CLEVELAND: Flanked by the owner of a national charter school company, presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday laid out an education plan to make school choice mandatory in every state.
Trump made his if-I-were-president pitch to a private audience of school staff, elected officials, Republican Party members and about a dozen students at the privately run Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy in a predominantly black, low-income neighborhood on the city’s east side.
Like his pitch, the location of his speech was selected for minorities, a voting bloc that is showing less enthusiasm for the billionaire businessman than it has for previous Republican presidential candidates.
Trump chose the charter school, among 23 in Ohio managed by Virginia-based ACCEL Schools, to unveil his plan to “reprioritize” $20 billion — nearly a third of the federal spending on elementary and secondary education — to make universal vouchers available to parents. Parents would take the credit to any school of their choice — whether public, private, religious, charter or magnet, he said.
Trump, an advocate for right-to-work laws that would outlaw compulsory union membership, also proposed merit pay for teachers in making a free-market case for reforming a “failing” public school system.
“Not only would this empower families, but it would create a massive education market that is competitive and produces better outcomes, and I mean far better outcomes,” Trump said after 16 minutes of attacking Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival.
Trump cast himself as the “civil rights” candidate.
Deregulating energy and lifting production limits would lower energy bills for low-income residents, including African-Americans and Hispanics, he said. Getting tough on trade would give them jobs. And more charter schools like the one he visited would boost educational outcomes, create a more robust workforce and make the streets safe enough for parents to walk their children to a school of their choice, he said.
Ohio would be better positioned than most states to benefit from Trump’s proposal, which he said he would make federal funding available only to states that allow for publicly funded private schools.
Seated near the front during the speech, Ohio Rep. Andrew Brenner perked up. As chair of the education committee in the Ohio House, Brenner has pushed for universal vouchers in a state that already leads the nation in school choice options.
“Wow,” Brenner, a Columbus-area Republican, said. “Of presidential candidates that I’ve heard in the past — I’ve worked on many campaigns over the years — this was the most pro-student, pro-school choice speech I’ve ever heard. Just, wow.”
Unions fire back
Even before Trump stepped to the lectern, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations – the nation’s largest union group – emailed prepared rebukes by several leaders of teachers unions, which oppose nonunionized charter schools.
“Ohio doesn’t need more snake-oil salesmen to come in and try to sell solutions that don’t solve anything,” said Melissa Cropper, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. “If Trump wants to discuss real solutions — like how we can hold charters to high standards and ensure they’re serving our kids, how we can reinvest in our neighborhood schools, and how we can return the joy of teaching and learning to our classrooms — I’m ready and willing to have that conversation.”
“But the last thing we need,” Cropper continued, “is another billionaire who thinks he knows more about education than the people who spend every day working to give our kids a fair shot.”
David Quolke, president of the Cleveland teachers union, said he was “excited” when he first heard Trump was coming to a local charter school that recently unionized.
“Sadly, he canceled that visit and rescheduled at a for-profit chain run by an out-of-state investment firm,” said Quolke.
Republicans have long offered charter schools as the answer to fixing a broken American public school system, marred by high costs and poor results.
But Ohio and the charter school Trump visited Thursday were not the best examples to make that argument.
Ohio’s charter school law is now a generation old. But it wasn’t until last year — after routine state audits and media reports uncovered fraud, and a national study respected by school choice advocates showed near-bottom academic results in Ohio — that the Ohio legislature began to apply more accountability.
Chains of charter schools run by private companies like Akron-based White Hat Management and New York-based Mosaica Education, after posting year after year of low test scores, continued to close, often for financial and not academic reasons. With increased accountability on the horizon, some never reopened.
And standing beside Trump Thursday was the man ready to write the next chapter in Ohio’s beleaguered charter school history: Ron Packard, CEO of ACCEL Schools.
Packard, a former Goldman Sachs banker who specialized in mergers, barreled into the school choice business in 1999 when he founded K12, Inc., a national leader in online charter schools. He and the company, based in the same Virginia city as ACCEL, were the targets of a class action lawsuit in 2012.
The lawsuit alleged that Packard, who made nearly $20 million in his last five years running K12, misled investors, oversaw questionable testing practices and inflated enrollment to draw more public funding.
On Thursday, Packard called the lawsuits frivolous. The company settled, paying investors with $6.2 million, or less than what Packard said it would have cost to fight to the end in court.
In the past two years, Packard has bought up most of the assets and schools once managed by White Hat and Mosaica, which filed bankruptcy.
Packard said he’s building a “scalable” and “successful” charter school model in Ohio. He dismisses misspending in the sector found by state auditors. He said the real taxpayer sham is that the surrounding public school district spends twice as much to educate the same students who would otherwise attend his schools.
As for performance, a sign outside his East Cleveland charter schools says it is number one in Ohio for value-added. But that information, like a pamphlet handed to reporters before Trump spoke, is two years old.
In 2014, it was number one, though two public school district buildings, Clark Elementary School on the city’s west side and a middle school in North Olmsted, scored better.
Packard refused to use data from last school year, when 75 percent of Ohio schools, including 51 in the Cleveland Municipal School district, outperformed his number one school. The state had switched tests. It’s since moved on to another, and Packard said the transition threw student growth scores out of whack all across the state.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.