A heavily lobbied plan that could undo recent charter-school reform could surface this holiday season in an unrelated education bill.
“It’s one of those bills that I hear is going to have a whole bunch of Christmas tree ornaments on it. This might be one of them,” Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Kettering Republican, said of the plan, which would boost charter school grades.
The legislation Lehner suspects might carry the plan, Senate Bill 3, currently proposes to deregulate mostly wealthy schools with good grades but, theoretically, could give them worse grades under the proposed change.
Some of the state’s poorest-performing charter schools could receive higher grades. Working for the change is Neil Clark, one of the most influential lobbyists in the state, who is working for Ohio’s largest charter organization, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.
Talk of the changes comes about five months after a high-level department of education official was asked to leave when he admitted manipulating a scoring system to benefit charter schools.
Lehner, chair of the Senate education policy committee, championed reforms this year to strengthen Ohio’s academically struggling charter schools, rife with fraud and abuse.
An amendment struck from the larger reform package would have required the Ohio Department of Education to automatically adopt a grading plan used by a trade association in California. Researchers warn that the plan could give low marks to large urban school districts and high marks to charter schools — especially the online schools that originally proposed the new system.
Lehner said she began hearing rumors last week that the failed amendment might return.
Sen. Cliff Hite, Republican chair of the education finance committee and co-sponsor of SB3, said he was approached by a union lobbyist worried the plan might be fast-tracked.
“I’ve heard about it kind of through the grapevine,” said Hite.
A spokesperson for Senate President Keith Faber, the other Republican to sponsor the deregulation bill, said there are no plans to include the California plan this year, at least in the Senate. “If there are any changes floating around out there, that’s in the House,” said John Fortney, spokesperson for Faber’s office.
The House has yet to unveil its SB3 amendments before holding a floor vote. After that, the bill would head back to the Senate for consideration of the changes.
Tale of two plans
The California Charter School Association developed the California plan partly because California doesn’t track test scores for individual students over the years. That’s what Ohio’s “value-added” system tracks.
“If we had a value-added model in California that used student level information we would absolutely use it,” said Elizabeth Robitaille, senior vice president of achievement and performance management at the association, which has used its plan to advocate for the closure of its lowest performing member schools.
The California plan works by determining whether schools are doing better or worse than expected than other schools with similar levels of poverty and other factors. In Ohio, year-to-year student scores are compared to determine if schools and teachers are helping students learn, regardless of a student’s background.
Ohio students take state tests in grades three through eight and 10. Because Ohio’s model requires consecutive years to be compared, no value-added score can be determined for third and 10th grade. Adding the California plan would allow Ohio to calculate a poverty-adjusted grade for these two grades.
Beyond that, some researchers see no reason to complicate the state’s already busy report card, which has 10 categories.
“My concern is that we’re kind of going backward,” said Vladimir Kogan, an education and political science researcher at Ohio State University.
Kogan has researched the potential grading shift. So has Ron Adler at the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education, an industry group that aspires to be Ohio’s leading voice for charter schools.
Both have determined that many online charter schools and most brick-and-mortars that fail Ohio’s value-added system would receive passing grades in the California plan.
But while Kogan sees confusion in adding to the state’s cluttered report card, Adler sees potential to add a layer of data, albeit one that favors schools that serve poor children who often move from school to school.
“We’re not trying to replace value added. We think it would complement it,” Adler said.
Online schools interject
Neil Clark is a lobbyist for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, Ohio’s largest online charter school and the recipient of the lowest value-added score in the state. He vehemently defends the California plan, recently attacking critics of the change, including Kogan and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a school choice proponent and Ohio sponsor of charter schools.
As Lehner led the effort to reform charter schools, she said it was Clark and Adler who introduced the California plan to Ohio legislators. Now, the two are working together again to discredit the criticism.
Clark issued a joint press release Friday with Adler. In it, he cited Robitaille’s criticism of Kogan’s research, saying there are “inaccuracies and mistakes” as well as “sweeping leaps in logic” in his conclusions.
Robitaille said she’s never heard of Clark, nor has she reviewed Adler’s research.
Robitaille said her association has been dragged into a debate 2,200 miles away. She gave her critique of Kogan to Adler not knowing he would pass it to Clark.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Department of Education — charged with conducting its own study — has been quiet following a debacle in the summer. It’s head of school choice resigned after he manipulated performance data to benefit charter schools.
“The right people are looking into what exactly the next steps are in order to even start this process,” said Toby Lichtle, spokesperson for the department. “We’re at the very beginning of the planning stages of all of this.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @DougLivingstonABJ.