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The Ohio Department of Education is retracting its evaluations of charter school sponsors after complaints about them leaving out poor grades of online charter schools.
(Patrick O'Donnell, The Plain Dealer)
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The Ohio Department of Education just announced that it is withdrawing the charter school evaluations that threw aside F grades for online schools.
In a statement released moments ago, ODE said that it will seek outside input from experts before going forward.
The Plain Dealer reported in June that ODE had intentionally left grades for online schools out of academic evaluations of charter school oversight agencies.
State school board members said this week that not counting those schools violates state law. They and State Sen. Peggy Lehner, the Republican chair of the Senate Education Committee, confirmed that omission by questioning David Hansen, ODE's top school choice official on Tuesday.
And last night, State Rep. Teresa Fedor said State Superintendent Richard Ross should resign for this "scrubbing" of charter school grades.
These evaluations of charter school sponsors, also called authorizers - the agencies that help create and oversee charter schools - are the cornerstone of Gov. John Kasich and the state's roundabout plan to improve Ohio's charter schools.
Rather than having the state act as quality control officers for charter schools,the state wants the sponsors to do that work and hopes to create pressure on them through the ratings.
But eliminating low grades for thousands of students makes the ratings look better and allows the agencies to qualify for new state perks.
Darlene Chambers, President and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a written statement a half hour before ODE's announcement that "It is vital to the success of charter schools and sponsors that evaluation protocols are followed."
Chambers stressed that the five sponsor/authorizers whose evaluations have been released so far all followed state requirements. And she said that academic measures make up a third of a sponsor's rating and those rated sponsors did well on the other portions.
"If there was any law that was not followed, ODE should revisit the evaluations to reflect the General Assembly's intentions within the law," Chambers said. "It is vital we continue to honor the trust of the parents of nearly 125,000 students attending community schools in Ohio."
Of the five sponsors rated so far, two that received the top rating of "exemplary" would have taken an undetermined hit if online schools had been included.
The key beneficiary of the exclusion - so far - was the Ohio Council of Community Schools, a non-profit agency which collects about $1.5 million in sponsor fees a year from the more than 14,000 students attending Ohio Virtual Academy and OHDELA, the online school run by White Hat Management.
White Hat owner David Brennan is a major contributor to Republican candidates in Ohio.
Those schools received F grades on state report cards, which would have likely blocked the agency from receiving the state's top oversight rating.
The Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, another charter school sponsor, has much smaller online schools under its wing, but was still affected by the exclusion.
Ross had declined comment earlier this week about how ODE would handle the F grades of The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio's largest online school, in evaluations coming soon.
Here's ODE's announcement:
In response to the concerns that have been raised and our own preliminary review, the Ohio Department of Education is retracting the community school sponsor evaluations that have been completed so far. The department will be seeking input from independent experts to make sure the methodology for evaluating all sponsors, including those already evaluated, is credible, accurate and compliant.