Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Passage last fall of widely applauded state legislation to crack down on Ohio’s largely dysfunctional and failing network of charter schools did not cure all that ails a system well known for ripping off taxpayers and cheating students of quality education.
Today, even before it is possible to reasonably evaluate the success of provisions of House Bill 2 passed last October and enacted last month to improve the transparency and accountability of Ohio’s network of about 400 charter schools, along comes troubling new revelations targeted squarely at the operation and oversight of electronic-based community schools.
GROWTH OF E-SCHOOLS
Such schools are proliferating throughout the Buckeye State. E-schools enroll nearly 39,000 students and will receive an estimated $275 million this year in state funding. They typically rank among the poorest performing schools in the state, according to annual state report cards.
One of those schools, Provost Academy based in Columbus, overbilled taxpayers nearly $800,000 by grossly inflating student attendance, according to an investigation by the Columbus Dispatch. The probe concluded that if other Ohio online charters had similar problems, the amount of money overpaid could easily surpass a whopping $200 million.
In response, state Sen. Joe Schiavoni of Boardman, D-33rd, has expeditiously gone to work to add another clearly needed layer of taxpayer protection and e-school oversight to state statutes.
Last week, Schiavoni, Senate minority leader, introduced a bill to strengthen attendance requirements and monitoring at the growing e-school subset of Ohio’s community schools.
“We need to make sure that online schools are accurately reporting attendance and not collecting tax dollars for students who never log in to take classes,” said Schiavoni. “Online schools must be held accountable for lax attendance policies.”
Provisions of Schiavoni’s newest charter oversight bill, co-sponsored by the Ohio Senate Democratic Caucus, are specific, taut and include:
Requiring e-schools to keep an accurate record of the number of hours each student actively participates in coursework each day. The information must be reported to the Ohio Department of Education on a monthly basis and be made available on the department’s website. If a student fails to log in for 10 consecutive days, the e-school must notify ODE, the student’s parent/guardian and the district of residence.
Requiring student participation logs be checked for accuracy on a monthly basis by a qualified teacher.
Requiring each community school to comply with all attendance requirements and standards established by the state.
ATTENDANCE IRREGULARITIES
We agree with Schiavoni that his proposed reforms are needed and long overdue. After all, attendance irregularities have long plagued Ohio’s brick-and-mortar charters. Who could forget an audit report last year that found 0 of the 95 students supposedly enrolled at Youngstown’s Academy for Urban Scholars in attendance there when auditors made a surprise visit to the school.
Ideally, the reforms Schiavoni proposes today should have been included in last year’s omnibus bill. To his credit, however, Schiavoni has long been one of the Ohio General Assembly’s most-aggressive watchdogs over the charter industry, and he’s wasted little time in trying to close this newest loophole.
His latest reform measure clearly deserves prompt consideration and passage, ideally before state legislators’ summer recess, so that its fiscally responsible provisions can apply at the start of the 2016-17 school year this fall.
Yet, we’re still pragmatic enough to recognize that this additional Band-Aid on the sickly charter school system will not be the last piece of tinkering for the industry. Operators of charters still have friends in high places – and in the Legislature – who are hesitant to adopt broader and more structural reforms.
As we have long argued, the only comprehensive elixir to cure once and for all the many maladies of the charter-school industry would be application of the same set of rigid and transparent rules, regulations and oversight by which Ohio’s network of public schools must abide.