At the State Board of Education’s February 13-14 meeting, an Ohio Department of Education official testified that the board has no clear authority, under current state law or board rules, to evaluate, intervene in, or sanction the state’s original 59 community (a.k.a. charter) school sponsors. This is a loophole in the charter school accountability chain that should be closed.
Charter school sponsors play crucial roles in monitoring, guiding, and supporting schools while also holding them accountable for academic performance, organizational viability, and financial stewardship.
Current law is unclear about ODE’s authority over “grandfathered" sponsors (Lucas County ESC and Ohio Council of Community Schools), created under the initial charter legislation, as well as district sponsors of conversion charter schools. All sponsors, not just the newest ones, should be subject to the state accountability system. The Ohio Department of Education may need new legislation to do this job well, but it should have the responsibility for overseeing and monitoring the performance of all sponsors. ODE needs to be empowered to “sponsor the sponsors.” This can be done by having the department work out and sign performance contracts with all of Ohio’s sponsors, not just the 14 non-district, non-grandfathered ones—which, after all, only sponsor a small fraction of Ohio charters.
The Fordham Foundation signed such a performance contract with the Ohio Department of Education when it became a school sponsor in September 2004. In our view, all sponsors should be subject to the state accountability system; otherwise, there’s a significant gap in the accountability chain. Some sponsors are able to give birth to schools without any concern for their ultimate success or failure. This is a mistake.
Critics of Ohio’s charter school program claim charter schools are not held accountable. In order to smash this argument once and for all, supporters of charter schools in Ohio should encourage a statewide charter school accountability system based on a contractual relationship between sponsors and the Ohio Department of Education akin to the relationship that exists between schools and their sponsors. For a look at how Ohio’s charter school accountability system could work if all sponsors had performance contracts with the Ohio Department of Education go to http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/sponsorchart.doc.