Support Public Education by Voting Out ALEC

American journalist Walter Lippmann once said, “Successful politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate elements in their constituencies.”

Most people’s viewpoints aren’t quite as cynical as Mr. Lippmann’s, but the simple truth is that some politicians do try to manipulate their constituents into agreeing with their initiatives by first stirring discontent. Satisfied people cannot be seduced, so to build a case for any crusade, these lawmakers try to create a need for the measure by cutting sources of funding. Such is the case with Ohio’s current state government.

Three years ago, Ohio’s Republican governor and the GOP-controlled legislature used the state budget to drastically cut public funding to local governments, which they hoped would create a need for the “tools” provided in Senate Bill 5. Although Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected the SB 5 tools in a referendum, those budget cuts created a significant loss of local facilities, services, and jobs, and elements in SB 5 have been introduced piecemeal ever since as cost-cutting measures in communities throughout Ohio.

Deep cuts to Ohio public schools, as well as a plethora of unfunded mandates, have helped convince Ohio citizens that there’s a real need for the dramatic expansion of charter schools in the state. Unfortunately, Ohio charter school expansion is a non-transparent movement that has not been held accountable for its use of public tax dollars. Ohio Department of Education data shows that the state’s public schools lost more than $870 million in state funding to charter schools in fiscal year 2014, amid ongoing reports of theft, misappropriation of funds, overpayment to vendors, nepotism in the employment of family members, and excessively high administrative salaries in many charter schools.

The great majority of charter schools are managed by for-profit companies that donate lots of money to political campaigns. Could that be the reason charter schools are exempt from 270 provisions of Ohio Revised Code?

There’s no requirement in state law that directs Ohio charter schools to disclose how much money is spent marketing commercials seen on prime-time television. State law doesn’t warrant that tangible property purchased with public funds remains public property when a charter school closes. There’s no requirement that board members of these schools represent parents — unelected boards are filled by the company that operates them or by friends and relatives of the school developer. Are the board members accountable to taxpayers or the corporate interests that put them there? For that matter, are our elected officials, who are supposed to monitor and regulate publicly-funded and privately-operated charter schools, accountable to taxpayers or the corporate interests that put them there?

Most of Ohio’s Republican legislators belong to a powerful organization of lawmakers and corporations, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC.) In 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) revealed the powerful control of the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) over the legislative process in many states in the US. It published a report showing over 800 business-friendly bills that were created, endorsed, and secretly voted on by corporations and Republican lawmakers. People for the American Way, Progress Ohio, and Common Cause documented the hold that ALEC has on the legislative process in Ohio and divulged the fact that 43% of its legislators belong to this corporate bill mill.

ALEC strongly supports school privatization through charter schools and vouchers. According to Bill Phillis, of the Ohio Education and Adequacy Coalition: [quote]ALEC is a champion of charter schools and voucher legislation, and thus is geared toward starving the public common school. One of the missions of ALEC is to replace the public common school system with private market-driven education thrift stores. Some Ohio legislators will press forward the concept of a voucher for every student.[/quote] Ohioans can support their public schools by voting for candidates who are champions of public education. Voters must exercise their power at the polls to push back against ALEC legislators who placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate elements in their constituencies to further ALEC’s privatization agenda. This is an important election where voters can and will “create a need” for Governor John Kasich and his ALEC allies to find jobs outside of the political arena.

Visit action.ohea.org to learn more about OEA’s 2014 Campaign and how you can help to elect pro-public education leaders in this election.

By Jeanne Melvin, OEA-Retired

In fourth grade, I was healthy enough to receive a “Perfect Attendance” certificate, and for me it was a badge of honor. Unfortunately, many private charter school operators don’t seem to care that much about perfect attendance, or the honor associated with it. Attendance fraud for charter schools is a national problem and has been going on for years.

Crackdowns on charter school operators who collect big bucks for students that don’t show up for classes are few and far between. One charter school operator in Philadelphia, Curtis Andrews, was charged with wire fraud for taking $200,000 for students who no longer attended. Eventually he was convicted, received 33 months in prison and had to return the money.

But these cases are the exceptions. In another, more sensational case, an operator from Texas, Donald L. Jones, received $2.9 million for absent students. Yet despite having been convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bank fraud, and other offenses related to a mortgage fraud scheme involving forty properties and more than seventy loans, he has never been charged in connection with his charter school activities.

Recent investigations have found that among charter schools nationwide, few operators are charged with anything when they are caught receiving funds for imaginary attendance numbers, and they simply have to return the cash. All too often, the taxpayers are left footing the bill. For example, the state of Florida doled out $25 million to for-profit charter schools during the 2006-2007 school year for nearly 5,125 students who never attended school.

And then there is Ohio. Ohio has some of the worst attendance records for its charter “dropout recovery schools” in the nation. In the 2006-2007 school year, reporters for the Scripps Howard News Service, found that Ohio paid $29.9 million to 47 of these recovery schools for students who never attended. A Life Skills Center campus in Cincinnati held the record in the 2004-2005 school year, where 64% of its enrolled students never showed up for class. The dropout recovery movement, an Ohio concept started in 1998, costs the state around $30 million or more a year for students who never attend school. “It’s a cash cow! We all used to sit around and joke about that,” said Mark Elliott, former principal of the record holding Life Skills Center of Cincinnati. “I spent less than $1 million on a $3 million operation. What the hell are they (executives at his former company) doing with the other $2 million?”

Yet, has anyone been charged with anything in Ohio? The Beacon Journal has questioned David Brennan, operator and founder of the for-profit Life Skills Center dropout recovery schools, as to how he can have more students enrolled in his schools than they can physically hold. The company has stated that due to high rates of absenteeism, they can enroll far more students than is normally possible, and receive payment for every student, even those that never return. The ODE has claimed that they check charters for their accuracy on attendance records, but many former employees said that they were often sent to a student’s home to get an excuse from a parent and any excuse would do. At the end of another 105 hours of absenteeism, which was the time that a student would no longer be enrolled, they would be sent again to get another excuse. I find it outrageous that our lawmakers in Columbus allow this to go on.

Diane Ravitch, education historian and educational policy analyst, refers to these charters as ghost schools, and recently wrote, “27 management companies operate charter schools in Ohio. Of those 27, 19 are for-profit companies. Of the 19 for-profit companies, half of them are out-of-state corporations; hence, they take a Brink’s truckload of school district money out of Ohio in the form of profits each year.”  Charter schools, in Ohio, need to be paid for students who actually attend these schools, not for the enrollment of mere names as the law currently permits.

Even though many state legislators act as if these ghost schools are just part of someone’s overactive imagination, they have come to haunt us, and will continue to do so unless someone steps up to the plate. Any ghost busters out there?

By Susan Ridgeway, Wooster Education Association

Time and time again, too many charter schools have failed our students. While the teachers in charter schools are passionate about education, their employers betray them and their students with constant administrative changes, a lack of support, and unethical practices that make the schools a disgrace.

After completing my Master’s, I was offered $26,000 to teach seventh and eighth grade social studies. Because there weren’t too many opportunities to even submit my resume that summer, I accepted the job and began planning the day I was hired, despite the many difficulties that lay ahead.

To begin with, no teacher in the building had any kind of curricular support. The principal told us to look online for copies of the state standards that were in effect at the time and then print copies for classroom decorations. Teachers had no textbooks and no reference material, not even classroom sets of books. I bought my own textbooks and then cut-and-pasted copies for students. Later in the year when a new administrator decided that teachers with 100 students would be limited to 25 copies per day, many of my teaching plans went out the window.

The school environment bordered on hazardous. The building was a former Catholic elementary school that had been vacant for some time. Because of mold problems, part of the school was closed off. Some of the classes that were used still had mold, as did the cafeteria. There were exposed wires in the hallways, torn carpets on the floors, uncovered electrical outlets in the classrooms, and even a bee’s nest in a boy’s bathroom that was never removed.

Less than a month after school started, four teachers were fired because the school’s enrollment was not as high as the school administration projected. Seventh graders were put in classes with eighth graders and taught different curriculum at the same time. It was not an ideal situation for the students but the teachers charged ahead.

The school was part of a multi-state chain based out of Chicago. Administrators throughout were all Turkish immigrants. Several teachers were also Turkish. While I understood the administrators and fellow teachers with ease given my background in teaching international students while in college, parents and students frequently complained that they were unintelligible. Only one of the administrators that I met during my time had actually studied in the United States and he was attending an online university. At first, our school had three administrators: a principal, a Director of Enrollment, and a Dean of Students. The latter two were rarely seen.

When the four teachers were fired, the charter school operator decided to simply switch our dean of students with the dean of students from the Columbus school. In December, the same thing happened to the principal. In March, it happened again with the principal position. Thus, during a few short months in the year, we had five different administrators for two positions.

During “count week,” children were given free meals, candy, and bus passes as an incentive to have them in school. This may have been great for the students, but they were otherwise treated very poorly by the various administrators who came and went. Administrators applied rules whimsically, both with regarding to student behavior and student achievement. When a particularly vociferous parent complained to one of the principals that their child’s grades were too low, the principal simply changed the child’s grades electronically, causing consternation among the other students and the staff.

I set up the school library with donated books. I made a dozen house visits. I arrived at school at 5:30 every morning and left at 4:30 in the afternoon. I received the best possible scores on my evaluations. I took students on field trips with money out of my own pocket.

When it came time for OATs, as they were called then, testing was a disaster. Several Turkish men arrived and pulled “at risk” students from their classrooms, taking them to the moldy rooms in small groups, despite the lack of written documentation allowing accommodations. The week after testing, I went to school on a Saturday morning in order to keep ahead of my planning, and I saw a dozen Turkish men sitting in a classroom with stacks of OATs on their desks. The current principal brought a cup of tea and a plate of cookies to me while I worked alone in my classroom. He said that the men were simply darkening in the answers for students who wrote too lightly.

The director of enrollment was rarely around because he was based in Columbus. He was also responsible for payroll. Sometime in April, several teachers realized that although money was being taken from our paychecks, money was not being paid to the insurance company or to the State Teachers Retirement System. The insurance company told me that my plan had been cancelled. When I inquired to the principal about the problem, I never received a response. I wrote e-mails to the members of the Board of Directors as listed on our school’s slick website; however, all but one of the e-mails bounced back. One person wrote back saying that they had worked with the school’s franchise in another city, but had resigned several years earlier on disagreeable terms.

That week, I was supposed to receive an evaluation from the principal at the time, despite having been evaluated with exemplary remarks by several other administrators, both based in Dayton and based in Chicago. When I politely asked the current principal why he missed my evaluation, he rescheduled it for the following week. The next day, he told me and three other teachers that we would not be hired for the next year. He gave no reason, although he told me that I was one of the hardest workers and best teachers he had ever seen. I inquired again about the money missing from my check and asked again why I was not being renewed. A week later, I was told not to return to school the following day.

Of the twelve teachers that started at the beginning of the year, only four remained at the end of the year, two of them were from Turkey. The other two were fired over the summer, one of the Turkish teachers was transferred to Columbus, and the other quit, telling me he wanted to complete his Bachelor’s degree in the United States. Thus, there was a 100% employee turnover within less than a year.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the charter school was that it encouraged students to swap in and out of other schools. If a student had bad grades or difficult behavior, they were literally asked to transfer to another charter school. The parents were brought in and told that their child would be expelled unless they transferred to another school. This is an endemic problem not just at the school where I taught, but at all the charter schools in the area. Children came and went, much like the administrators. By the end of my tenure, I knew several students who had been to three different schools in one year. The revolving door system meant that there was little consistency for students. Add to that the revolving door of administrators and employee turnover, and there was no consistency. This problem is disastrous for education, although it is rarely discussed and this small paragraph does not do the subject justice. The system, however, is advantageous to charter schools who are then allowed to manipulate their data more easily.

While teachers took responsibility for their students, the administrators saw them as numbers and problems. Parents often simply removed their children from school because of the administrative problems, electing to send their children back to public schools. Despite all my efforts, I can’t say that I blame the parents. They are lured with promises of science education, glossy brochures, and websites with polished clip art.

I loved being in the classroom at the charter school. I loved the students and the parents. Unfortunately, environmental problems, rotating administrators, unethical behavior on the part of the charter school and its sponsor, student manipulation, a complete and total lack of curricular support, and terrible employee relations made school difficult for students, parents, and teachers. This situation is regrettably found in too many charter schools.

By Matt Blair, Springboro Education Association