toledoblade.com --

COLUMBUS - Ohio's expanding experiment with charter schools is constitutional, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled this morning in a splintered decision.

"When the General Assembly enacted Ohio's Community Schools Act, it was entrusted with making complicated decisions about our state's educational policy,'' wrote Justice Judith Lanzinger, a Toledo Republican. "These policy decisions are within the purview of its legislative responsibilities, and that legislation is entitled to deference.''

She was joined in the 4-3 majority by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer and Justices Maureen O'Connor and Evelyn Lundberg Stratton.

"The General Assembly always has the prerogative to determine that Ohio's community schools are not meeting the purpose for which they were established and, consequently, has the ongoing opportunity to modify or dismantle them,'' wrote Justice Lanzinger.

Justices Alice Robie Resnick, the sole Democrat left on the court, and Republican Justice Paul Pfeifer, dissented. They're the only remnants of the former court majority that had previously struck down the state's system of funding public education in the DeRolph case and its successors.

Justice Resnick, of Ottawa Hills, wrote that she believes Ohio's charter school law unconstitutionally "produces a hodgepodge of uncommon schools financed by the state.'' She wrote that Ohio has created a "schmizmatic educational program under which an assemblage of divergent and deregulated, privately owned and managed community schools competes against public schools for public funds.''

Justice Terrence O'Donnell also dissented from the majority's opinion, but he wrote that the court shouldn't have agreed to hear such a complicated case until after a full record had been developed at the lower court level.

At stake is a system of nearly 300 charter schools serving nearly 72,000 students in 35 of Ohio's 88 counties at a price tag of half a billion a year to state taxpayers.

In a case that has drawn comparisons with DeRolph, charter school critics argued that the schools, which are freed from some of the regulations that govern their traditional K-12 brethren, are public in name only with many operated by private management companies.

They argued that the schools drain badly needed cash from the mainstream educational system even as performance on standardized tests remains poor.

Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com, or 614-221-0496.

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