Grand experiment gone awry

Charter schools, or commun- ity schools as they are called in Ohio, were billed as an experiment in ways of providing students with a better education than was available in public schools.

There is now ample evidence that some of those experiments have been successful, but just as many have been failures.

And yet, even the failures get nothing more than encouragement under the cockeyed system that was put in place a decade ago and that has survived, thanks to Republicans in Columbus who, even when Democrats won the gubernatorial election and took over the House, managed to block reform in the Senate.

It is as if a mad scientist did an experiment that blew up in his face, and then continued to do the same experiment every day, suffering through the same explosion day after day. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result isn’t called an experiment; it’s called madness.

A prime example

In Youngstown, Eagle Heights Academy, despite early promise, has been an academic failure. Test results for its students were bad, and the financial management, as evidenced by a report from the Ohio auditor of state, was worse.

The school was ordered closed at the end of this academic year, and it faces findings for money the auditor’s office says was misspent and action by the Internal Revenue Service for taxes that were withheld from employee paychecks, but not forwarded to the IRS.

And yet, Eagle Heights’ backers and organizers aren’t going away; they’re reorganizing, using many of the same overseers, the same building, same student body and same access to state money. Only the name will change. Eagle Heights will emerge as South Side Academy. And there will be politicians in Columbus who will act surprised when another experiment blows up in their faces.