More Evidence That the Charter School Problem Is Only Getting Worse
It seems that John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, is making some noise up there in New Hampshire, where the choice between a vulgar talking yam and Tailgunner Ted Cruz is giving some sensible Republicans the agita. However, like his fellow governors with ambitions-the departed Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal, as well as the snowbound Chris Christie, who was forced by meteorological circumstance to spend all weekend talking about closing down bridges, to the amusement of many of his housebound constituents, especially in Fort Lee-Kasich has a little problem back home with which to deal.
The problem deals with the oversight of the state's charter schools. Kasich is a big proponent of charter schools, despite the fact that story after story, all across the country, has revealed the charter movement to be a fertile environment for graft and grifting, two chickens that seem to have come home to roost on him back home. Plunderbund, a progressive blog covering Ohio politics, has been all over a story about how Ohio's former school choice director, whose wife now manages Kasich's presidential campaign, fudged the data he reported to the U.S. Department of Education in order to make Ohio's charter system appear to be in compliance with the governor's stated goals. While the story was restricted to the scurvy blog community, it could be safely ignored. But now the mainstream Ohio press is digging into it as well.
Former ODE school choice director David Hansen, the man in charge of charter school oversight, engaged in a fraudulent scheme to boost the evaluations of some charters. Mr. Hansen, whose wife worked as the governor's chief of staff until she left to manage his presidential campaign, admitted scrubbing data on failing online and dropout recovery-charters to improve their standing in the state. Some outraged state school board members charged Mr. Hansen with breaking the law and demanded an impartial investigation. Team Kasich quashed that notion and contained the political damage.
Then-state superintendent Richard Ross professed no prior knowledge of the fraud perpetrated on his watch by his subordinate to promote an administration mandate. Unexplained is why Mr. Ross forwarded Mr. Hansen's falsified data to the U.S. Department of Education for funding, despite the controversy over his cooked books. ODE's discredited charter czar quietly resigned from the department, followed by the retirement of the superintendent months later. The department that had allowed the data scam to proceed in a calculated move for public dollars-without regard for educational accountability-vowed to enact internal reforms. No need for outside scrutiny.
Chagrined state lawmakers who were previously in no hurry to pass charter school reform, finally approved legislation to take the heat off Mr. Kasich. The changes will only be meaningful if they are implemented by the Kasich people running the ODE. Public education advocates aren't holding their breath for wholesale reform of the charter school industry in Ohio, which is fine with the Kasich administration. It pushed a potential political liability off the radar to let Mr. Kasich spin on the campaign trail without distraction.
At the very least, legitimate oversight failed here in a gigantic way, and in a way that, coincidentally or not, allows Kasich to brag about his record on school choice in Sioux Falls and Manchester. So far, the issue hasn't come up in the debates, but if the Kasich boomlet continues to grow, I think you can count on hearing about it.
