- The Columbus Dispatch recently reported that Imagine Schools, a large charter-management company, has a number of schools in the Columbus area that are spending what appear to be excessive amounts of their state aid on real-estate dealings. In the most jaw-dropping case, Imagine Columbus Primary Academy spent $700,000 on lease payments but only $614,000 on salary and benefits. Here’s how it works: A subsidiary of Imagine buys buildings, refurbishes them, sells them to a new owner, leases them back from the new owners, and then rents them out at high prices, often to their own schools. Whether Imagine is financially benefitting from this arrangement is not certain, as significant investment goes into purchasing and renovating school facilities. Here's what is certain: The optics of the real-estate machinations are bad, too much money is taken out of the classroom and away from students, and the situation is exacerbated by Ohio's failure to provide meaningful facility funding to charter schools.
- Attending college but dropping out short of a degree can be worse than not going to college at all, reports The Wall Street Journal. College dropouts can’t compete with degree-wielding peers—but they’re also behind (in pay, skills, etc.) those who jumped right into work after earning a high school diploma. Worse, more than half of these folks have student loans, with average annual borrowings around $10,000. When you’re making $15,640 annually, that kind of debt can drag you down for years. All of this is just another way of saying that college isn’t for everyone—and we ought to promote technical training as a viable, sometimes better option.
