Aired September 18, 2006
State report cards show test scores for Ohio's more than 300 charter schools improving. But controversy over Ohio's charter school efforts continues. Critics cite concerns over spotty performance and weak accountability as tax dollars leave the traditional public school system. Over the next two weeks, 90.3 will focus on educational obstacles and opportunities in Ohio. ideastream's Mhari Saito starts with this report on Charter Schools.
See Also: All Education Series reports
 Photo courtesy of The Intergenerational School |
Walk into a classroom at The Intergenerational School near Cleveland's University Circle and the first thing you'll notice is that the kids aren't organized by grade level. 9, 10 and 11-year-old students sit in Maureen Consul's class and discuss the novel Seed Folks by pretending to be characters in the book.
Teacher: Where's Gonazalo?
Student: Here.
Teacher: How did you help in the garden?
Student: By planting the seeds.
Teacher: Right, you planted them figuratively and literally...
Tuition-free charters like this get the state subsidy for each student that would have otherwise gone to a traditional public school. Freed from some of the regulations of their public counterparts, principal Catherine Whitehouse says Intergenerational best reaches their students by putting them in class levels based on performance, not age.
Catherine Whitehouse: The state says, 'well, this is what you need to be teaching,' but the fact of the matter is, I can't teach that if the foundational skills aren't there. So it's really just addressing each child's individual needs and you know honoring the experiences and the skills that they bring to the classroom.
The approach is working for students that statistically are not expected to do well. By many measures they are disadvantaged. Many come from Cleveland's poorest neighborhoods. Two-thirds qualify for free or reduced lunch. But students have done so well on state tests, they have earned Intergenerational the state's highest ranking - excellent - three years in a row. Critics argue that Intergenerational is an exception.
Tom Mooney: Half of Ohio's charter schools are still in academic watch or emergency. At the other end of spectrum, 74% of regular public schools are rated as excellent or effective and only 16% of charter schools are.
 Photo courtesy of The Intergenerational School |
Tom Mooney is the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. The union head says charters have received $1.5 billion in state tax dollars over the past seven years; yet, he says, no one is adequately monitoring charters that aren't doing well.
Tom Mooney: Some of these schools post miserable academic performances year after year and nobody's touched them.
Mooney points to schools run by the state's largest charter operator, the for-profit White Hat Management. More than half of the company's northeast Ohio schools get failing grades from the state. White Hat spokesman Bob Tenenbaum says many of their schools - especially its Life Skills Centers - help students that struggle academically.
Bob Tenenbaum: While nobody's happy with those schools being in academic emergency - it's entirely unrealistic to expect this kind of population to compete with traditional public high schools.
A year-old state law moves the burden of closing a failing charter school from Ohio's Department of Education to the school's sponsor. The idea was the non-profits, universities or school districts allowed to sponsor charters would be more invested and better able to monitor their school's progress. But teachers union head Mooney says the law has backfired.
Tom Mooney: So when a sponsor says we need to cut back and get rid of a school, the school says well, let's get a new sponsor. Any 501c3 or any nonprofit one wants to create can now be a sponsor.
The state Department of Education says so-called "sponsor-hopping" is not allowed. But even charter school supporters like State House Speaker, Republican Jon Husted says something needs to be done.
Jon Husted: We don't have enough quality sponsors providing training and oversight but we are in the process of correcting that in past and present legislation and we are not going to allow any growth in the charter system unless its quality growth.
 Photo courtesy of The Intergenerational School |
Husted says he's looking at legislation that would only allow sponsors with proven track records to sponsor new schools. He also points to recent acts that cap the number of new community schools and new tests to weed out failing charters.
Back at Cleveland's Intergenerational school, students, mentors and staff stay focused on academics. But principal Catherine Whitehouse says political wrangling makes her job tougher as new requirements also penalize charter schools that are doing well.
Catherine Whitehouse: We can just get to the point where we give up because we're churning our wheels about things that have nothing to do with educating children. More and more pieces of paper have nothing to do with educating children.
There's no likely end to the demand for paper as lawmakers work to improve oversight of Ohio's over three hundred charter schools. I'm Mhari Saito, 90.3.