Charter charges

Advocates of charter schools say they provide needed competition for traditional public schools and greater choice to students and parents. Operated correctly, they fulfill these roles.

But the anything-goes approach the Kasich administration and the General Assembly is taking to charter schools is wrong. It needs to be reversed before it does deep and permanent damage to Ohio’s educational system.

In the name of “reform,” Gov. John Kasich wants to lift the limit on the number — currently about 330 — of Ohio charter schools, most of them privately operated. Such schools get tax money — roughly $680 million in the past school year — but are exempt from many of the rules the state imposes on public schools.

About 94,000 Ohio students enrolled in charter schools last year. Critics argue that these schools, especially for-profit ones, generally perform no better — and often worse — than traditional schools.

The expansion of charter schools Mr. Kasich seeks is at least questionable at a time when he is slashing state financial aid to public schools by $1 billion over the next two years. Changes the Ohio House has approved to the governor’s budget make a bad plan worse.

A series of shadowy amendments added at the last minute would gut performance and independent-sponsorship standards for charter schools. They would weaken accountability, transparency, and oversight measures that govern charter schools’ use of public money.

Critics across the political spectrum say the changes are designed to benefit such major for-profit charter-school operators as White Hat Management of Akron and Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, whose executives are big contributors to Republican campaigns in Ohio.

House Speaker William Batchelder (R., Medina) denounces as a “damn lie” any effort to link the charter-school changes to a political payoff. But neither he nor anyone else in the House will identify who sponsored the amendments.

It gets worse. The liberal advocacy group Innovation Ohio reported last week that graduation rates for five of the seven online charter schools that operate statewide are worse than those of Cleveland’s schools, which have the worst rate of any public district in the state.

Moreover, the study says, online charter schools cost the state twice as much per pupil as traditional public schools. It notes that lawmakers still have not adopted standards for online schools the State Board of Education developed in 2003. The group calls the electronic schools “an outrageous taxpayer ripoff.”

The schools’ operators condemn the study as an “incomprehensible ... partisan attack.” They claim that failed charter schools operated by nonprofit groups cost the state plenty when they closed. They might explain why their schools should not be closed as well.

To its credit, the Kasich administration says it opposes the House amendments. That is ample reason for the Senate to remove them when it takes up the budget.

But a better approach would be for Governor Kasich and lawmakers to postpone their needlessly large and rapid expansion of charter schools and school vouchers until public-school funding across the state is stabilized.

That hiatus would provide crucial time to impose — and enforce — the same sort of performance and accountability standards for these education options that Ohio taxpayers rightly demand for public schools. Students, not profits or money politics, must guide the debate.