Editor's note: On May 6, Fordham contributor Andy Smarick delivered testimony before an Ohio education subcommittee on Senate Bill 148, a critical piece of legislation that would help clean up the state's troubled charter sector. With his permission, we're reproducing his remarks.
Thank you Chair Hite, Vice Chair Sawyer, and subcommittee members for allowing me to offer some thoughts on your ongoing efforts to improve charter schooling in Ohio. Congratulations and thank you for the important progress that’s reflected in the legislation being considered here today.
My name is Andy Smarick, and I’m a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit organization committed to improving K–12 schooling, especially for high-need students. I’ve worked on education policy for most of my career—at the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. House of Representatives, a state department of education, and a state legislature.
I’m also a strong advocate for high-quality charter schooling. I helped start a charter school for low-income students, I helped found the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and I’ve written extensively about charter schooling, including a book on how—when done right—it can dramatically improve student results in cities.
I was a coauthor of the report published late last year that studied Ohio’s charter school policies and offered recommendations. This subcommittee, your colleagues in the legislature, and Governor Kasich deserve credit for advancing legislation, namely SB 148, which would address many of the most important challenges facing your state’s charter school sector.
Let me begin by pulling back to offer a national perspective. Chartering is doing extraordinarily well elsewhere. According to Stanford’s CREDO research institute, urban charter students in other states are learning substantially more than similar students in district-run schools. In cities like Indianapolis, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, they learn several months more per year. In Newark and Boston, charter student learn about a year more per year.
But as you know, the same researchers found that the charter results in Ohio are not nearly as strong. Your urban charter students aren’t benefitting from the gains we’re witnessing elsewhere.
My colleagues and I tried to figure out why this is the case—why Ohio’s charter school sector is struggling while other states’ charters are excelling.
First, we know from more than twenty years of national experience that quality charter school authorizing is essential for creating a high-quality sector. Ohio could do more to improve charter authorizing.
You have nearly seventy entities sponsoring community schools; the state should make sure all of them are doing their jobs well. That requires what some refer to as strong “front-end” and “back-end” accountability; in other words, a prospective sponsor should go through a rigorous process before being approved to authorize charters, and sponsors should be monitored for their performance and go through a renewal process in order to continue authorizing.
This bill would bring valuable changes to Ohio’s law. All sponsors—not just new sponsors—would need state approval, and ODE would have the authority to hold sponsors accountable for the performance of their schools. The bill would also end automatic sponsor renewals, shorten initial sponsor terms to five years, and make sponsor renewal terms contingent on performance.
The bill’s sponsor rating system would also be a valuable improvement. Exemplary sponsors would receive welcome flexibility, and ineffective and poor sponsors would face meaningful accountability
Currently, your law allows sponsors to use funding generated through authorizing fees to subsidize non-sponsor functions. That means sponsors can use charter authorizing as a funding stream for other activities. This creates an incentive for sponsors to authorize more and more schools (more schools equals more revenue). But obviously “more schools” is not synonymous with “more great schools.”
Your law also currently allows sponsors to sell services to the schools they oversee. That means a sponsor can generate revenue by authorizing more schools and selling them more services. Again, this doesn’t necessarily align sponsor incentives with quality.
The bill would wisely limit the use of sponsor-generated funds to monitoring, oversight, and technical assistance. It would also prohibit sponsors from selling services to schools they oversee. To be clear, if a school wants to buy services from the entity that oversees it, that school could become a traditional district-run school. But in the charter sector, where an authorizer’s role is to impartially monitor school performance from arm’s length and not become involved with school operators, it’s inappropriate for an authorizer to play the role of coach and umpire.
Because Ohio has so many sponsors and your law creates a financial incentive for sponsors to have large school portfolios, “sponsor shopping” has become an issue. A low-performing charter can avoid tough accountability by moving from its current sponsor to another that’s willing to adopt it. This makes it easier for persistently underperforming schools to stay open.
The bill would help solve the problem by allowing only schools in good standing to move to a new sponsor. Schools performing poorly on the state’s accountability system would not be allowed to shop for new sponsors.
An important provision in the House bill is the development of a performance report for management organizations. Since Ohio has so many sponsors and so many community schools, it can be hard to assess the performance of a management company’s entire portfolio of schools if those schools are spread across the state. This new system of transparency would provide valuable visibility into the performance of entities running several schools. I’d encourage you, however, to ensure that this reporting system focus solely on outcomes and not inputs; that is, community schools and their operators should be held accountable for results, not micromanaged when it comes to practices.
Even if Ohio improves charter accountability to address underperforming schools, the state needs to do more to help create new high-quality charters and enable existing high-performing charters to grow. As it currently stands, other states are more hospitable to the growth of high-quality schools. In other states, we see numerous networks of high-performing schools. In Ohio, we’re not seeing the replication of great schools.
In Ohio, community schools receive considerably less funding than district-run schools, lack access to facilities, and often have trouble securing reliable transportation for their students. State and local dollars should follow students to charters, charters should have access to fair transportation funding, and charters should have access to adequate facilities aid and/or have greater access to underutilized and un-utilized district-owned facilities.
More could be done to help high-quality charter schools access facilities. The new legislation has one strong element that would engage the Ohio School Facilities Commission in helping charters acquire suitable buildings. The facility assistance program would help cover up to 50 percent of the costs of projects for successful schools.
Another provision tries to encourage districts to make district-owned space accessible to charters. However, the bill would make this optional. It would also provide a state subsidy to districts that house charters in district-owned facilities. If the space isn’t being used, why would the state pay extra for a district to ensure that space is used to educate students? Moreover, this subsidy actually incentivizes districts to hold on to underutilized buildings instead of selling them to charters that could use them. If you can maintain ownership of an empty building and receive rent payments and a state subsidy, why sell it?
There are other strong provisions in the bill worth mentioning. It eliminates the ability of a management company to appeal if a school’s governing board terminates the management contract. To minimize the potential for conflicts of interest, it reduces the amount board members can be compensated and requires disclosure statements from board members and notice of relatives and business associates with financial or accountability ties to the school. It also requires board attorneys, accountants, and auditors to be independent of school operators
In total, these provisions would significantly strengthen charter schooling in Ohio. Thank you again for having me. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.