AG Dann, a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down, and a thumbing of the nose!

Editorial: Attacking bad charter schools on a new front
Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 16, 2007

For far too long, abysmally performing charter schools in Ohio have been wasting students' time and taxpayers' money - and getting away with it.

So give credit to Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann for trying to put two of the worst out of business. Maybe he'll strike fear in the hearts of other laggards around the state. Maybe some of them will take their jobs more seriously.

Dann is angling to seize the nonprofit status of New Choices Community School and Colin Powell Leadership Academy, both in the Dayton area, so he can close their doors.

Despite $17 million in public money that has flowed into their accounts over the last six years, neither school has lived up to state scholastic standards, and the lawsuit says both have "persistently lagged" the Dayton public schools, hardly a stellar academic system.

Terry Ryan, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which runs nine charters in Southern Ohio, but not the two in Dann's crosshairs, sees an ominous portent in Dann's entry into educational quality control.

He says that since the legislature has established a procedure for closing bad charter schools, the schools shouldn't face the "academic death penalty" at the hands of the state prosecutor's office.

It's true that Ohio law allows the state to close down underperforming charter schools, but the hoops the state has to jump through in order to close a school can keep a bad charter open for quite a while: A school has to be in academic emergency for three years and flunk other measures before it has to shut its doors, said Todd Hanes, the Ohio Department of Education's executive director of community schools.

The earliest many failing charter schools are expected to empty out is at the end of the 2009 school year. That's a long, long time to leave young minds unattended.

Dann is putting the squeeze on just two underachieving charter schools. Ohio has hundreds more. But Dann's actions should warn others that Ohio's leaders won't continue to tolerate poor test scores and lousy student attendance.

To do so would be a criminal abandonment of Ohio's children - and there's been enough of that already.

And now....we have the Lima News' editorial re. the Dann vs. Charter Schools via the Lima News editorial staff:

EDITORIAL: Dumbing down
Lima, News, September 16, 2007

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann has begun a campaign of suing charter schools that aren’t meeting academic and financial requirements. Whatever his stated reasons for the suits, Dann appears to be trying yet another tactic to push Ohio public schools back to having a lock on all the tax money no matter how poorly they perform.

Dann is overstepping his bounds by a wide margin. His office contends the charter schools are not meeting their obligations to receive taxpayer money. Further, a spokesman said accountability measures for charter schools that the General Assembly put in place would take too long. That’s a bold statement: The Ohio attorney general doesn’t like the timeframe lawmakers set, so he’s going to override them.

We’ll let the Republicans in charge of both houses of the Ohio Legislature worry about reminding Dann who actually makes laws in this state. Our concern is the double standard many Democrats and just about every public schools teacher and administrator has about “protecting” the taxpayer.

When a charter school underperforms or a private school has some sort of scandal, it’s a condemnation of all schools of choice, according to the public schools-only lobby. When the same happens in public schools, it’s explained as one bad actor or further evidence that the state needs to spend more money.

Dann’s lawsuits against the schools follows Gov. Ted Strickland’s attempt to write educational vouchers for students in failing public schools out of the state budget. Republicans in the Legislature sensibly restored the money to allow parents to provide their children an escape from continually failing schools.

Ridding the state of schools that continuously fail isn’t such a bad idea. But it should be all schools that continuously fail, not just one group or the other. But Dann and Strickland don’t seem nearly as interested in improving education as they do in simply keeping parents from choosing what’s best for their children.

Of course...what would we expect from an ultra-conservative newspaper from northwestern Ohio? This editorial is from the same folks who bitch, moan and wail when taxes rise a fraction of a per cent for education but who fail to mention to their readers that readers' tax monies were used (i.e. wasted) to generate profits for charter school's administrators and sponsors off the backs of every Ohio taxpayer. These same editors also failed to divulge to their readers that the bookkeeping and salaries paid by these charter schools (unlike public schools) are NOT open for inspection by the general public and that the charter operators can thumb their noses all day long against freedom of information requests issued to them by the general public as charters are protected from the Freedom of Information Act. Pretty good for a newspaper which is owned by the "Freedom" Communications Inc., don't you think? Therefore, the 17 million tax dollars that went to these two Dayton area charters can legally be and are publicly unaccounted for.....just like the poor proficiency scores racked up by the students in these two schools. Lastly, these editors forgot to tell the general public that the boards of charter schools can and often are staffed by non-locals that can also thumb their noses at the local taxpayers....so much for local control! Two more years of waiting and wasting taxpayers' monies until the Ohio Dept. of Education (by law) can act to shut these charters (and others like them) down is two years too many. Public schools haven't exhibited nearly the failure rate that many charters have. Marc Dann is just doing his job to protect the public, and he is being faulted for it!

John Curry

A non-proud subscriber of The Lima News