KC Ubiarco and his sister Sabrina complete lessons for the Tennessee Virtual Academy.
Online schools like Ohio Virtual Academy, ECOT and OHDELA with poor state report card grades won't be counted in this year's reviews of charter school oversight agencies.
(LANCE MURPHEY)
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- It turns out that Ohio's grand plan to stop the national ridicule of its charter school system is giving overseers of many of the lowest-performing schools a pass from taking heat for some of their worst problems.
Gov. John Kasich and both houses of the state legislature are banking on a roundabout plan to improve a $1 billion charter school industry that, on average, fails to teach kids across the state as much as the traditional schools right in their own neighborhoods.
But The Plain Dealer has learned that this plan of making charters better by rating their oversight agencies, known as sponsors or authorizers, is pulling its punches and letting sponsors off the hook for years of not holding some schools to high standards.
The state this year has slammed two sponsors/authorizers with "ineffective" ratings so far. But it has given three others the top rating of "exemplary" by overlooking significant drawbacks for two of them and mixed results for the third.
The state's not penalizing sponsors, we found, for poor graduation rates at dropout recovery schools, portfolios of charter schools that have more bad grades than good ones and, most surprising, failing grades for online schools.
Online school F grades aren't counted
We found that the state isn't counting the performance of online charter schools -- one of the most-controversial and lowest-performing charter sectors -- in the calculations in this first year of ratings.
That means that many F-rated charter schools that serve thousands of students won't be included when their oversight agencies are rated this year.
The Department of Education says recent drops in grades for online schools are "inexplicable" and that it has to develop a way to grade these "unique" schools.
The omission caught some of the state's major charter supporters by surprise. The Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which says that a strong ratings plan is key to improving charters, was certain until recently that online schools would be a factor in the ratings.
Consider the Ohio Council of Community Schools, which collects about $1.5 million in sponsor fees a year from the more than 14,000 students attending Ohio Virtual Academy and OHDELA, the online school run by White Hat Management.
The F grades that the state gave those schools last year for failing to teach kids enough material over the school year didn't count against the council when it was rated early this year. The result? A perfect academic rating of 100 percent and an overall rating of "exemplary," the highest available.
This year's ranking also leaves out dropout recovery schools, another controversial group of 90 charter schools, because separate report cards for those schools aren't complete.
Mostly "ineffective," but still "exemplary"
Even without the online schools, the rating system doesn't set a high standard for the schools a sponsor oversees. Instead of setting a high bar and challenging staff and overseers to meet it, The Plain Dealer's review shows that the Department of Education set a low standard that's met much more easily.
In fact, a sponsor can oversee more students in schools that are "ineffective" than are "effective" and still be lauded as "exemplary" this year and next year. Sponsors only have to have 41 percent of students in "effective" schools to meet the state's goal this year.
Those standards will increase over time, with an eventual goal of 66 percent of a sponsor's students in "effective" schools. But even by the 2016-17 school year, the state will only require 55 percent.
So the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, which sponsors 52 schools, wasn't hammered in its rating this year despite having only 38 percent of students in "effective" schools.
Since 38 percent is so close to the 41 percent standard, the foundation only lost a few points in its rating and snagged an "exemplary" mark.
Department of Education spokesman John Charlton said online and dropout recovery schools will be included in ratings next year, and that the target for having effective schools will increase over time.
"Keep in mind this is the first year of the evaluation process, and we expect to make improvements to the system," Charlton said.
Ratings have high stakes
Why do these ratings matter? Because supporters of the charter school concept have portrayed them as a way to put pressure on sponsors to make Ohio's charter schools something to be proud of, not viewed as a drag on the state's education system.
Kasich and the legislature are considering tying some incentives and sanctions to the ratings in bills that could be passed by the end of this month. An easy path to the top rating of "exemplary" won't separate strong oversight from mediocre when cash and other benefits are handed out.
For example, Kasich proposed early this year setting aside $25 million in the state budget for charter schools to spend on new school buildings, but he wants the money to be available to schools with "exemplary" sponsors. His plan passed in the Ohio House,
The Senate may change that plan in the next few days, making the money available only to highly rated schools, not sponsors.
Kasich and the House have proposed letting schools run by exemplary sponsors seek tax levies from voters, if the local school district agrees. That's allowed only in Cleveland now.
And Kasich and the House have proposed allowing schools run by exemplary sponsors to offer kindergarten and collect state tax dollars for each kindergarten student.
As a penalty, Kasich and the House have proposed adding a lower rating of "poor" in the ranking, giving these sponsors one year to improve or be shut down.
And though the standards will increase over time, the ratings completed this year will last for three years. Sponsors won't face any effects from dropout schools, online schools or needing to have more "effective" schools until 2018.
They won't be rated under higher standards until after the state passes a new two-year budget in 2017 that could offer even more perks and penalties.
Where do these ratings come from?
The state legislature voted to start rating sponsors in 2012 and set up a basic structure in House Bill 555.
Charter school supporters nationally look at sponsor/authorizers as fundamental to making charter schools run well. These agencies are usually local school districts that create one or two charter schools in their cities, but can be statewide charter boards, county Educational Service Centers or, in a national rarity, other nonprofit organizations.
As we reported last year, observers in other states view Ohio as the "wild, wild west" of charter operations because it has so many sponsors and so few rules governing them. The new evaluation system in Ohio was viewed as a way to compel improvement in sponsor quality and, in turn, make schools better.
As ordered in HB 555, academic performance makes up just a third of a sponsor's rating. The other two components are compliance with all state and federal codes governing sponsors and how well they meet industry standards.
As a result, one third of each sponsor/authorizer rating is based on the quality practices suggested by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
How the academic portion would be handled was left up to the Department of Education.
Not counting online schools is a surprise
The state agency decided to drop online schools that serve 40,000 students across the state from the evaluations. In letters to sponsor/authorizers announcing the results of their reviews, David Hansen, executive director of the department's Office of Quality School Choice, said that the 2013-14 online school test results will simply be the "base year" to evaluate future performance.
"I wasn't aware that they (online schools) were not counted in the evaluation," said Lenny Schafer, executive director of the Ohio Council of Community Schools.
Chad Aldis, vice president of Ohio policy and advocacy of the Fordham Institute, the other charter sponsor that has already received an exemplary rating, said he was unaware of that too. Even though Fordham has been rated, it does have the academic scoring rubric used by the state.
And Darlene Chambers, president and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said Thursday that she was sure online schools are being counted. She has told people for months, often in formal PowerPoint presentations, that Performance Index scores the state calculates for all of a sponsor's schools were part of the evaluation.
Performance Index combines test scores across multiple grades and subjects and is the state's main measure of how much kids know. The sponsor PI scores include online schools.
"E-school outcomes are not being ignored," Chambers said. "It is captured in that now."
But when told that the state created a new academic measure that excludes online schools, Chambers said: "If it exists, I've not seen it. This is the first time I've heard of it."
Charlton said the Department of Education decided to use the value-added ratings of schools -- a measure of student academic progress -- instead of the Performance Index in the evaluations.
And the department also chose to set aside value-added results for e-schools, he said, because of concerns over how those scores are calculated.
Concern over scores for online schools
This chart of the value-added grades the state has given online charter schools shows a significant change since 2011-12. The state calls that change "inexplicable."
Shafer said a change for the 2011-12 school year about which first-year students in online schools were counted in state report card results caused a dramatic lowering of scores for online schools. Data provided by him shows online schools mostly met or exceeded value-added targets for student growth before the change, but most failed to meet them after the switch.
Charlton said the Department of Education dropped the online schools because of this concern.
"Because the change in the system for measuring performance has had a significant and inexplicable impact on the e-school data, the department decided to take a year to look at those results, identify what caused the significant changes and address those causes by creating a more accurate performance evaluation system," he said.
It is unclear if there is a calculation "glitch," as Schafer calls it, or if online schools saw lower grades because report cards started counting under-served kids that should have been counted all along.
Dropout recovery ratings are incomplete
Unlike the online schools, the state planned for a few years to exclude dropout recovery schools -- charter schools that serve kids returning to school or at risk of leaving. The legislature decided in 2012 to keep them out because separate report cards for these schools would not be finished in time.
These 90 schools don't appear on regular state report cards because they serve a different type of student and the state has different expectations for them.
Charlton said these schools will become part of sponsor evaluations next year, once measures of student academic growth there kick in.
"There will be a learning gains measure available starting next year for dropout recovery," Charlton said. "DOPR (Drop Out Prevention and Recovery) schools are being graded as soon as the grading system is in place."
For now, sponsors like the Ohio Council of Community Schools face no consequences for overseeing schools like the Life Skills Center of Toledo, that meets no graduation standards. The school graduates only 2.2 percent of students on time.
A tough new growth standard
Instead of using Performance Index as most expected, the Department of Education is using the value-added calculation of how much learning kids accomplish over a school year.
The Department of Education has not published its academic rating criteria. Repeated requests to a link for it went unanswered.
But Charlton said here's what the department used in the sponsor evaluations:
Charter schools with an A or B grade in value-added -- scores that are above average -- are counted as "effective" schools.
Schools with a C in value-added -- the average grade meant to show that a school met learning expectations -- need to have an A, B, or C in Performance Index to be considered "effective."
If you have a D or F in value-added -- grades that reflect kids making less than a year's progress over a school year -- your school is ineffective, regardless of performance score.
That's a strong departure from the state's traditional focus on Performance Index, a measure of academic achievement.
We have asked the department to explain why it made this choice, but have not heard back.
To evaluate a sponsor/authorizer of multiple schools, the state counts the number of students in schools that meet the "effective" criteria vs. those in schools that are "ineffective."
It then looks at the ratio of "effective" school "seats" to "ineffective" ones.
More "ineffective" than "effective"
This first year, the state is asking sponsors' to have a 0.7 to 1 ratio of effective to ineffective seats -- less than one effective for every ineffective one -- in their portfolios. As a percentage basis, that's the 41 percent effective mentioned earlier.
If a sponsor meets that target, it receives all 100 points for academic performance in its evaluation.
That means that the Fordham Institute that had an almost equal number of ineffective seats to effective ones at the 10 schools it sponsors, met the state's bar by 141 percent and earned a perfect academic score.
That came despite overseeing schools with value-added F grades, like Sciotoville Community School in Portsmouth and Cleveland's Village Prep, normally a well-regarded school for student growth that had abysmal results last year.
And the low bar gave Buckeye Community Hope Foundation only a small penalty for having a ratio of 0.6 effective seats to each effective one.
The target percentages are supposed to rise each year, Charlton said.
Here are the expected ratios:
2013-14: 0.7 to 1.
2014-15: 0.85 to 1.
2015-16: 1.05 to 1.
2016-17: 1.25 to 1.
Eventual goal: 2 to 1.
Though sponsors have known that their academic performance would be evaluated since 2012, Charlton said the state agency is phasing in the standards because of the contracts that sponsors have with individual schools.
Those contracts, which can last five years, spell out academic goals. Sponsors can't change the expectations midway through, Charlton said.
To follow education news from Cleveland and affecting all of Ohio, follow this reporter on Facebook as @PatrickODonnellReporter