Attendance audit by the state shows charter schools’ flaws

If any doubts linger on the press- ing need for massive structural reform in the operation and oversight of Ohio’s 300 charter schools, humiliating results from a recent attendance audit seals the deal for concrete action now.

The informal audit, conducted by Ohio Auditor Dave Yost’s staff, found embarrassingly low attendance rates at half of the 30 community schools where auditors conducted unannounced visits and head counts last fall.

In fact, auditors found the most egregious example statewide of potential overreporting of student attendance in Youngstown at the Academy for Urban Scholars on Fifth Avenue where not a single student was found in the school — zero, zilch, zip. Two months earlier, the academy reported 2014-15 attendance at 95.

Not surprisingly, the results drew a harsh response last week from Yost. “I’m really kind of speechless of everything that I found. It’s quite a morass.”

Call it a morass. Call it a fiasco. Call it a tragedy. Above all else, call this new report a final SOS for a top-to-bottom scrubbing of the system to ensure minimal educational and attendance standards are maintained in all community schools and to guarantee transparency and accountability in their oversight. The fall 2014 audit also renewed longstanding criticisms of charter schools, arguing they lack segregation of duties and allow for conflicts of interest among charter-school boards, sponsors and for-profit management companies

As report after report and audit after audit have demonstrated, far too often, charter schools shortchange students and hoodwink taxpayers. That’s because charters receive funding based on head count. The higher their reported attendance, the more bountiful the pot of gold they grab. Collectively, they receive about $800 million per school year. Each absence of each student of each school day wastes those hard-earned tax dollars.

Clearly, many of Ohio’s community schools have fallen short of their 18-year-old mission to offer quality, innovation and choice for students. The realities reveal a long and unsavory trail of mismanagement, greed, illegal activity, instability, lack of public accountability and anemic academic performance.

At long last, the damage has reached such epic proportions that even Republicans — who have long resisted systemic change in the charter system — have come around to recognize enough is enough. Gov. John Kasich has made charter-school reform one of his signature issues in 2015.

Legislative changes

In addition, Republicans in the Ohio House of Representatives on Wednesday unveiled House Bill 2, which would prohibit poor-performing charter schools from regularly switching sponsors, require contracts between schools and management companies to be filed with the state and posted online, and push for increased public information about charter school performance.

Similarly, state Sen. Joe Schiavoni, one of the Mahoning Valley’s most aggressive watchdogs on charter school irregularities, plans to reintroduce his bill to clamp down on charter sponsors and operations. Recalcitrant Republicans cast that much needed bill to the dung heap of the General Assembly last session.

This year, the Legislature must act swiftly — before its summer recess — to ensure such critical measures are adopted into law. As Schiavoni aptly points out, “Ohio’s system of regulating public charter schools is broken. … There are just too many examples of students being cheated out of a good education and tax dollars being wasted for the General Assembly to ignore the problem any longer.”