Charter sponsor review panel.JPG
Thomas Hosler, superintendent of the Perrysburg Exempted Village schools, discusses a proposed way of rating charter school oversight agencies to the state school board. Mark Hatcher, a Columbus lawyer and fellow advisory committee member, is to his left, along with Chris Woolard of the Ohio Department of Education.
(Patrick O'Donnell/The Plain Dealer)
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Charter school supporters want the state to kill a proposal that would grade their "sponsors" just like school districts.
But they haven't won over the Ohio Department of Education, at least not yet.
And the outside panel that proposed the new rating system is as adamant as ever that sponsors -- the agencies that monitor and help create charter schools -- be graded the same way school districts are on state report cards.
"I understand this is scary for some sponsors," panel member Thomas Hosler told the state school board Tuesday.
But Hosler, superintendent of the Perrysburg school district near Toledo, said that he objects to sponsors, known as authorizers in most states, not taking responsibility for whether the schools they start and oversee ever educate children well.
By grading sponsors just like a school district, sponsors will have to be "in the cockpit" with their schools to guide them to improve.
"I don't think that sponsors can be silent partners anymore," Hosler said.
State Superintendent Richard Ross will make the final decision before he retires on Dec. 31. Ross told the board Tuesday that he expects to finalize a plan in a few days.
The proposal would take effect for sponsor ratings to be done after this current school year.
Ross said he is not sure yet how the state can handle the first set of ratings that is already overdue. He told the school board he is looking at using the panel's proposed system, with previous state test results, now. But he added, "That might not be fair to sponsors that didn't know" the ratings system would be used.
Meanwhile, sponsors and charter supporters are asking the department to drop the plan. In letters to the department and testimony Monday to the board, they said schools in poor, urban areas have little chance of earning enough good grades for a sponsor to be well-rated.
They instead want to be rated in comparison to big-city school districts -- districts that almost always have low grades and which charters consider as "peers" -- and not against all schools in Ohio.
They also suggested counting student improvement scores more than report cards do. They say that a sponsor is very different from a district and should not be judged the same way.
Chad Aldis of the Fordham Institute, sponsor of some schools near Dayton but also an advocate for charter school quality, said that sponsors may not want to risk adding schools in poor neighborhoods that need them.
A school's C grade will hurt a sponsor's rating, he said, even if that C surpasses the Ds and Fs of other schools in the neighborhood.
See all submitted comments on the proposed plan below.
The so-called "Sponsor quality ratings," new for Ohio, are meant to raise standards for the agencies that oversee charter schools. By rating the agencies in three areas -- academic performance, compliance with regulations and use of strong operating practices -- the state hopes to pressure them to make charter schools improve.
This indirect and roundabout strategy is the cornerstone of Gov. John Kasich's plan to raise the quality of a $1 billion charter school industry in Ohio that is ridiculed by charter experts nationwide.
Passage of a new charter school reform law this fall, also promoted by Kasich, is the other main piece of the improvement plan. But the academic portion of the ratings have been a source of controversy since ODE illegally omitted failing grades of online schools from ratings earlier this year.
ODE had to toss out its first round of ratings, plus its old academic rating plan, after The Plain Dealer reported on the e-school exclusion in June. State Superintendent Richard Ross then formed the three-person panel in August to come up with a new plan.
As The Plain Dealer reported late last month, the panel's proposal calls for the state to calculate grades for each charter school, then combine the grades from each of a sponsor's schools into a single grade, much like the overall grade that districts usually receive on state report cards.
Grades for each school will be weighted by enrollment, so large schools will count more toward a sponsor's grade than small ones.
That was a major issue for e-school giant, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which wanted to count the same as a small school instead of a 15,000-student giant. Weighted by enrollment, ECOT's poor grades would count as 40 percent of its sponsor's academic grade.
That letter grade for a sponsor's "portfolio" of schools is then used in its overall rating.
Since the state is not officially grading schools or districts until 2018 while the state shifts its education standards and tests, it will have to specially calculate grades for charter schools only for the sponsor ratings.
"If you're accountable for the academic performance of the schools, and we have a state accountability system, it makes sense that we have the same accountability system across the board," Chris Woolard, ODE's accountability director, told the board.
Woolard said that having the same standard for districts and sponsors was key for the panel. This issue is the source of much of the debate about the plan, with charters insisting that a sponsor's role is very different from a district's.
Sponsors, they note, give contracts and authorization to schools to operate independently. So sponsors have no day-to-day control, don't hire staff, don't pick administrators and don't set curriculum.
Sponsors can set goals and requirements with schools only through contracts with schools, they say. Since those contracts can typically last five years at a time, sponsors can't force instant changes.
Columbus lawyer Mark Hatcher, another member of the panel, said the panel was very aware of those differences. But he said sponsors can be more aggressive about setting standards in contracts and enforcing them.
"There will need to be increased focus on the contractual relationship between the sponsor and the community school (charter) so that the powers of the sponsor can be addressed through the contract," he said.
State school board member Michael Collins, who was a non-voting participant in the panel's meetings, said sponsors have to take contracts more seriously.
Sponsors, he said, "can't be relieved of responsibility" just because they allowed a school to operate with a "half-baked" contract with no teeth.
"They have to be responsible for what they put their name on," Collins said.