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State Superintendent Paolo Demaria, shown here talking at a workforce panel in 2014, will keep reviews of charter school sponsors on schedule by skipping some rule changes that had drawn opposition.
(The Ohio Channel)
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Key reviews in Ohio's charter school quality effort won't be delayed by a controversy over changing a few procedures and rules for them.
State Superintendent Paolo Demaria said today that he'll avoid a political fight by simply dropping attempts to change a few rules covering the evaluations and ratings of "sponsors," the organizations that approve and oversee charter school, and just use existing ones instead.
The Ohio Department of Education had attempted to require those organizations - school districts, county education agencies, non-profits - to document how they and each school they oversee complies with over 300 regulations and laws.
That drew a backlash from charters as too burdensome. Republican legislators then blocked that requirement from going forward last week because the department had not given sponsors proper legal notice.
So rather than start a lengthy bureaucratic process to change the rules, Demaria said the department will just use rules in place already. Those allow the department to randomly select 10 percent of each sponsor's schools for intense scrutiny as part of the evaluations.
He said the shift should allow the department to meet the Oct. 15 deadline for the department to rate the sponsors, required under state law.
"Our perspective is that what we have is still rigorous," Demaria said.
Peggy Young, head of the Ohio Association of Charter School Authorizers, said she is glad the department is trying to resolve the issue. But she is waiting to comment until a state webinar on the new plan coming up on Tuesday.
Authorizers are what most states call "sponsors."
The evaluations are the center of Ohio's indirect strategy of improving charter school quality. By rating overseers and giving perks and penalties based on those ratings, the state hopes they will force bad charter schools to improve.
Click here for more on how that's supposed to work.
The "compliance" portion that Demaria's decision affects makes up a third of each sponsors' rating, with one third covering how well they follow national best practices for overseeing charters and a third covering the academic performance of schools that each sponsor oversees.
But last year, the first round of evaluations was thrown out after the department rigged them by leaving out the F grades of online schools to make the academic performance of some overseers look better.
House Bill 2, a major charter school reform law passed last fall, mandated that the compliance portion of sponsor reviews should cover how well sponsors and schools meet all laws and rules.
The law does not specifically say if the sampling method is allowed or not. Though the department had tried, until being blocked last week, to review each school, Demaria said he believes that is not necessary.
Asked if he expected any objections to not reviewing every school as part of the evaluations, he said that "we've scrutinized exactly that question...is this easier, is this harder. Under any scenario, we're going to get complaints."
He added that the department will look at compliance of each school and report findings to sponsors and the public on an "informational" basis, just not counting all of them in the rating.
A panel of charter advocates and sponsors had just asked the department in a letter today to use a different approach to sampling compliance - by using 10 percent of regulations across all schools - not the 10 percent of schools that Demaria chose to use.
That group also noted that some of the items the department is measuring are not really required by law and some questions the state is asking sponsors are poorly worded and confusing.
Demaria's new plan also penalizes sponsors if they or schools do not fully comply with only a few regulations - even minor ones. If they fall short of four or more out of the 300, they will have a low rating. The advisory panel suggested that the state look at the percentage of regulations with issues, not the number.
Here's Demaria's memo to the state school board today on the issue: