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Ohio's public schools serve 1.6 million children - 90 percent of students in the state! What happens in the classroom has impacts far beyond the walls of the K-12 school building or higher ed lecture hall. So, on behalf of the 120,000 members of the Ohio Education Association, we're taking a deeper dive into some of the many education issues facing our students, educators, and communities. Originally launched in 2021 as Education Matters, Public Education Matters is your source for insightful conversations with the people who shape the education landscape in Ohio. Have a topic you'd like to hear about on Public Education Matters? Email us at educationmatters@ohea.org
Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.
Jeff Wensing 0:15
This is Public Education Matters brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.
Katie Olmsted 0:26
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Public Education Matters. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the nearly 120,000 public school educators OEA represents around the state as people who care a lot about public education, we've been talking a lot about the harms to our public schools and public school students being caused by some of our lawmakers incessant pushes toward privatization. Shameless plug. We actually did a really good episode about this and what's going on with the vouchers lawsuit a little earlier in this season. So please go back and listen to it if you haven't heard it yet. But one of the big takeaways is that public school and private school funding come out of the same line item in Ohio's state budget, and the billion dollars a year our state spends on private school vouchers is a billion dollars less for our public school students, but charter school funding comes out of that same pot of money too, and there are some major problems around charter schools in Ohio and across the country. And Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, says we need to be talking about that a lot more, and we need to be doing something about it. NPE offers some suggestions in a recent report called Charter School Reckoning: Disillusionment. It's part two of a three part report series, and it's part of a bigger project from the Network for Public Education that focuses on charter school accountability. We sat down with Carol in mid March to dive into all of it.
Dr. Carol Burris 2:10
My name is Carol Burris. I'm the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education.
Katie Olmsted 2:16
Carol, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. We have so much to talk about, and because there's so much, you actually have a whole new project going to talk about charter schools and what people need to know. What can you tell me?
Dr. Carol Burris 2:30
Yes, yes, we're very excited. We launched the National Center for Charter School Accountability as a project of the Network for Public Education. We do so much of our work following charter schools, that it seemed to make sense that there be a place and a space where everything we were doing around the issue of charter schools was coming together. And you know Katie in the past, if a reporter or a citizen wanted information about charter schools, in charter school laws, the only place they ever went to was the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Well, the problem with that, I found, because I used to go there all the time looking for resources is that it's it's a trade organization. It is the trade organization and major lobbying organization for charter schools. So what I would find is that while they would give information like how many new charter schools there were, they would never give any information about how many charter schools closed, or any of the problems around charter schools. So it seemed important for us to use research and gather our own information, sometimes using consultants in the process, and to also provide a more comprehensive view on charter schools that I think has a far more balanced approach, and to be honest, more of a public education spend. And it's, it's really been a very successful project, and I think part of it too is, is we recognize that charter schools are not going away, but with a lot of the work that we're doing at the center is we're really taking a hard look at laws around charter schools to see if we cannot reform charter schools and bring them closer back to to their original purpose.
Katie Olmsted 4:43
Well, and that's really one of the things that is looked at in the report that we're talking about, the disillusionment, the there was an original purpose, there was a promise, and we're not seeing that play out as it is, right now, and I'd love to get into that a little bit more, but big picture, first, why are we focusing on charters? You know, Ohio, our one of our biggest problems is the voucher funding. You're saying we got to be talking about the charters too, why?
Dr. Carol Burris 5:13
Yeah, I mean, we definitely do. And part of the reason why we have been emphasizing charters is not because we don't think that vouchers are a threat. We absolutely do, but because they are the newest form of privatization. There's a lot of energy around vouchers. There are a lot of organizations that are that stand in opposition to vouchers. Some of those organizations will stand in opposition to vouchers, while embracing charter schools. And our position at the Network for Public Education is both of them are a threat in some states without vouchers. The larger threat, or the largest thread, is actually charter schools, and they take a tremendous amount of money from the public school system, far more, I think, than people realize, because of lobbying efforts, they have managed to get more and more funding and more and more privilege in Ohio and in other states. So it's, it's a drain that is happening that I think is as bad, if not worse, than vouchers, but because vouchers are the newest villain on the block, that tends to be where, where the energy is. So, you know, we're still trying to bring forth some of the problems with charter schools as well, so we don't forget about it, and so a lot of bad legislation doesn't happen while everybody is looking at the voucher issue, if that makes sense.
Dr. Carol Burris 5:14
Absolutely and you know, we see that in Ohio that we can't even really look at the voucher issue because the standards are not the same. It's better. It's better for charters than it is for the private schools that take the voucher money in terms of transparency and accountability. But really, we are not playing the same game. We are not playing with the same rules. We are not playing with the same things. So it is really difficult to talk even in the same language about it, and that's why these reports are so important, because you really are diving into what is happening. There's, it's a three part series. Part one came out already. Part Two recently came out. What can you tell me about a what the series is about, and also what we've been seeing?
Dr. Carol Burris 7:36
Right. Well, the first part we call decline. I mean, the reason we did it in three parts was there was just so much information and research that we've uncovered in the center that to put it all in one report, the feeling was, well, nobody will read the whole thing. It'll just be too big. I think at the end of the day, it's almost going to be a small book. So so we decided to break it into three chunks. The first chunk was declined, where we make the case that charter schools, in many ways, they're not growing the way they had been in the past. During the Obama years, they exploded. Unfortunately. Now what's happened is that you have enrollment that's declining. You have saturation of charters in big cities, and you now have charter schools competing with other charter schools as well as public schools. So what's happening is that the number one reason why we're seeing an acceleration and closure rates of charter schools is because all of these factors are making it unsustainable. So you would think that smart policy would be, hey, let's put on the brakes. Let's take the schools we have, let's perfect them and move on. But that is not what the charter lobby wants. It's all based on this, you know, this sort of churn of schools that can't make it closing, and then another school opening. Interestingly enough, in the state of Ohio, if you look at all of the charter schools that ever opened and all of the charter schools that closed, you have a 50% churn rate. That means that 50% of the schools that ever opened, charter schools that ever open in Ohio, have closed. Some of them in a year, some of them it takes longer. Most close in the first five years. And at the same time, we have a federal program for the Federal Charter Schools Program, which has now been upped to half a billion dollars a year to expand charter schools, to create new charter schools, to expand the ones that are there to prop them up with facility funding, and it's just making the whole problem worse. One of the things that we looked at in that first report, well, why do schools close? Well, the number one reason was lack of enrollment. It is amazing there are 1000s of charter schools with fewer than 100 students, and after a while they they just collapse, sometimes in the middle of the year, when they can't make payroll anymore. And then the second reason that we found was fraud, corruption and just gross financial mismanagement. In the second part of the report, we pick up on that theme, you know, why is all of this happening? And we talk about disillusionment. And as you said before, what we do is we take, well, what were the original promise, promises of charter schools, what were they supposed to be, and then we contrast that original promise with the reality of what we see today, and we delve into the recurring scandals that have tarnished the brand and expose how lax charter school laws and bad authorizing policies is making all of this happen. And then I think one of the best parts of the report is at the very end, where we list ten ways where we think state laws could be reformed to bring charter schools back to their original purpose, as right laboratories of innovation that are part of school districts that are led by parents and teachers and not by profiteers, as 50% of the charter schools in the state of Ohio are.
Katie Olmsted 11:48
Ooh, that is not a distinction that that feels very good, and obviously we will link to the report right in the show notes for this episode, so anybody listening can go look at it for themselves. But let's talk about some of the things that you did conclude what, what are some of those ways that we can fix this or try to fix?
Dr. Carol Burris 12:06
Well, I think one of, one of the ways is, is we need to what would help the most would be to bring charter schools under democratic control so that they go back to where they were, which is as part, integral part of a school district where essentially it's a school board that's deciding, hey, we need a charter school. We need something different or particular group of kids, for example, so that democratic
Katie Olmsted 12:35
Small d, not big d.
Dr. Carol Burris 12:37
Exactly, exactly. And, you know, interestingly enough, there are states where that's where how charter schools are run. One of them is Alaska, which has very, very good charter school results. Charter schools are a school within the school district. Virginia is another example. Kansas is another example. Even in the state of Wisconsin, while they have both independent charters that are run by independent boards, they also have charter schools that are part of the school district, and the school district opens up the charter school when the charter schools needed if they find it's no longer working, they flip it back to a public school, and it comes a lot closer to what we would like. The teachers are protected. They're part of the teachers association or the teachers union in those states, the kids have full protection. They're covered by the same disciplinary practices as their colleagues who are in public schools. Another way to reform the law, get rid of the for profits. Never should have happened. We see it all the time. There's a lack of transparency. I see it in the state of Ohio, in a lot of the dropout recovery centers. And you know, the for profits love online schools. The for profit operators love the dropout recovery centers. Why? Because there's very little overhead, right? They don't have to provide the transportation. They don't have to supply those sports programs. They can have very large class sizes, because very often kids don't show up as regularly as they do. And when it comes to the dropout recovery centers, there's a whole other standard for judging how the school does. So there are just some schools with dismal reports. Stephen Dwyer in Ohio talks about this all the time, and yet they're allowed to continue. And meanwhile, the for profit operator is making a lot of money, but you can't even see how much. Because there is that lack of transparency in the charter school world, especially when it comes to for profit operators. So that's another great way that we could improve the sector.
Katie Olmsted 15:13
I want to pop back to what you had mentioned about where the charter schools are in the public schools and they are working. What does that say about, you know, the role of a charter school? How is it different than a traditional public school, classroom that works in those settings?
Dr. Carol Burris 15:30
Well, if you take the case of Alaska, for example, where they have some very successful charter schools that are really designed to support native and native languages and are very, very close to native culture. I do think that charter schools that are part of a district carefully controlled by the district can work, for example, with at risk students. That was the original idea of charter schools. But what you see too, which I think is really important, Katie, in states like Virginia and in Kansas and in Alaska, you don't have the schools competing with the with the public schools and with other charter schools, so there tends to be fewer charter schools. But those charter schools that exist, they have a specific purpose, and if there are not fulfilling that purpose, then the district democratically controlled, can decide, hey, you know, we're not going to keep this charter school going anymore. If a new need arises, they can always open up another charter school.
Katie Olmsted 16:54
So, I mean, that's all of this from the the part two of the report is, so important that people see this, but people have already been seeing part one and part two together. What impact have these reports had already?
Dr. Carol Burris 17:10
Well, one of the great things I think about doing these reports now is that they tend to have reverberations far after when they're first published, we'll always get some publicity when the reports first come out, but they then become an important source for journalists and other researchers and investigators. So I constantly get calls from reporters, for example, asking me to comment on a particular aspect when a charter school scandal happens, or when a state is trying to pass a new law, and very often in different news reports, I'll see quotes or excerpts or links to our reports so it gets it gets that information out in the public square. So it's not just, you know, the rosy picture that the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and other charter school advocacy organizations paint, you know, our reports stand there and say, hey, look, there's a different side to this. And this is especially important, I think, in the age of AI, right? Because what is AI, if not a huge Google search, right? A very sophisticated one where and it's pulling from different sources, and if we're not writing enough, if we're not reporting enough, if we're not putting enough information out there that provides balance, when folks go to do research, they're only going to see one side of a story. So I think that's an a special advantage to generating reports in in the age of artificial intelligence.
Katie Olmsted 19:03
And for that whole National Center for Charter School Accountability in its entirety, I mean that becomes a such a valuable resource for those reporters, for anybody who cares about these issues, which everyone should, especially when we get to what part three is about, which is the cost. What can we expect to see in that report?
Dr. Carol Burris 19:24
Well, first, we're going to be right before we put that out, in about a month, we're going to be issuing our 50 state report card, and that evaluates all of the state houses on their support for public education. We put this out about once every two years. We look at the extent of privatization, how they treat teachers, how they treat students.
Katie Olmsted 19:52
I don't want to know what Ohio gets in this one, because I don't think
Dr. Carol Burris 19:56
Well, usually you're you're not at the very bottom. Vegas, Florida and Arizona
Katie Olmsted 20:03
That's not company I want to be in.
Dr. Carol Burris 20:07
No, it's not. No, it's not. And then right after that, we are going to put out a report on cost, and we're still doing the research for that. Part of of what I've done is gone through with the help of some consultants to really dig into how charter schools are financed in every state. In every state, it's very different, but there's a myth out there that charter schools don't get as much money as public schools, and
Katie Olmsted 20:42
Podcasts, but like no, my face says, nope, nope, nope, the direct lottery funding payments. There some lottery funding in Ohio. It's a mess. I don't even want to go down that rabbit path, but I just read something in the Akron Beacon Journal that, like the only schools that actually get the direct lottery payments are surprise, surprise charter schools.
Dr. Carol Burris 21:03
Wow, you have to send me a link to that, because, but, but, you know that's and that's exactly what's been happening Katie and it, and I really feel like it's been happening while everybody's eyes are on vouchers, all of these different pieces of legislation are passing that are pro charter school legislation, facilities, funding. There were three states This blew me away when I found this out in my research, Ohio wasn't one of them, though I wouldn't be surprised if this makes its way to your to your state where, right? Well, if a charter school fails, and that charter school has loans, maybe loans for facilities or or loans for, you know, whatever reason they may have taken out a loan that the public is on the hook to pay them off. I mean it, it blew me away. In the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools refers to to these policies as moral obligations.
Katie Olmsted 22:13
Huh?
Dr. Carol Burris 22:13
So you know, you could start a charter school, you could run up all kinds of bills, you could mismanage it, and then the taxpayers are on the hook for having to pay off loans that never should have probably been given to the charter school to begin with, and all of these little pieces, they happen behind the scenes, so that originally, When it started, maybe charter schools were getting about 80% what a public school was getting, which kind of makes sense, because public schools have lots of expenses that charter schools don't have
Katie Olmsted 22:51
Including transportation, that transport their students.
Dr. Carol Burris 22:53
And then all of a sudden, you know, little pieces get added on. There's, where's there's one state that I found the other day trying to think of which state it is, it's not Ohio. I can't remember which, where a charter school gets transportation aid, even if it doesn't transport any students.
Katie Olmsted 22:55
Whoa.
Dr. Carol Burris 23:06
And this, you know. So there are states where I'm convinced it's very, very hard to do sort of apples to apple comparisons, where I really do believe that charter schools are actually getting a lot more income than public schools are. So cost will blow up that myth, as well as to talk about the human cost to families when a charter school closes abruptly, or the cost to school districts when all of a sudden a large charter school closes and they're forced, maybe in the middle of the year, to take in all of the students.
Katie Olmsted 23:55
But but when the charter schools close, I mean, anecdotally, I hear from a lot of my friends who are educators about, you know, families will come back to the public school in the middle of the year because they'll finally realize that the charter school isn't delivering on that education, or maybe there was a discipline issue, and then they get kicked out of the charter school and back into the public school, and they're so far behind, so far behind, because it's just not the same they're it, they're not held to the same standards.
Dr. Carol Burris 24:22
Yeah, and it, you know, it's, it's a real problem. I was, as you know, a high school principal for many years, and one of the would be very destabilizing, when all of a sudden, maybe it was August, I already did my class sizes, I already have my teachers, and then all of a sudden, we get a large influx of students. They're basically in the district where I was it was mostly boys getting kicked out of Catholic schools.
Katie Olmsted 24:51
Because don't have to, they don't have to. They get to pick and choose. They get to pick and choose, and then kick them right back to public school and we educate everyone.
Dr. Carol Burris 25:01
Really, but it makes, it makes such a problem, because all of a sudden you go, like, where do I put these kids? You know? And if you have a whole school close, especially in the middle of the year, and many of these charter schools, it, it's so sad, they don't even tell the parents. They know they're struggling, but they want to keep everything going, hoping against hope that it's all going to work out, I'm sure. Then suddenly, parents show up, the doors are locked, and you're a public school principal, and now you have 30, 40 kids. Where do you put them, you know? Or maybe 100 kids. Where do they go?
Katie Olmsted 25:40
Right.
Dr. Carol Burris 25:41
And as you said, they're very far behind. Now the test cycle comes, and all of a sudden, oh my goodness, you know, look at this failing public school.
Katie Olmsted 25:52
Right? This issue and so many others are, I'm sure, some of the big topics at the national conference I know last year NPE hosted that right here in Columbus, Ohio. What are the plans for 2026?
Dr. Carol Burris 26:07
In September 26th and 27th we're going to be in Conroe, Texas, which is right outside of Houston, Texas. And we're very, very excited about the conference. Catherine Stewart, who is a journalist and writes extensively about the religious right, is going to be one of our speakers, along with Zeph Capo, the president of Texas AFT and and lots of other terrific speakers, we're going to have panels, and we're doing something different this year. We're going to have skill building sessions that are going to be a little bit longer, where we're really going to get participants some hands on experience, on, you know, how to do a variety of things, from how to create whiteboard presentations and effectively use new media to how to file lawsuits to try to fix voucher and charter school laws. So we're super, super excited about it, and listeners can find all of the information they need at the networkforpubliceducation.org you can find out about the conference, how to register. We got a great price on hotel rooms this year, $134 a night. You can't beat that. Buy it and and also, you have a link there to the National Center for Charter School Accountability, where you can find the reports, you can click on your state and see what your charter laws are like, and we rate them, we give them five star ratings, and there's a lot of no stars, unfortunately, on Ohio. But you know what? It's a way forward for people to say, hey, wait a minute, not every state has a law like this. Let's see if we can make some progress and improve our own charter school law.
Katie Olmsted 28:09
Well Carol Burris, thank you so much for helping us understand our laws and what we're looking at in Ohio and what we can do from here. Thank you so much for sitting down with us.
Dr. Carol Burris 28:18
Katie, thank you so much for having me. Have a great end of the school year everyone.
Katie Olmsted 28:22
Carol mentioned the link for more on the conference and the charter school accountability reports and that national center. It's all in the show notes for this episode. And while you're there, make sure you subscribe to public education matters wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss an episode in the future, we are continuing to have these important conversations about the big public education issues in our state every Thursday this season, because in Ohio, public education matters.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai