Some schools not allowed to flunk out Accelerated Learning Resources

Some schools not allowed to flunk out

Gov. John Kasich’s top education adviser told an educators conference in Akron last month that the governor wants to close the poorest performing schools.

The state’s charter schools would face the same penalty, said Robert Sommers, who is director of the Governor’s Office of 21st Century Education.

Sommers said Kasich’s proposed budget would eliminate an exemption to a 2006 law that protects charter high schools with dropout prevention programs.

”As it’s defined right now, they would not be exempted,” Sommers said.

No more exemption? That was news to David Brennan, owner of Akron-based White Hat Management, one of the country’s largest for-profit charter school operators.

Brennan enrolls nearly 10,000 Ohio children in his 31 schools, including an online school. Together, they are on track to receive at least $74 million in tax money this school year, according to state records.

Without that exemption, two out of Brennan’s three Life Skills Centers in Akron would face closing after the 2008-09 state report card showed continued poor performance, according to the Ohio Department of Education.

”My understanding was that that provision was taken out,” Brennan said when a reporter called him after Sommers’ Akron speech.

He was correct.

The budget that Kasich sent to the legislature left the dropout exemption untouched and the bill stayed that way in the version passed by the House of Representatives.

Much still could change when a committee working behind closed doors settles the differences between the House and Senate versions of the budget.

The exemption may yet be yanked before the final version of the budget reaches Kasich’s desk, but history is on the Akron businessman’s side.

Brennan — the biggest contributor to Ohio Republican Party candidates over the last 20 years — has usually gotten what he wants from a legislature that still hasn’t figured out how to judge his schools.

‘Greater accountability’

Brennan told the Beacon Journal in 1998 — a year after the legislature opened the state to publicly funded, privately operated charter schools — that he would focus on educating children instead of accommodating the demands of teachers unions and the state bureaucracy.

”I don’t think there’s a government school in existence that can say that,” Brennan said in the interview. ”They’re focused on lawsuits, on power, on compensation, on school board issues. It’s one great big cauldron of confrontation and dispute in too many cases.”

Charter school advocates argued that in exchange for more freedom from the regulations constraining traditional schools, they would provide ”greater accountability for student performance,” according to the Legislative Office of Education Oversight.

However, by 2003 that same research arm of the state legislature reported that many charters did not set clear academic goals and failed to submit required testing data to the state.

The report concluded that charter schools weren’t performing any better than the traditional schools they were supposed to replace.

”The most that can be said about the overall academic performance of community schools is that they are doing no better than low-performing traditional public schools with similar demographic characteristics,” the report said.

The authors admitted, however, that they were ”hampered by a lack of agreement on the standards with which to judge the community school movement.”

Slated to close

In 2005 — the same year lawmakers shut down the Office of Education Oversight — 60 percent of the charter schools were rated in academic emergency on the report cards released in August.

The Republican-controlled legislature could no longer give failing charter schools a pass. Gov. Bob Taft signed legislation as he left office at the end of the 2006 lame-duck session that spelled out the conditions necessary to close a charter school for academic failure.

So far, the state has closed a dozen charter schools for academic reasons under the 2006 law.

Another five, including Brennan’s Hope Academy Cathedral Campus in Cleveland, are slated for closing by the end of this month based on last year’s report card. His Hope Academy Broadway Campus in Cleveland also is on that list, but it closed last June.

An additional 19 charter schools are one failing report card away from closing, according to the state.

But charter high schools with dropout programs, such as Brennan’s 18 Life Skills Centers in Ohio, can never be closed for poor performance.

Dropout programs must meet some basic criteria to qualify for a waiver from the closure law.

Their students must be age 16 to 21 and at least a year behind in credits or unable to graduate from a traditional high school because of a personal crisis.

”While there are criteria that you have to meet, they’re not that hard to meet and all you have to do is seek the waiver,” said State Sen. Tom Sawyer, D-Akron, the ranking minority member of the Senate education committee. ”The actual program itself is whatever you say it is.”

Measuring performance

Akron has four charter schools with dropout programs: one sponsored and staffed by Akron Public Schools and three Life Skills Centers run by Brennan’s White Hat Management.

Brennan’s schools had the lowest percentage of students passing in nine of the 10 Ohio graduation tests given to 10th- and 11th-grade students.

Life Skills Center of Akron, on Bowery Street downtown, has both the lowest attendance rate (53.5 percent) and the most abysmal graduation rate (7.4 percent) of any Akron high school.

Brennan, who turns 80 next month, said he’s not opposed to holding his dropout schools accountable.

”We’re not afraid to do that,” Brennan said. ”There’s never been a consensus about what it might be. We think some measures might be appropriate.”

He said the big problem is a lack of computer technology.

”No one has developed any effective student information system to adequately track individual student performance in a manner that is sufficient to put in a standard that we could live by,” Brennan said. ”You have to be able to track every single student that comes in because they’re at all different levels. They each have their own individual learning plan. And you have to track what happened to each of those kids. It’s not an easy job.”

He said White Hat is developing such a computer tracking system.

”Two-thirds of the students who come to us have no high school credits at all and measuring what we do for them should involve a whole lot more than whether they actually get a high school diploma,” Brennan said. ”Many of them are going to be unable to complete that by the time they’re 22. We’re urging the legislature to fund more post-22 dropout recovery activity.”

The legislature did just that — it’s considering upping the limit for enrollment in dropout schools to age 29.

When Brennan urges, legislators listen.

Since 1990, Brennan has contributed nearly $4 million to Republican Party organizations and candidates and given more than $300,000 to various political action committees, according to the Ohio secretary of state.

Brennan’s wife, Ann, made about $1 million in similar political donations.

Setting standards

The only yardstick available is the state’s own high-stakes test scores, but the Ohio Department of Education says it’s not good social science to compare dropout schools with traditional high schools because the dropout schools have more challenging students.

Lawmakers recognized that dropout schools needed a different yardstick and ordered the State Board of Education to recommend one.

The state board made recommendations in 2008, but the legislature has never acted on them and the state Education Department will not move forward on its own.

The state board’s recommendations envisioned having those new standards in place by the end of this school year.

State Sen. Nina Turner, D-Cleveland, who joined the Senate in late 2008, said she didn’t know about the recommendations when she sponsored Senate Bill 15 this year, which directs the state board to recommend performance standards for such programs in district schools.

Turner said she would be willing to amend her bill to include charter schools.

”It seems to me that this whole dropout recovery was a sleight of hand,” Turner said. ”We all agree that they’re the most at-risk, so why wouldn’t you even be held to a higher standard because you’re dealing with the most at-risk students?”

The Republican chairwoman of the education committee, Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, said Sommers has told her that dropout schools wouldn’t be exempted from the governor’s reforms.

”He’s adamant about that because I’ve asked him about the ranking,” Lehner said. ”And he says, ‘No, they take on these kids, they say they can turn them around, so they should be held accountable’ .”

Sawyer sits on both the education committee and the finance committee, which is considering the budget. He said the current exemption language in the budget is untouched and would protect dropout schools from any new policy to close them.

The problem, Sawyer said, is that both Republican and Democratic governors have loaded their respective parties’ pent-up education reforms into two-year budget bills that cover all the functions of state government.

Highly technical issues that should be considered separately by lawmakers who know something about education get short shrift in the overall budget debate.

”That kind of work in my judgment deserves a great deal more substantive attention,” Sawyer said.

When the Beacon Journal asked the governor’s office to explain the apparent contradiction between the administration’s position on exemptions and the budget submitted to the legislature, the press office emailed this reply:

”A number of legislators have raised some concerns about the impact of the closure procedures for these schools when operated by either a district or a community school, and we are continuing to work with them to address this issue.”

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