Just Another Day In The Wild Wild West of Ohio Charterland

The Dispatch has an article chronicling the almost comical doings of the Imagine Columbus Primary Academy charter school.

Let's go down the list of shenanigans

six members who resigned in recent weeks amid ongoing concerns about a high-cost building lease, teacher turnover and adequate services for students.

Almost the entire board of the school resigned because they had so little control over the management company, thanks to Ohio's charter school laws that allow operators more power than the boards. So what's this lease issue that caused these resignations?

Board members complained that the $700,000 annual lease consumes too much of the school’s $1.3 million annual budget. According to the Franklin County auditor’s office, the building, at 4656 Heaton Rd., is valued at $1,164,600.

Schoolhouse Finance purchased the building in 2005 for $1.5 million and made $2.6 million worth of improvements, according to the auditor’s website. SchoolHouse sold the building in 2006 for $5.2 million to a real-estate investment trust, then leased it back from the trust to charge rent to the school.

That's not a school, that's a real estate scam designed to bilk tax payers. And if you need further proof there's this

The school opened in the 2013-14 school year, just months after another Imagine School that occupied the same building under a different sponsor was closed for poor academic performance.

Again, Ohio's ridiculous charter laws allows these for profit companies to sponsor shop, even after they have been closed down for terrible performance.

Why are the schools so terrible? Because so much money is being siphoned away with dodgy lease deals there was none left to spend on paying teachers

Sinoff said board members also tried to increase teacher salaries, concerned that low salaries of $30,000 a year were causing high turnover.

No wonder we're starting to see a number of charter schools teachers consider joining teachers unions. So what of this schools sponsor, the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center?

In an interview with The Dispatch hours before threatening to close the school, the education service center’s Lahoski said he was unaware of the board departures but he, too, wanted answers about how operators were spending the money they receive.

Providing so little oversight, the sponsor was totally unaware of the resignations, and only when the situation reached comically high levels of absurdity are they even beginning to think about closing the school.

So where is the Ohio Department of Education in all of this?

Ohio Department of Education spokesman John Charlton said the agency oversees the educational service center and other charter-school sponsors and encourages them to hold school operators accountable.

“If a school isn’t doing what they are supposed to, we want the sponsor to step in,” he said.

Passing the buck and ignoring the problem as always. Meanwhile 150 young children are not getting the education they deserve and that tax payers have paid for. It's just another day in the wild wild west of Ohio Charterland

North Side charter school board quits amid concerns

Following the mass exodus of the board of a North Side charter school, the sponsor of Imagine Columbus Primary Academy says it might close the school.

The North Central Ohio Educational Service Center said Tuesday it is considering “remedial action” against the school’s Virginia-based management company, Imagine Schools Inc., because the school board failed “to hold a meeting since January.”

In a letter sent Tuesday to Imagine, Educational Service Center Superintendent James Lahoski gave operators five days to respond to concerns, warning that the school could be put on probation, have operations suspended or its contract terminated.

Charter schools are privately operated with public tax dollars. Under Ohio law, the schools must have a board that meets at least six times a year.

The action comes less than 24 hours after Imagine appointed five new board members to the Columbus Primary school board on Monday night. They replaced six members who resigned in recent weeks amid ongoing concerns about a high-cost building lease, teacher turnover and adequate services for students.

(Read more that the Dispatch)

Trio found guilty in bribery scheme involving charter school

A federal jury found three defendants guilty on Tuesday in a bribery and kickback scheme at a now-defunct Ohio charter school.

Government prosecutors had charged that two board members, the superintendent and an outside contractor for Arise! Academy in Dayton had shared nearly $500,000 and other perks as part of the scam.

Testimony in the two-week trial ended on Friday in U.S. District Court in Columbus. The jury began deliberating on Monday.

Shane K. Floyd, 42, the school’s superintendent and chief operating officer and a resident of Strongsville, near Cleveland, and board member Christopher D. Martin, 44, of Springfield, were found guilty of bribery, conspiracy to illegally use federal money and lying to the FBI.

Consultant Carl L. Robinson, 47, of Durham, N.C., was found guilty of bribery and conspiracy to illegal use of federal money.

A fourth defendant, board member Kristal N. Screven, 39, of Dayton, pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge on May 8.

(Read more that the Dispatch)

Even Scaled Back, PARCC Still Has Big Problems

The Fordham Foundation has a good blog post detailing the impacts that PARCCs proposal to scale back testing would have

The spring 2015 testing window for PARCC extended from mid-February to mid-May. That’s a long time. Of course, schools were not required to administer exams throughout the full testing window—they could use as few or as many of the days within the window as they needed. But for students, parents, and educators, the three-month window probably made “testing season” feel unusually long and drawn out. (In contrast, Ohio’s old state exams were administered over the course of roughly one month.) It also meant that testing interrupted classroom instruction for more of the school year—and earlier.

The reason for the long testing window was fairly simple: The assessment system included two exams. The first, the “performance-based assessment” (PBA), was given in February–March, and the second— the “end-of-year assessment” (EOY)—was given in April–May. The PBAs focused on students’ application of knowledge and skills (e.g., solving multi-step problems, explaining mathematical reasoning), while the EOYs focused more on traditional assessment items like reading comprehension or straightforward multiple-choice math problems. See for yourself the differences in the sample PARCC exams.

But starting in spring 2016, PARCC will be administered in one thirty-day testing window, occurring in the traditional testing period of April–May. Importantly, while the earlier PBA testing window is erased, some of PARCC’s performance-based tasks will be preserved in next year’s summative exam.

This is clearly movement in the right direction, but fixes just a fraction of the problems PARCC has, and has created. We detailed these problems, with our suggested fixes a few weeks ago. We identified 4 broad areas that needed to be addressed. Testing time, technology problems, test content problems, and high stakes.

Law makers cannot simply cut back on some tests and think the job is done. Are we still going to have schools struggle to deploy tech heavy testing solutions, on unstable software platforms with inadequate bandwidth? Combining the PBA and the EOY testing into a single test is likely to exacerbate the content problems, not alleviate them - and yet more change applied to a system under constant change isn't an appropriate environment to have mis-matched stakes for students, teachers and schools.

The Ohio legislature needs to address the full range of problems, not just the politically convenient changes PARCC has recently proposed in the face of losing millions of dollars in funding.

Two Youngstown charter schools seek unionization

Education in Youngstown may once again face changes- but this time from two charter schools.

Summit Academy and Summit Academy Secondary Schools, in Youngstown, announced on Friday the decision to form their own teachers union.

The potential union, the Summit Academy Youngstown Education Association filed authorization cards with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), vying for the opportunity to participate in the Valley's education as an exclusive bargaining representative.

An NLRB-supervised election to certify SAYEA should take place within a month, according to a news release.

According to the release, if a majority of educators and staff vote to form the Summit Academy Youngstown Education Association (SAYEA), it will be the first charter school union in Youngstown and will be affiliated with the 121,000 members of the Ohio Education Association.

The release says that the decision of educators and staff to seek representation was inspired by the mission of Summit Academy, namely the commitment "to providing an extraordinary, safe, and nurturing learning environment where students will reach their full potential."

According to the media release, teachers at Summit Academy feel that the unionization would help them advocate for their students, many of whom are disabled.

Charter schools misspend millions of Ohio tax dollars as efforts to police them are privatized

No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.

A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.

Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival .

And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.

That’s because Yost and his predecessors, unable to audit all charter schools with limited staffing and overwhelmed by the dramatic growth in the schools, have farmed out most charter-school audits to private accounting firms.

Last year, these private firms found misspending in one of the 200 audits of charter schools they conducted, or half of 1 percent, while the state’s own police force of auditors found misspending in one of six audits, or 17 percent of the time.

“You don’t even have to understand audits to know that something is broken there,” said Kyle Serrette, director of Education at the Center for Popular Democracy.

(Read more at the Akron Beacon Journal)