5/3/09

Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial

The 88,000 youngsters who attend charter schools in Ohio need better friends in the Ohio Senate than they have in the House.

The House last week approved a school funding budget Democrats trumpet as bringing fairness to the system. But the fairness doesn’t extend to charters, or their students. House members did far too little to lessen the impact of Gov. Ted Strickland’s evisceration of charter school funding. 

The Senate must rescue these legally sanctioned schools.

To its credit, the House banished the governor’s ill-conceived funding distinctions between for-profit (devils) and nonprofit (angels) schools. And the budget wisely establishes a new Center for Creativity and Innovation to study best practices at charter schools. The measure also rightly gives the state power to speed the process of shuttering failing community schools.

Still, nuance isn’t this bill’s strong suit. It would cut basic state aid for every charter school, from a total of $617 million a year to not quite $471 million in 2010 and $511 million in 2011. (Those figures are boosted a bit when one-time federal stimulus money — the quicksand on which so much of this rickety budget is built — is added.) But the lion’s share of that goes to charter schools sponsored by school districts. Outstanding schools like the Intergenerational School and Citizens’ Academy in Cleveland, which are not sponsored by the public school district, deserve better. Such schools have earned better by serving their students well.

Voluntary partnerships between school districts and charter schools are not to be discouraged, of course, but it’s unfair to penalize good charter schools that prefer to be independent of the local public district.

A frustrated William Sims, president of the Ohio Alliance for Charter Schools, is threatening a lawsuit if the “yawning disparity in funding” is allowed to stand. It shouldn’t come to that.

The Senate can and must fix this by ensuring reasonable state aid to effective charter schools, so they can keep doing what they do best — teaching students, not fighting court battles.