Stephen Dyer: The Failure of Charter Schools in Ohio

Stephen Dyer has tracked charter schools over the years and knows their problems better than anyone else. They are very costly. Many have very low performance. They have enabled scandals and corruption due to lax oversight.

In this post, he presents his ideas about why charter legislation must change:

Yesterday, I discussed how Tuesday’s election results here and in Texas, as well as the political fallout therefrom will almost certainly result in the death knell for the ~ $1 billion EdChoice voucher program.

Today, it’s the Charter School program, which costs Ohio taxpayers 50 percent more than EdChoice annually. About $20 billion in total since 1998.

I’ve gone through this carnival of horrors many times, but let’s deal with the topline issues with Ohio’s Charter Schools.

1. They receive 2 out of every 3 of failing grades on the most recent state report card
2. More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.
3. More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.
4. About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.
5. More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.
6. They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.
7. They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.
8. They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.
9. They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).
10. They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.
11. Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.
12. That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.
13. More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.
14. More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.
15. They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.

A LOT to chew on there. But let’s deal with the three major issues overall issues with charters:

1. They cost too much
2. They perform too poorly
3. They are scandal ridden

So how do we deal with each of these issues now? A few thoughts.

Costing too much

The original sin of Ohio Charter Schools is paying them like they cost the same to operate as traditional public schools. Under Ohio’s current Fair School Funding Plan, costs are calculated based on the overall cost of teachers, principals, administrative assistants, superintendents, treasurers, etc. for Ohio’s public school districts.

The issue with Ohio Charter Schools is they pay their people (except for administrators) way less than traditional schools. In fact, according to state data, they pay their teachers about 37 percent less. So just applying that lower teacher salary to the formula to pay Ohio Charter Schools cuts their funding by about $167 million.

Do that for principals, superintendents, treasurers, administrative assistants, etc. and you would realize additional cost savings.

In addition, you should limit their administrative costs to no more than 10 percent more than the average traditional public school. Currently, the average administrative expenditure in traditional public schools is about 13 percent of the overall spend. Limiting charters to just 10 percent more than that would free up another $210 million or so.

And online schools need a drastic reduction in state aid coupled with requirements to provide up-to-date computers and internet links. 

Brick and mortar charters and online schools need their own, separate funding formulas¹. 

Finally, tying per pupil funding for Charter Schools to no greater than what the state would have paid the school district of residence would also limit their funding to something that makes sense. If the state is paying $5,000 for a student to attend the local public school district, why should it pay $12,000 for that same student to attend a poorer performing charter school²?

Poor Performance

Which brings us to performance. 

Look, Ohio Charter School performance has always been pretty damn poor. The state only spent $8 million of the $71 million the state lied the Obama Administration into giving them a decade ago to grow high-quality Charters. Now we’ve got another $100 million in federal money to expand high-performing Charters here, but we have nowhere near that number of high-quality Charters.

So what can be done?

First, we need to immediately close Charters that have performance index scores that rank in the bottom 5 percent of Ohio public school districts³. If districts that score in the bottom 5 percent on Performance Index Score is bad enough to allow Charter Schools to open, certainly it’s fair that Charters who perform no better shouldn’t be operating and continue siphoning money away from kids in traditional public school districts.

Yes, those students would have to return to traditional public schools, but because the state pays so much more for those kids in Charters, there would also be savings when the kids return to the traditional public schools. Depending on how many years you’d want to include the 5 percent cut off⁴, you’d save $50 million to $450 million.

As for where would districts put these kids now? Just do to Charters what’s been done to Districts: Offer their buildings to the Districts that now need to take the kids at low to no cost. 

And no lottery money should be used to fund Charters. 

Like, ever.

Second, we need a much tighter automatic closure law that takes into account all the report card elements, not just cherry picked elements that put charters in the best light. So if a Charter underperforms the school district of residence from which the student is coming on more measures than it outperforms the district, the Charter can’t take the kid.

This is loosely based on a plan that former state Sen. Joe Schiavoni proposed more than a decade ago. Still works.

And if the Charter School does not outperform the lowest performing public school district in the state on more report card measures than it underperforms, it needs to close, regardless of whose kids the school takes. If you want to do this for two consecutive years or something, I’d listen.

Scandal Ridden

The primary issue with Ohio Charter Schools is their oversight is almost non existent. Yeah, they are audited every year, but as then-Auditor Dave Yost proved — that doesn’t mean they’re getting shut down. He gave the state’s highest auditing award to the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) the same year they were actively ripping off taxpayers to the tune of $120 million plus. 

While more than 1/2 of all Ohio Charter Schools that have ever opened are now closed, only about 2 dozen of those closures were due to the state’s lax automatic closure law. 

In 2015, we tried putting the onus on Charter School Sponsors to take a more active approach to policing Charter School behavior — to great fanfare and hope from me. But that has largely failed because 1/3 of Ohio’s Charter Schools are on the state’s list of worst-performing schools. 

So here’s how to improve accountability and reduce the possibility of another ECOT scandal.

First, we ban for-profit operators from running Ohio Charter Schools. This is something former House Speaker (and current 20-year federal resident) Larry Householder proposed not long ago. Most states do not let private, for-profit companies to run their Charter Schools. Ohio should join them. Eliminating the profit motive should reduce costs as well, as I found back when Householder proposed the idea. For-profit schools spent about $1,200 more per pupil back then.

Second, we require that all charter school sponsors have to be publicly accountable entities. One of the elements that leads to us being deemed the Wild, Wild West of Charter Schools by Charter School advocates is that so many non-profits that have little to do with education run our Charter Schools, including an orphanage and a housing organization. This arrangement is almost unique in the country. 

Requiring Ohio Charter Schools to be run by school districts or the state would ensure more public accountability, as well as create better partnerships between the traditional and charter sectors — partnerships that have been nearly non-existent here as these schools were first and foremost a political, not an education reform project of big Republican campaign donors.

Finally, we need a transparent, KnowYourCharter.com-like state website where people can compare their schools and Charters easily and understandably. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, after all. 

Bottom Line

Doing these things will greatly reduce the taxpayer investment in Charter Schools, but will ensure a better Charter School program. Think quality, not quantity here. 

Would you rather have a huge Charter School program filled mostly with failed operations that cost state taxpayers more than school districts? Or fewer, higher performing schools that complement the traditional schools?

I have often differed with many public school advocates on Charter Schools. I have said they can work in limited circumstances. We have spent $20 billion and 30 years proving that they can’t work here in their current form as a broad-based education solution. 

As Charter School advocate Macke Raymond put it many years ago: Parental Choice has not improved education the way the School Choice advocates thought. 

That doesn’t mean Charter Schools can’t work in some form or fashion here. 

But I think we can all agree that after $20 billion and 30 years, this Charter School form is not working. 

They need to be reined in with the money saved from that re-directed to fully funding the state’s school funding formula and reducing the need and amount of property taxes collected.

It’s time for this program’s GLP-1 treatment.

Slimmer and better.

Our taxpayers and, most importantly, our kids deserve it.

To read the footnotes, open the link.