COLUMBUS – The Ohio Department of Education is retracting the charter-school sponsor evaluations it issued this year, after an outcry that Internet charter-school achievement data were arbitrarily left out of the criteria, a potential violation of state law.
“In response to the concerns that have been raised and our own preliminary review, the Ohio Department of Education is retracting the community-school sponsor evaluations that have been completed so far,” the department said Friday in a written release. “The department will be seeking input from independent experts to make sure the methodology for evaluating all sponsors, including those already evaluated, is credible, accurate and compliant.”
The Columbus Dispatch reported on Friday that State Auditor Dave Yost is looking into the fact that student test scores from Internet-based charter schools were left out of the ratings. Yost said he saw “concerning similarities” to what Columbus City Schools did when it excluded data to help improve its state report card results.
The decision to exclude perennially poor online charter-student proficiency results was made by David J. Hansen, the department’s director of quality school choice and funding.
The exclusion likely boosted the rating of the Ohio Council of Community Schools, one of five charter-school authorizers the state has rated so far this year. The sponsor was rated “exemplary,” the highest rating.
Among the schools the council sponsors are four online charters that enroll about 16,000 students, about 57 percent of the 28,000 total students in the council-sponsored schools.