OFT: Union sounds warning bell to schools

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Change or lose out to charters, official says

Tom Mooney, OFT President

Thursday, March 09, 2006
Catherine Candisky
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

The head of one of Ohio’s largest teachers unions said yesterday that public schools must adopt "bold reforms" if they are to survive against burgeoning charter schools.

Tom Mooney, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, said the tax-funded, privately operated schools are crippling the public-school system by siphoning away students and state aid, and academic performance is lagging.

Still, a growing number of parents and students are signing up, and Mooney said that complaining about what he sees as the shortfalls and abuses of charter schools is not enough to save the public ones.

"We must make bold reforms in public education if we want to survive," he said yesterday.

It’s a message he will deliver to union members this morning at their annual convention in Cincinnati.

"We must listen to parents and students when they tell us why they choose charters despite their academic failures," Mooney said.

A record 71,000 students are attending 294 charter schools across Ohio this year. Most are from Columbus and other large urban districts.

Mooney said he believes parents are concerned about safety and discipline and are put off by impersonal bureaucracy, particularly in larger districts.

A poll last year conducted for KidsOhio.org, a Columbusbased group that studies children’s issues, showed that 42 percent of parents who moved their children to charter schools did so because of concerns about discipline, safety and dress. The same number indicated that they left their public school because of a lack of individual attention.

In response, some districts, including Columbus, plan to open their own charter schools.

Mooney said another option is to create less centralized school districts to give building administrators and teachers the ability to be more responsive.

"We should demolish most of the bureaucracy, give schools much more operational autonomy, vested in school-site councils that include parents and community stakeholders, as well as teachers and other employees."

While Mooney pushes his new initiative, he said he will still keep a close eye on charter schools.

This week, he released a lengthy report on Akron businessman David L. Brennan and his White Hat Management Co., which oversees 34 charter schools in Ohio, including three in Columbus.

The report notes that most of Brennan’s schools are failing in terms of student performance and many are not administering state-required proficiency tests to most of their pupils.

The profit that Brennan acknowledges he is making on his schools is another concern of Mooney’s.

A recent state audit on one of Brennan’s charter schools, Life Skills Center of Northeast Ohio, showed that White Hat received $4.6 million in management fees from the school for the 2004-05 school year. It reported expenses of $3.4 million, for a profit of $1.2 million.

Mooney said he was stunned by the amount and questioned whether companies should profit from tax dollars.

Asked about the profit yesterday, Brennan said, "I’d ask the other question: Why do we keep giving money to (public) schools that can’t turn a profit? Why do we keep giving money to schools that are running at a loss? Why don’t we fund more schools that are operating at a profit?"

White Hat receives 97 percent of the state aid a school receives for its management fee. State law does not require charter schools or their management companies to report profits or losses even though they operate with tax dollars.

However, a recently passed law requires management companies earning more than 20 percent of what a school receives in state aid to provide a detailed account to the state auditor. The Life Skills audit was one of the first completed by state Auditor Betty D. Montgomery under the new law