Outrage missing from the charter school schemes

Where's the outrage?  

After all of the teasing talk by Gov.Kasich and state lawmakers that reforms for charter schools are on the way for the $1 billion tax-funded industry, the Ohio legislative class merely kicked the idea down the road until September at the earliest and left town for  summer fun.  Meantime Kasich scheduled more out-of-state visits  for his presidential candidacy that he will officially announce on July 21, thus giving convenient  reason to return to his home state.

As Innovation Ohio  reported:  "After months of bipartisan momentum to improve Ohio's nationally ridiculed charter school laws, the Ohio House left for the summer without acting  on House Bill 2.  This means that charter schools will receive nearly $1 billion in state funding in at least  another entire school year."

Where's the outrage?

Where are the first signs of protests at the Statehouse door that $1 billion in taxpayer money will again be granted to the faltering charter system that has been embarrassing to Buckeyeland around the country?

Taxpayers have been conveniently excluded from the business-as-usual moments by budget arrangers who skillfully created a state budget for public schools with a formula that  few  without  doctorates can understand. And the state's media have done a modest  job in trying to explain the taxpayer  stakes in the opaquely distributed revenue for charters that is bleeding the budgets of public schools.

For evidence, the Beacon Journal today editorialized at length  complaining that "the new state budget doesn't include the better funding formula."  So far, so good.  But nowhere does the mysterious word "charter" appear.

Yes, school funding is complicated.  It's costly.  It's never had top priority in the legislative halls from the hacks and 10 o'clock scholars.  Instead, the governor boasts with vacuous self-approval of his Ohio Miracle and now, a New Day for Ohio. New about what?

It's hard to be outraged when a billion dollar industry is  swathed in unintelligible language for its politically disguised accounting system  infused with  dizzying numbers.

Mark Urycki, a reporter for StateimpactOhio, a consortium of WKSU, WOSU and WCPN, courageously  explored the density of the problem of such funding.  He reports that charters are more than an inheritor of  the revenues that are stripped from public school districts.

''But because charter schools on average are assigned more state aid than traditional public schools,  districts have to dip into their local levy money to give charters what the state demands". Right! For  the 370 charter schools with about 125, 000 students.

As a I've written in an earlier column, you must contend with  the powerful charter  guy who founded White Hat Management as a for-profit  investment in school kids, and then writing to lawmakers to remind them of where some of their political cash is coming from.  Legislative hacks don't need much more convincing to  discourage them from leaning on the  state's horrific giveaway of your money.

Where's the outrage?  You know, the kind you might hear from a neighbor who is reacting to a cost overrun on a street repair.

Kasich has talked of more transparency of the money spent.  But if you asked him in  the middle of  a campaign stop, he'd have a hard time  explaining what he meant.  He leaves the gritty work to others.  For example, in 2013 he appointed a pro-charter fellow named David Hansen, the ex-president of the right-wing Buckeye Institute,  and husband of Kasich's chief of staff, to oversee   charter school and voucher programs in the Ohio Department of Education. Sort of like the fox guarding the chicken coop, don't you think?

First things first for the governor and Republican legislature. That takes care of any  threat from the public outrage thing. Unfortunately, it has been fail-safe.


(Reposted from Plunderbund)

Former White Hat takes important reins at UA

As if matters weren't edgy enough on the University of Akron campus under a new president on the block, there's even more faculty concerns for a campus in some sort of transition.  It's the appointment of a new vice provost and executive dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology to oversee President Scott Scarborough's. "repositioning'" the school from a traditional academic mission that allows for the humanities  as well as technology. As the question arose on whether  the school would change its name - which Scarborough  finally dismissed as nothing more than rumors - some faculty members figured he would at least see to it that UA would have "Technical Institute" attached to its legal name.

But the new science and technology guy who will doubtless work  in close quarters with the president is  Todd Rickel, who brings a resume that notes he was once the "Chief Learning Officer"  of White Hat Management.

You haven't been around these parts   very long to not recognize White Hat as David Brennan's charter school behemoth.  Which leads us to wonder  how his self-appended expertise as an "education futurist" will play on a  campus where departments are either being eliminated or downsized in what Scarborough refers to as "disinvestment.".

That  futurist stuff  is also how Brennan has seen himself .  Years ago he invited me to a private breakfast to hear a fellow, whose name I've long forgotten, who predicted the imminent demise of universities.

As Steve Dyer of Innovation Ohio, a progressive issues group,  wrote:  "While I'm not opposed to changing things, I deeply question how [Scarborough] could put so much faith in Todd Rickel'' while telling us that Rickel also has served as the Executive  Vice president  of the White Hat's  Distance Education Group - ''overseeing Ohio's worst online school..."

While Rickel was at White Hat,  Dyer wrote, " the company was receiving $110  million a year, on average, from Ohio taxpayers.  Meanwhile the school's performance - for which Rickel was directly resposible - was dreadful."

For those of us who see UA as a significant partner in the city's future,  we can only hope  that things don't turn out the same way on the downtown campus.