes than by reading tomes about charters.

Categories Charter Schools, Funding, Ohio, Teachers

Stephen Dyer: In Ohio, the Charter Schools Have the Most D and F Grades

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2015 //
5

This is part 3 of Stephen Dyer’s series about charter schools in Ohio. What he has learned from state data is that charter schools perform worse than public schools and take money from children in public schools in every district.

 

His series is titled “Ohio Charter Schools Just Don’t Work.” Something tells me you won’t read anything about this in the Wall Street Journal, and very likely not the New York Times either, although they are fast to shine a bright light on high-performing charters which are not representative of the charter industry.

 

He writes:

 

Now that I’ve shown how state data indicate that Ohio’s charter schools simply aren’t up to snuff with Ohio’s school districts, costing children in those districts millions of dollars a year, and that the excuses posited by some in the charter school community just don’t hold water, I’m going to spend some time today looking at building-level data.

 

This is the data charter school proponents have argued for years should be the only comparable data when look at charter and public school performance.

 

Even though the state does not track which kids go from which public school buildings to which charters.

 

And the funding comes from the district, not the district building the kids leave.

 

And charters are considered districts in state law for funding and accountability purposes.

 

And charters are considered Local Education Agencies for federal funding and grant making purposes.

 

The primary reason I look at district-level data in my comparisons is pretty simple: when a kid leaves a district for a charter, the money that flows to the charter for that kid’s education comes out of every child’s state funding pot, not just the pot going to the most failing building in the most failing district. So it’s not punishing the most failing building in a district –it’s punishing every building and child in the district, even the best of both.

 

But for argument’s sake, let’s look at charter and public school building performance. What you’ll see is even in the light most favorable to charters, public schools outperform charters overall. Period.

 

Ohio’s charter schools perform worse overall than all local public school buildings, including those in the Big 8 urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) – the areas where charters were supposed to offer better alternatives. Charters register lower percentages of As and Bs while having higher percentages of Ds and Fs than local public schools.

 

Read the whole post to read the links and the rest of the story.

 

Why is the new ESEA setting aside new money for a sector that performs worse than public schools? Why are hedge fund managers and philanthropists funding more such schools? When will they pay attention to data?

 

When Jeb Bush invented school grades, he no doubt thought they would embarrass public schools and help charter schools and voucher schools, but it is not working. Just as charters are not working.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Ohio

Stephen Dyer: The Excuses That Charters Make for Poor Performance: Part 2

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2015 //
6

This is part 2 of Stephen Dyer’s series called “Charters Just Don’t Work.”

In this post, Dyer examines the excuses that charters offer for their poor performance relative to district public schools.

For example,

Claim: Charter schools struggle because their populations are so much more challenging than districts’.

Fact: While charter schools do have higher percentages of students in poverty and minorities, they have smaller percentages of special education children.

But here’s the deal: Charters do worse on the report cards than districts with greater challenges. So that means that while charters’ poor performance compared with districts overall can perhaps be explained by more challenging populations, districts with greater challenges are doing better. So charters are not, on the whole, doing a better job serving our state’s most challenging students than districts with more challenges than the charter faces.

There are other excuses, but as Dyer says, they don’t hold water.

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio

Stephen Dyer: Charter Schools in Ohio Just Don’t Work: Part 1

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2015 //
4

Stephen Dyer, former legislator, now affiliated as an education policy fellow with Ohio Innovation, has been a close observer of charter schools in his home state. When he writes, he relies on nonpartisan data. This is the first in a series about the disappointing results of charter schools in Ohio.

 

This first post finds that taxpayers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars (that is, taking it away from public schools) to subsidize charter schools that perform the same or worse than the regular public schools.

 

Here is what the data show:

 
Out of the $774 million that were transferred from districts to charters with state report card grades , 56% – or more than $430 million – went to charter schools that performed worse overall than the district that transferred the money. If you include districts that performed the same, nearly 2 out of every 3 dollars went to charter schools from a district that performed the same or better, at a cost of $504 million.

 
Local taxpayers had to subsidize $180.3 million to cover the money transferred to the same or worse performing charter schools.

 
Districts were more likely to lose money to charters that underperformed on all 8 report card categories and not a single transfer occurred where the charter outperformed the district on all 8 report card grades.

 
When districts and charters were both graded in every category, 97% of the time districts outperformed the charters. Just 1.8% of the time did a charter outperform districts in the majority of the categories.

 
There were 461 school districts – accounting for more than ¾ of all of Ohio school districts – where all the kids attending charter schools were transferred to equal or poorer performing charter schools. That adds up to 19,042 kids and $136.6 million.

 

 

Meanwhile, every district lost at least some funding to poorer performers, with only 17 districts losing less than half their children to poorer performing charters.
In 84 of 88 counties, more than half of children attended poorer performing charters, and in 43 of Ohio’s 88 counties, all the children going to charters attend charters that perform the same or worse than local school districts.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio
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