Both Lighthouse Academies and Building Excellent Schools – two national, top-flight, nonprofit charter-school management organizations – never wanted to come to Ohio, but both did and both regret the decision.
“It’s unlikely we would come back to Ohio in the near future,” said Lighthouse President Michael Ronan, citing severe structural issues and a hostile political environment. Lighthouse is headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts. Linda Brown, executive director of the Boston-based Building Excellent Schools organization, is even sourer on Ohio. There is no way her organization will ever open another school in the state.
“We never thought Ohio was going to be a good fit. We were encouraged by several people and funders,” Brown said. “We were sweet talked into working [in] Cleveland.”
The organization opened two schools in Cleveland – Entrepreneurship Prep in 2006 and Village Prep in 2009. It founded the Columbus Collegiate Academy in Columbus in 2008 (one of six schools that the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation authorizes).
Ohio has about 330 charter schools enrolling more than 89,000 students. As charter schools spread nationally, there are more than 1.5 million students attending over 4,900 public charter schools in 39 states and the District of Columbia, the Buckeye State seems intent on making it hard for these schools to open and operate successfully. During the state budget battle in 2009, charters would have been all but eliminated by the governor and House of Representatives but were saved in the Ohio Senate.
A new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says the state’s limits on new charters endanger its chances of being awarded federal Race to the Top dollars. The report compares state charter laws across the nation with the Alliance’s model law and ranks Ohio 26th among 39 states and the District of Columbia (11 states do not have charter laws). Ohio earned 97 of 208 possible points in the analysis. Ohio law seems to hit most of the Alliance’s concerns, just not as forcefully as the Alliance would like. Further, Ohio is one of 11 states that cap charter-school growth. Alliance Vice President for Policy Todd Ziebarth said Ohio could lose as much as $400 million in federal assistance under the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top grant competition because of the state’s charter caps.
The report, How State Charter Laws Rank Against The New Model Public Charter School Law, evaluates states in 20 categories such as quality and accountability, funding equity, facilities support, autonomy, and growth and choice. The report includes the District of Columbia. Minnesota is the most charter-friendly state with 152 points, followed by the District of Columbia (131), California (130), Georgia (130), Colorado (128), Massachusetts (125), Utah (123), New York (121), Louisiana (120), and Arizona (120). Kansas (62), Rhode Island (58), Iowa (56), Alaska (54), and Maryland (41) are at the bottom.
Despite the rapid growth of charters after Ohio first approved a charter law in 1997, Ronan said Lighthouse decided to expand in Ohio because inner city students remained in dire need of quality school-choice options. These students often suffered from family poverty and chronic low academic performance in the traditional district schools. Ronan thought that winds of political change were blowing more positively and that the state’s tolerance of choice was improving. The question was, how much? And for how long?
Ohio had become charter friendly under Ohio’s GOP-controlled General Assembly and two Republican governors. “We saw the great need. We got lots of encouragement from people that the state was interested in trying to meet the need with charters,” Ronan said. “The climate seemed positive and there were options for growth. It wasn’t the most favorable climate at the time. It was probably marginal in terms of what we were looking for. But we thought the political support was there.”
After making the decision to open Lighthouse charter schools in Cleveland, Ronan said, he had no second thoughts until the General Assembly decided, in its 2005 budget bill, to slow charter growth by decreeing that only 30 new charters would be opened in each of the next two years and that those schools would be chosen by lottery. Lighthouse needed to win a lottery slot to open.
It was an odd way to select something as important as a school, Ronan observed. “That was the first sign to us that this was a changing political situation,” Ronan said. Lighthouse was picked to open one school in the 2005 lottery. The problem was it had to open its school almost immediately. Lighthouse had one month to open; normally it takes a year. It was the same situation the next year. “There was never a lot of notice; that was a real out-of-the-ordinary situation,” he said.
By 2009, however, in the (third) year of Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland’s term, the political pendulum had swung even further. “Gov. Strickland has a different vision of what would lead to higher quality education in Ohio. We respect that.... [but] we think [in the governor’s view] charters play a lesser roll.”
The state’s troubled economy and the financial cost of state regulation also were making matters tougher for new school operators. Ohio is a costly state in which to run a school, let alone the cluster of three that is always Lighthouse’s goal for a city, Ronan said.
“Ohio has high employment costs. We offer 401(k) plans to employees [while the state requires employers to contribute 14 percent of salary to the State Teachers Retirement System]. We believe in yellow bus transportation. The yellow bus transportation is very expensive with insurance. School bus drivers are in the state retirement system. Quality buildings are expensive,” Ronan said. “I don’t think we ever ran across a good district building in Cleveland.” Finally, given Lighthouse’s intense academic program, the state’s per-pupil support of about $7,000 made it difficult financially, he said.
To make its model work, Lighthouse needs either lower-cost facilities or higher per-pupil funding. In Ohio, it had neither.
Finding great staff was also a persistent challenge. Trying to attract high quality teachers to Cleveland from out of the state was hard. Ronan said there were highly qualified local teachers but the pool was never large enough to meet demand.
More Teach For America alumni would have helped. Ohio public schools do not participate in Teach For America so there is no ready supply of TFAers in the state looking to move on to other schools in Ohio.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District also proved a roadblock. There was no mechanism in the state to encourage or force districts to cooperate effectively with charters, especially for buildings and transportation, he said.
“Without a real transportation plan, how does an impoverished family have access to choice?” Ronan said.
The negatives accumulated. “We came to the conclusion a year ago it was unlikely we could execute a long-term plan in Ohio and looked at how we could get another operator to take over the schools,” he said. Both schools remain open but with new operators. Lighthouse has withdrawn from both and has left Ohio behind.
Ronan said Ohio could learn from New York City, Arkansas (15th in the NAPCS report), Chicago, and Indianapolis where, he believes, the climate for charters is better, and support much greater. New York City, for example, has a political environment that includes a commitment of the mayor and school superintendent to quality choice programs, solid efforts to provide facilities for successful charters, and district assistance for special education, food service, and transportation. Plus, the New York state charter statute is relatively stable, unlike Ohio’s, which has been frequently changed as different political interests injected themselves into the law.
“[In New York City] there’s this laser-like focus on supporting schools, to getting quality choices for children,” he said. Even the local teachers union operates a couple of charter schools.
While Lighthouse is out of Ohio, the Building Excellent Schools organization is still here, although reluctantly. Building Excellent Schools fellows founded two schools in Cleveland and another in Columbus. Even though both schools recruited good leaders it was still a “very complex and unsure road to charterdom” in Ohio, Brown said.
BES’s Columbus Collegiate Academy came very close to not opening at all even though it spent 18 months to roll out its school.
The school had problems locating a suitable building and, even when it did, eleventh-hour problems with city zoning officials nearly killed it.
“Who would have thought Columbus, Ohio, was not going to have any buildings?” Brown said.
Although more than 300 charter schools had opened in Ohio by 2008, Brown said, the environment for charters was still lacking. Lots of charters, she said, don’t make it an easy place to work.
Ohio’s chartering system, with its plethora of charter authorizers also was a drag. “It was like a maze,” she said. “I don’t understand the role of sponsorship. It slows down the process,” she said.
CCA had the added disadvantage of opening at the same time as a nearby KIPP school, the KIPP Journey Academy (which is also sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation). The better-known and larger KIPP organization garnered most of the local media attention and public support. “It was a disaster. Everywhere [we] went KIPP had been there just before. That’s not to put KIPP down but it shows how slight the window [for success] was.”
Enrollment was a problem, and once students were enrolled, getting them bused to the school was a challenge. The struggle to attract and keep students has cut operating income for the schools. Despite the struggles, CCA was one of the top-performing middle schools in Columbus its inaugural year, and BES-founded E-Prep has been rated “Effective” by the state each of the last two years.
Meanwhile, BES is looking elsewhere. By autumn, the organization plans to add another 10 schools to the 40 its fellows operate. Ohio, however, is out for good.
Editorial note: Just this week, the Ohio Department of Education announced that both the Columbus Collegiate Academy and the KIPP Journey Academy will receive an additional $200,000 each in federal start-up funds (16 school statewide will receive additional support of roughly $3.5 million). These resources came at a critical juncture in these schools’ lives. Unfortunately, the additional funding doesn’t address the areas of most urgent need: operating expenses and facilities. Still, the optimists in us hope this may be a newfound signal that Ohio will seriously support quality charter school operators in the future. It may also be evidence that the Obama administration’s support for charters, and encouragement for them through the Race to the Top competition, is having a positive catalytic effect in the Buckeye State. This is all good if it ends up helping kids.
