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Speakers Decry Harm Charter Schools Cause
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Charter schools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not the solution to what ails public schools, four speakers agreed Monday night at a symposium co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters.
After the four speakers showed how charter schools have diverted, if not drained, resources from public school system in Ohio, especially Youngstown, the president of the Youngstown chapter of the league, Barbara Brothers, asked the audience to sign two petitions.
Both are addressed to Gov. John Kasich, the Ohio General Assembly, the state Board of Education and the state superintendent of schools. The first seeks a moratorium on the issuance of more charters for these private schools supported almost entirely by state tax dollars.
The second seeks a moratorium on the “high-stakes tests” students take to demonstrate proficiency in kindergarten, grade school and high school -- including the Ohio Graduation Test -- until an objective study is conducted that proves the tests accurately reflect what they purport to reflect.
The four speakers were Doug Oplinger, managing editor of The Beacon Journal in Akron, Sherry Tyson, assistant treasurer of Youngstown City Schools, Ronald J. Iarussi, superintendent of the Mahoning County Educational Service Center, and Randy Hoover, professor of education at Youngstown State University and vocal critic of high-stakes tests.
Oplinger, who began covering education for The Beacon Journal in 1995, provided the background and some perspective of how charter schools came to be.
Their genesis can be traced to state Legislature repeatedly flouting the Ohio Supreme Court’s DeRolphe decision. The court ruled in 1997 that property taxes are not an equitable way to fund the needs of the state’s public schools.
In that context, state legislators decided to allow community – not charter – schools, Oplinger said. However, “the concept of community changed,” the managing editor said, and “private, profit-minded companies” saw an opening. His paper reported that while only nonprofit groups could found a charter school, they could hire private for-profit companies to administer them. Requirements were so lax or nonexistent that the Beacon Journal found some charter schools in Ohio “opened without textbooks or indoor bathrooms.”
Beacon Journal reporters came across one charter high school with an enrollment of 764. Oplinger knew the building that housed the school and wondered how it could hold that many. The administrator informed him the school operated in two shifts. A visual inspection of the building showed the fire marshal limited capacity to 297. Half of 764 is 382, Oplinger pointed out. The for-profit company assumed that one-quarter of the students would be absent 80% of the time was the explanation given, Oplinger said.
Some charter schools are set up for children with special needs, which translates to higher subsidies from the state, the Beacon Journal editor related. No one checked to see if the apparently normal students who left public schools to enroll at the school for those with special needs were indeed disabled.
The for-profit companies have successfully lobbied the state Legislature for funding for transportation so charter school students can attend.
As Tyson noted in her presentation on finances, public schools must provide busing on days they’re closed. And they must provide door-to-door transportation that they cannot provide their own students. Moreover, charter school students are bused longer distances because they live farther away from their schools.
Youngstown City Schools have spent $5 million year-to-date on transporting charter school students, Tyson said.
But the issue that upset Oplinger, Tyson, Iarussi and Hoover most is the lack of accountability for the tax dollars that subsidize charter schools. Because they’re private, by law the sponsors need not provide any information.
Regardless, The Beacon Journal set out to finds out as much as it could about the identity of the school boards and for-profit administrators of every charter school in the state, more than 400. Three hundred responded in varying degrees. “Eight refused to provide anything and one in four didn’t respond at all,” Oplinger related.
No part of the state education bureaucracy knew any more, he pointed out.
One last statistic Oplinger provided: 25% of the students who could attend Youngstown City Schools are enrolled in charter schools.
In her presentation, Tyson provided a host of figures and statistics, the most eye-opening of which are charter schools diverting $27,555,435 from city schools in academic year 2014-15. Second-highest is Boardman, $1,461,371; third-highest is Austintown, $1,221,842. Campbell loses $810,082, Canfield $420,661, Poland $426,624, Springfield $418,003. Lowellville, one of the smallest systems, loses the least, $68,163.
Two charter schools with Mahoning County students enrolled earned A’s on the proficiency tests the state mandates. Constellation Outreach in Cuyahoga County has one student from Mahoning County; Youngstown Community School has 329.
Four schools earned B’s, eight C’s, seven D’s and two F’s. Both schools handed F’s are in Franklin County but have more than 85 students who reside there between them.
The time students spend taking the mandated tests is time not spent in instruction, Iarussi noted. Next school year the state is requiring an additional 49 hours spent in testing, which the superintendent noted, is a minimum of seven school days not spent learning.
In addition, despite the time devoted to preparing for the tests and taking the tests, the third-grade reading scores in 2003 were 401.87 statewide on average. In 2013, the reading scores were 404.68.
And Iarussi pointed out, vendors of testing materials have gotten rich. They make $1.7 billion annually, or $65 per student who takes the tests in grades three, four and five.
In his presentation, Hoover again attacked the shell game proponents of testing play.
The scores of the high-stakes tests, he declared, “do not represent academic performance in any way, shape or form.”
It’s “counterintuitive,” he allowed, but “Standardized test scores do not [his emphasis] against stand up common sense, scientific-psychometric analysis or official standards for ethical test uses.”
The tests are based on the fallacy that “all children are the same, that they are interchangeable,” he said, that they live in similar neighborhoods and are parts of families with the same levels of income.
The tests purport to identify good teachers and bad teachers by how well students perform on the tests. The best indicator of how well students perform is income level, Hoover reminded the audience. “As wealth goes up, scores go up,” he said. “As wealth goes down, scores go down.”
And with Youngstown being the poorest school district in Ohio, the education professor thinks it’s a tribute to the system that so many students have demonstrated academic excellence, not that so many have failed the mandated tests or dropped out of school.
The mandated tests, he said, reinforce the misperception of urban and poor rural school districts having students inferior to those who attend suburban schools. “Their sin the demonization of public schools,” Hoover said. “These tests are a false proxy to communicate to you that our [Youngstown] schools are lousy.”
The tragedy, as he sees it, is that parents in urban school districts withdraw their children from the demonized schools and enroll them in charter schools that are in most cases far inferior.
To combat the misinformation and misperceptions about what the state-mandates tests measure, especially teacher effectiveness, the professor of education announced he’s launched a website, www.Teacher-Advocate.com. It should be up and running this morning, Hoover said.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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