Terry Ryan

Urban School Reform

When Ohio issued its first district and school-level report cards in 1998, they confirmed what most Daytonians had known for at least a decade: the Gem City’s public schools were in academic tatters. By the state’s reckoning, Dayton and Cleveland were the two worst districts in Ohio. At the time, the Dayton public schools (DPS) served about 26,000 students, employed 3,847 people (half of them teachers), and had an operating budget of

The Dawn of Charter Schools

203 million. But its academic performance was woeful. As summed up by the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s education reporter, “With dwindling enrollments and abysmal test scores, the [Dayton] school district looked like a poster child for all that was wrong with the big urban school systems. Too many students were dropping out. Too many never came at all. There was little or no discipline. Teacher morale sagged. School board members bickered. Deficits soared.”1

Baptism Under Fire

To make sense of the complex origins of Ohio’s charter school program and related school and school finance reforms, it helps to understand the state and its political divisions, some of America’s most distinctive. These divisions turn out to be more complicated than big-city Democrats versus suburban and rural Republicans. Few other states have eight major cities. Known, in fact, as the Big 8, they marked Ohio politics throughout the twentieth century. Other states have regional competitions: New York City versus upstate, Chicago versus downstate, northern versus southern California, and so forth. What makes Ohio different, explains political scientist Herb Asher, who has studied Buckeye State politics for decades, is that, except for the thinly populated semi-Appalachian southeast, every region of Ohio has a major population center that generates parochial demands and political power.

Polarization and Politics

Since the state had capped new charters, in Fordham’s new role as sponsor we decided to focus our energy, leverage, and money—as well as that of the Gates Foundation—on helping our initial ten schools to improve. They were a varied bunch. Eight had previously been sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education, schools that the department had been required by House Bill 364 to cut loose. The other two were allowed to open by virtue of winning tickets in the 2005 charter school lottery. Both were sister schools of Cincinnati’s acclaimed W. E. B. DuBois Academy and were to be run by the DuBois leadership.

An Education Tragedy

I’m amazed at some of the really, really painful stories that six-year-olds and seven-year-olds are bringing to school, and the efforts of schools to deal with these things. I’ve gained more respect for traditional educators.”1

Dayton’s Decline

In his 2008 book on high-performing schools, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, journalist David Whitman distilled the key practices used by America’s most effective urban schools: telling students exactly what is expected of them; implementing a rigorous, college-prep curriculum aligned with state standards; regularly assessing pupil progress; building a culture of success; enforcing attendance; and shedding the constraints that hobble conventional schools.

The Rest of the Story

Dayton is where Thomas B. Fordham made his fortune and where Chester Finn and Mike Lafferty grew up. Our roots there run deep. It’s a city that was founded by frontiersmen and farmers at the confluence of three rivers in southwestern Ohio, but it became a model for early twentieth-century America at the hands of entrepreneurs, inventors, and businessmen. Tocqueville understood this spirit when he described Americans as being less interested in high-minded philosophy than in simply getting the job done. They want to grow it, make it better, and sell it for less than anyone else, he observed. Dayton typified this approach.

Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges

In 2009, Governor Strickland and his allies relaunched the policy and budgetary attacks they had mounted two years earlier—but this time with a Democratic majority in the house. The 2008 elections had been good to their party in Ohio as well as nationally. Although the GOP retained a 21 to 12 majority in the senate, four of the five statewide offices were now in Democratic hands. The biennial budget proposed by the governor in early February 2009 would have nailed shut the coffin for Ohio’s charter school program. We summarized that threat for the Akron Beacon Journal in these words: Ohio’s charter schools certainly need attention and the governor has a good idea or two here—making all charter “sponsors” accountable, for example. But while purporting to cure this patient, Strickland would actually deprive it of vital limbs and organs. His budget would severely worsen the funding inequities between charter and district schools. And he would heavily increase the regulatory burden on all charters, good, bad, and indifferent. In barring “for profit” school operators, he again fails to distinguish between shady managers of squalid schools and outstanding providers of quality education. That both may be profit-seeking is beside the point. Put it all together, and it’s hard to picture any high-octane charter operator wanting to work in Ohio.