By Edith Starzyk
(The Plain Dealer, April 21, 2011)
CLEVELAND, Ohio — While suburban districts like Solon and Rocky River are wailing over proposed cuts in their state funding, supporters of “school choice” are pleased with Gov. John Kasich’s budget — and hopeful that they’ll get even more of what they want down the road.
Kasich plans to use state money to:
• Raise the maximum number of EdChoice vouchers for private-school tuition from the current 14,000 to 60,000 within two years.
• Allow more independently operated charter schools to join the 339 that are authorized now.
His point man for education, Robert Sommers, says the administration has a consistent message: It will promote schools that deliver student success, whether or not they’re the traditional district model.
“When adults compete to educate our children, the children win,” Sommers, who used to run charter schools in Detroit, said earlier this month.
But skeptics like Miesha Headen question whether the state is demanding accountability from those who use public money to provide all the new choices, such as charter schools that work only with dropouts.
“Choice is fully engrained in our big-city districts as well as inner-ring suburbs right now,” said Headen, a Richmond Heights council member and head of the Ohio chapter of Democrats for Education Reform.
“It falls on our lawmakers to make sure in this universe of choice that parents are getting the best options available and that we’re appropriately using our dwindling pie of state money.”
Headen and Democratic legislators from the area have been closely watching subcommittee hearings on the budget that finished up last week. She said lobbyists from the choice side have been busy behind the scenes, trying to get legislators to add amendments before a House vote.
One likely amendment is key to how many new charter schools will open in the next couple years.
Kasich’s proposal has been billed as lifting a cap on charters, though in reality, the cap isn’t as snug as you might assume. Current law does restrict who can start a charter school and where it can be located, but as many as 43 are poised to open next school year — even without help from the budget.
Surprisingly, Kasich’s original budget language would make it difficult for new charters to open — probably an unintentional result of his trying to make charter school sponsors more accountable.
In Ohio, a charter school must have a contract with one of 77 approved sponsors (also known as authorizers) who are responsible for overseeing academics and finances. Many are school districts or county educational service centers that sponsor only one or two charter schools, but a few are nonprofit organizations that sponsor dozens.
As introduced, Kasich’s budget pins more responsibility on sponsors by forbidding them from adding schools if any of their current schools are in academic watch or academic emergency, the state’s two lowest rankings.
That disqualifies just about everyone who’s a sponsor now because almost all have at least one low-performing school, said Terry Ryan, who heads the Ohio offices of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Its sister foundation sponsors seven charter schools in Ohio, one of which is in academic emergency.
“Conceptually, it’s absolutely right — before you open a whole bunch more, you have to have schools that deliver,” he said. “But the way it’s written, it would prevent almost any new schools being opened by the current crop of authorizers.”
Ryan would like to see that changed to allow, say, 20 percent of a sponsor’s schools to be low-ranked. But he’s quick to add, “We do not want to return to the days when 50, 60, 70 schools were being opened by people who did not have a solid track record. We’re still seeing the repercussions from that.”
Sommers is amenable to a change.
“We are entertaining legislature adjustments to the restrictions,” he said. “We know we want to restrict poor-performing sponsors, but the original was maybe a little too tight for that.”
While that part of Kasich’s proposal gets hashed out, his move to lift a moratorium on new online charter schools appears to face little opposition in the Republican-controlled legislature.
Ohio has 27 so-called e-schools now, most of them set up by districts for their own students. However, nine of them operate statewide, drawing a total of more than 30,000 students.
Current law doesn’t stop the existing schools from signing up more students. But the proposed change would end their monopoly and open the door for new models with different approaches, Ryan said.
The freeze was supposed to be in effect until new standards were approved for online schools. Piet Van Lier, of the liberal-leaning Policy Matters Ohio, thinks such standards are much-needed.
But he’s not optimistic in light of Kasich’s decision to erase a requirement that online schools spend at least $2,931 per pupil on instruction from the base funding of about $5,700 per pupil that they get now.
“I don’t understand why that’s a good thing when the administration’s goal for all public schools is to put more money into the classroom,” Van Lier said.
Bill Sims, head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said he’s happy with the administration’s support for charters, but he would like to see a change in the geographic restrictions.
Charter school buildings are mostly limited to the state’s eight big cities and districts that are in the bottom two rankings, which would include East Cleveland, Lorain and Warrensville Heights.
Sims thinks it would make more sense to expand eligibility to the Urban 21 districts, as it briefly was in the past. That would allow new charter schools in cities like Cleveland Heights, Elyria, Euclid and Parma.
He doesn’t expect that to happen in the budget, though.
“There’s so much policy change in this bill that I think they’re going to put some of the issues off for an omnibus education bill later on,” he said.
Chad Aldis, president of School Choice Ohio, is heartened by “the emphasis Gov. Kasich placed on empowering parents,” particularly by making more Educational Choice vouchers available for private-school tuition.
The demand is there, evidenced by the 15,397 voucher applications that have been filed for next school year, Aldis said. That’s more than the 14,000 vouchers available.
Under Kasich’s budget, the cap would climb to 30,000 next year and 60,000 the year after that.
Students are eligible for EdChoice if they would otherwise attend a low-ranking district school. The list now includes schools in the Akron, Cleveland Heights-University Heights, East Cleveland, Euclid, Lorain, Maple Heights and Warrensville Heights districts. Cleveland has a separate voucher program.
Kasich’s budget also would expand EdChoice eligibility to schools with test scores in the bottom 10 percent, even if they’re not in the lowest two rankings.
Aldis isn’t quite sure how that provision would play out. But he wants to see even broader eligibility than Kasich is proposing, and he’ll get it if a bill from Rep. Matt Huffman becomes law.
That bill would award private-school tuition vouchers of up to $4,626 to families based on their household incomes — with no geographic restriction and no requirement that students come from failing public schools. Within a couple of years, even families that have been using private schools all along could get the vouchers.
To Aldis, that would give “every child access to an education that meets their needs.”
But the price tag presents a dilemma for a fiscal conservative like Ryan, from the Fordham Institute, who estimates that 80 percent of Ohio families could qualify for some sort of subsidy under Huffman’s bill.
“There may be a day for that kind of middle-class funding program,” he said. “But with all the cutting going on across the state, this is not the time to go there.”