Dive Brief:
- This week, Ohio Democrats Rep. Tim Ryan and Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced bills in their respective chambers of Congress aiming to increase federal charter oversight.
- Both bills would crack down on the particularly troubled charter sector in Ohio.
- The move also comes on the heels of a new report from the liberal-leaning Center for Media and Democracy that found the charter sector lacks transparency and accountability at both the state and federal level.
Dive Insight:
Of notable concern to the center's report was funding. “Unlike truly public schools, which have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending is largely a black hole,” the authors wrote. And it singled out Ohio, which it says failed to hand over information about the charter sector. The state received $71 million this year from the federal government to expand and open high-performing charter schools.
The state's education leaders, however, have continued to grapple with fallout from an earlier scandal that involved the state’s charter school chief scrubbing bad grades from state reports on charter school performance. Gov. John Kasich has refused to hand over document to the state auditor related to the federal grant and the grade scrubbing.