Enrollment in Buckeye State charter schools was up eight percent last year, to 89,000 students statewide, according to the Ohio Department of Education’s annual report to the governor about the state’s community schools.
The report and accompanying tables include demographic and historical academic performance data for all charter schools, a map of charter school locations, school enrollment numbers, information about sponsors, analysis of charter school performance, and a recap of legislation (from the past year and previous years) impacting charter schools. This year’s report also features a section examining district conversion schools.
Conversion charter schools are those in which all or part of an existing traditional public school has been transformed into a charter school. These schools may be sponsored by any public school district in the state. Fifty-two of the 332 charter schools operating last school year were conversion schools.
ODE staff visited 36 conversion schools last year to gain information ranging from the schools’ educational programs, admissions processes, and staffing to their independence from their sponsoring districts. The department found that many conversion charter schools do not operate as independent, autonomous entities and instead operate more like district programs.
Independent governance of the school and integrity of the sponsor’s fiscal monitoring functions could not be assured for 34 of the 36 schools visited. Likewise, independent operation of the school could not be assured for nearly half of the schools. Smaller numbers of schools had other problems, including not providing instruction in core subjects in classrooms dedicated to charter students, having insufficient staffing because charter teachers performed similar functions at one or more of the sponsoring district’s schools, and not having evident, adequate space dedicated to the charter school.
The report does not speculate why conversion schools don’t operate in consistency with state charter laws and regulations. In practice, though, this generally happens for one of two reasons: 1) savvy administrators see starting a conversion charter as a simple way to bring additional money (through federal charter school start-up grants) into their district coffers, or 2) well-meaning district leaders don’t fully understand the charter school model and the autonomy requirements that go with it. In any case, ODE intends to work with conversion schools and their sponsoring districts over the next year to ensure that they comply with state and federal law and that each school operates as a separate and unique entity.
