Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has long been a champion of public charter schools. He believes that the competition from charters will help, not hurt, traditional public schools in their efforts to improve achievement, and he argues that strong bipartisan, community-based support is a real strength for charters.

But charter schools are fairly new, and Finn thinks that some authorizers – the entities charged under state charter laws with approving applications from groups wanting to open charters, and with overseeing the new schools’ performance – are having trouble figuring out how best to meet their responsibilities.

“Authorizers are like an 8-year-old charged with looking after a new puppy that they didn’t ask for,” he said at a February 18, 2004 Brookings Institution press briefing in Washington, DC. “ …In the real world, it’s amateur hour.”

Thanks to a new Ohio state law, Finn and his team may soon be spending countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to become something more than “amateur” in Dayton, Ohio.

Dayton Dilemma
Since 1997, when Ohio passed its first charter school law, the state’s Department of Education has authorized an estimated 120 new schools in Ohio, 19 of them in Dayton. Today, almost 20 percent of Dayton schoolchildren attend charter schools authorized by the department.

While the original state law also designated school districts, the Lucas County Educational Service Center and the University of Toledo as authorizers, the state department has been the most active.

But the fast pace of school openings created problems thanks in part to a staff that was stretched thin on many fronts.

“There was lots of criticism of the [department’s] administration of the program,” says Stephen Ramsey, President of the Ohio Charter Schools Association. “An independent performance audit was very critical.”

Find out More About Charter Laws in Your State The Center for Education Reform offers a state-by-state map [1] showing what’s going on with charters around the country. The Center also ranks [2] the quality of each state’s charter school laws, based on a number of variables.

That audit was prompted by financial mismanagement at eight charters, which led to the schools being closed. In his February 2002 report, State Auditor Jim Petro recommended that the department streamline payments to charter schools, while more closely monitoring their enrollment figures. He also said the department should encourage more innovative financing for charter school buildings.

Ramsey says the department was in a difficult situation politically: “I think it was tough for them to balance between their biggest customers, which are school districts—who are, in Ohio, aligned against charter schools—and, at the same time, be supportive of charter schools.”

Ohio lawmakers found the response of the state department to the audit recommendations unsatisfactory. In 2005, the department will be stripped of its authorizer status, but will have an oversight role over all Ohio charter authorizers.

Needed: New Homes for Orphan Charters
Since the majority of Dayton’s charter schools are currently authorized by the state’s Department of Education, those schools will close if they do not find new authorizers.

Last year, Ohio lawmakers passed the Community School Enhancement Act to encourage more organizations to become authorizers, and to ensure that new authorizers have links to the communities where the schools operate. Under the new law, authorizers must be located within 50 miles of the charters they oversee.

The law also expands the list of entities that can become authorizers to include all Ohio educational service centers and public colleges and universities.

And, in an unusual move, it allows charitable organizations that have existed for at least five years, have at least $500,000 in assets, and have an educational mission, to become authorizers as well. Ohio is only the second state, behind Minnesota, to get 501(c)3s involved.

Nonprofits to the Rescue?
Enter the Fordham Foundation, which meets all of the new requirements, and which Finn hopes will become the authorizer for about nine Dayton charter schools. The Ohio roots of Thomas B. Fordham, an industrialist who ran the General Motors plant in the 1900s and lived and worked in Dayton, is a key reason for the Foundation’s interested in this location.

“There’s no other organization, we feel, that has the capacity to do sponsorship as well as we can in Dayton,” says Terry Ryan, a Fordham project director who now lives with his wife and two young children in the city. “We want to be a community-based sponsor.”

Ryan thinks Fordham can be successful under the community-based approach. The Foundation’s plans call for two staffers to cover an expected nine schools, all within Dayton. By contrast, the state department had a staff of four to oversee approximately 120 schools located throughout Ohio.

Fordham expects to hear from the state within the next couple of months on whether its application to become an authorizer has been approved. Ryan is also waiting to hear from more schools that would like Fordham to be their sponsor.

Playing Defense
While charter schools have won acceptance from a substantial number of Ohio parents and students, they still face considerable opposition from traditional public schools and their supporters.

“The traditional education system…is opposed to charter schools here,” says Ramsey. “A lot of organizations…collectively filed a lawsuit challenging their constitutionality.”

Last year, the Coalition for Public Education – which includes elected school boards, public school administrators, parents, teachers, organized labor groups, and the League of Women Voters – challenged what it called inconsistent academic standards for Ohio students. The group argued that privately operated charter schools were not subject to the same academic standards that apply to traditional public schools.

“Charter school advocates and operators made a bargain with Ohio taxpayers,” said the Coalition’s Chairman Tom Mooney in a 2003 press release. “‘Free us from red tape – and from supervision by elected school boards – and hold us accountable for results.’ If there is no performance standard for renewing charters, there is no accountability, and we’ve been had.”

But in April 2003 Judge Patrick McGrath of the Franklin County Common Pleas Court in Columbus said opponents of the schools could not provide facts that proved their argument and dismissed the lawsuit. The Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association have since filed an appeal and new lawsuits.

Since the first charter school laws were passed in 1991, close to 3,000 schools have opened nationwide. Because each one is established under a unique mission statement, or charter, the job of overseeing charter schools is complicated: Authorizers must ensure the schools are living up to their own promises while meeting the requirements of state and federal law. Yet the schools are not obligated to use the same curricula, textbooks, and course requirements as regular public schools.

Making Tough Calls
Critics of the charter school movement are sometimes skeptical of authorizers. They are concerned that lax oversight could lead to bad educational outcomes for children, or that poor financial controls could lead to schools going bankrupt and abruptly shutting down.

“Skeptics [of charter schools] often say that it’s a sham—that authorizers won’t really close bad schools,” says Bryan Hassel, a researcher with Public Impact, an education policy and management consulting firm.

In February 2004 Public Impact released a study called “High Stakes,” which explores 506 decisions made by charter school authorizers nationally as of fall 2001. Co-authors Hassel and Meghan Batdorff wanted to find out if authorizers were willing to close charter schools that were not working. They wondered if authorizers might have an inherent bias in favor of charters.

But they found that many authorizers are willing to close under-performing schools. Hassel and Batdorff found that about 17 percent of schools were shut down during the study period. “I think that’s a fairly high percentage,” said Hassel.

In a randomly selected sample of 50 of the 506 authorizers, the authors found only one case in which a school was allowed to remain open despite clear evidence of underperformance.

Dayton Decisions
Ohio charter school advocates, like Ramsey, are working to see that authorizer decision-making under the new law is sound.

Ramsey sees the new law as an opportunity to create a process for authorizers that can be used nationwide. His Ohio Charter Schools Association has been awarded grant funding from the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations and received approximately $500,000 in the state budget to open an Ohio Charter School Sponsor Institute. According to Ramsey, it’s the first attempt in the country to establish a curriculum to support the development and training of authorizers.

“Almost every state law dealing with charter schools just specifies who can be [an authorizer], but there’s very little guidance for what they should be doing,” says Ramsey. “We need to support authorizers who know what they’re doing in terms of oversight. We’re not interested in authorizers who just turn out schools without any regard to whether or not they’re conforming to their contracts, or producing a better product for students.”

The Ohio Charter Schools Association has partnered with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers on the project.

Meanwhile, Fordham is moving forward. Staff time, insurance and legal fees, interview costs and systems development will cost the foundation at least $300,000 over the next few years. But Ryan still expects his board of directors to vote to become an authorizer in June 2004.

“Here’s an opportunity to not only ‘talk the talk’ but also ‘walk the walk,’” he says. “We’re in this because we want to do a quality job of it.”

Resources:

• National Association of Charter School Authorizers [3]
• Fordham Foundation [4]
• Ohio Charter School Association [5]
• Ohio Department of Education [6]

Rob Capriccioso is a staff writer for Connect for Kids.