Ohio's charter school sponsor authorizers.jpg
These key officers of charter school oversight organizations will have their groups rated by the state this week. Clockwise from the upper left are Apryl Morin of the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West, Peggy Young of the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, Stephanie Klupinski of the Cleveland school district and Lenny Schafer of the Ohio Council of Community Schools.
(Plain Dealer staff)
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Peggy Young isn't officially a "superintendent," but she may as well be.
She's paid like one - nearly $220,000 a year - to oversee 45 charter schools for the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation. That Columbus-area non-profit collects more than $3 million a year in fees from its schools to oversee the education of 13,000 students - more than any district in Cuyahoga County other than Cleveland.
And this week she and her work will be graded just like one.
The state will issue ratings this week to more than 60 charter school oversight organizations, known as sponsors or authorizers. It's attempt #2 by the state to start holding the organizations responsible for their schools, after years of barely making them accountable.
The state's first attempt at sponsor evaluations last year was thrown out after Ohio Department of Education officials rigged reviews by leaving out inconvenient F grades of online schools.
Also up for review is the work of:
Apryl Morin of the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West
- Apryl Morin, director of community (charter) schools of the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West, which collects $4 million a year in fees to sponsor 59 charter schools.
Among them is the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio's largest charter school and an e-school that was just cited by the state for improperly documenting the work its students do online.
Morin is paid $92,500 to oversee her schools.
Lenny Schafer of the Ohio Council of Community Schools
- Lenny Schafer, director of the Ohio Council of Community Schools, a non-profit that collects at least $4.3 million a year in fees to oversee 49 charter schools.
Schafer's pay was not available. But tax records show he was paid $98,000 in 2013 as the assistant director while his predecessor as director, Diane Chambers, was paid $178,000 that year.
- Dave Cash, president and founder of Charter School Specialists, the consulting firm paid about $2 million a year to handle the 41 schools and more than 10,000 students overseen by the St. Aloysius Orphanage in Cincinnati.
- J. Leonard Harding, executive director of Educational Resource Consultants of Ohio, which oversees 22 charter schools.
Stephanie Klupinski of the Cleveland school district
- And Stephanie Klupinski, who was paid $111,000 in 2015-16 to oversee the 10 charter schools sponsored by the Cleveland school district.
Other sponsors will also be rated this week.
This year the new evaluations will rate sponsors just like a school district by measuring their test scores, how much students in their schools improve from year to year, by graduation rates and by how well they help struggling young readers catch up.
They won't be receiving grades or a report card though, said Ohio Department of Education spokesperson Brittany Halpin. They'll just be rated on a scale of 0-4 for their schools' academic performance.
They'll also be rated on how well their schools comply with state regulations and on how well they follow practices that are nationally accepted. those will also be 0-4 ratings, with all three combined in the end for a final sponsor rating of exemplary, effective, ineffective or poor.
The ratings have some teeth: Ineffective sponsors can't add any more schools and three years of ineffective ratings will shut you down.
If you are rated as poor, you are no longer a sponsor.
Sponsors are bracing for what they expect will be harsh ratings, much as this year's state report cards hit school districts with much lower grades than they had received in the past.
They have complained about how the department is handling both the compliance and academic portions of the ratings and their belief that no sponsor will receive a strong rating under this system.They also say that since schools and school districts have "safe harbor," an exemption from any penalties, while Ohio shifts to new learning standards and state tests, they should have the same consideration.
Young, who heads the Ohio Association of Charter School Authorizers
Peggy Young of the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation and head of the Ohio Association of Charter School Authorizers.
, says the sponsor/authorizers shouldn't be graded like school districts since they don't have the exact same role.
While they have some similarities, she said a sponsor's job is to negotiate a contract with a charter school, monitor to make sure the school is operating properly and as specified in the contract, help it improve if necessary and close it down if it can not perform.
Sponsors can step in over time, she said at a charter school summit this summer, but stressed, "We do not run the schools. We are not in the schools."
Schafer objected to the academic rating even more strongly.
"If I could pick one battle personally, it would be academics," he said at the same summit, adding, "That's the one part of the three...that none of us have any control over."
For a sponsor to have a strong rating, he said, it will need all of its schools to have at least a C average on their test achievement scores, but the poor and urban students in most charters rarely score that high on state tests.
"We're in urban districts," Schafer said. "Does any urban district in the state have a C in achievement?"
Some national charter school advocates share some of the concerns of Ohio sponsors, but others are less sympathetic.
Greg Richmond, who heads the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said that a rating system that labels all sponsor/authorizers as ineffective - as Ohio's most likely will - won't separate the better ones from the truly poor ones.
"Ohio should quickly adjust the evaluation system so that parents and the public are confident that these evaluations are capturing what matters," Richmond said.
But Todd Ziebarth, vice president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the nation's main charter advocacy group, rejected Schafer's claim that sponsors can't control academics. Ziebarth said sponsors have lots of control when they first award a charter to a school and can limit how fast a school can grow before proving that it can succeed.
"For authorizers to just throw their hands up....is a position that we strongly disagree with," he said.
He also said charters may have lower test scores than most because they are in urban areas. But he said scores have to be better than traditional schools in those areas to meet the "charter bargain" of having more flexibility in running schools in return for better performance.
"If at the end of the day we're not providing a better educational alternative for families, what's the purpose?" he asked. "The need for charter schools was because of the chronically low performance of urban schools. If some of our schools are performing the same, why should we keep them open?"