Incredibly, after numerous charter school scandals in Ohio, the GOP candidate for Lt. Governor suggests the next step is to make charter schools to be released from ethics laws. Stephen Dyer explains.
I’d been hearing rumors about Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman pressuring the Ohio Ethics Commission to exempt Ohio Charter Schools from scrutiny. But when Laura Hancock of cleveland.com called and asked me my thoughts on Huffman and McColley teaming up, my first thought was what she quoted here:
“It’s awfully interesting that the lieutenant governor candidate is trying to make sure that a $1.6 billion program can remain in the dark from Ohio taxpayers. During an election year, that’s certainly a choice.”
In order to understand what happened here, you need to understand how Charter Schools work in Ohio. Their operational structure is unique in the country.
Every Ohio Charter School has a governing board — a group of folks that oversee an individual school. Kind of like a local school board. They also have a so-called sponsor, which is typically a non-profit organization that serves as the school’s gateway to the Ohio Department of Education.1 They also can have operators that run nearly every aspect of the school. Operators can be for-profit companies, which has caused numerous problems for Charter Schools over the years. It’s these for-profit operators that spent much of the last 30 years lining the campaign coffers of Ohio Republicans specifically to limit oversight of their operations.
All Ohio Charters have governing boards and sponsors. Not every Charter School has an operator, though more than 3 in 4 Ohio Charter Schools do. And of those 264 Ohio Charter Schools who do have operators, all but 10 are for-profit entities2.
So the rule that the Ohio Ethics Commission sought to make was to require anyone who sits on a Charter School governing board to file financial disclosures, like nearly every public official has to do. These forms disclose where they make their money, who took them out to lunch (over a certain amount) and, most importantly, who they have a relationship with that may involve the school.
For example, if the CEO of a textbook company or gradebook software company is on the governing board of a Charter School — or multiple ones because Ohio law permits that — and that school or those schools only use that company’s textbook or gradebook software, that may be something the public should know about, right?
Not according to Rob McColley. Because Rob wants to keep that all secret.
What could possibly go wrong?