Dive Brief:

• During a meeting with Ohio school board members on Tuesday, Superintendent Richard Ross admitted that the state’s charter schools lacked acceptable oversight this year.
• Earlier this summer, the state’s school choice director stepped down after it was revealed that he had excluded low grades from state evaluations of charter school operators.
• State auditors are reviewing the education department’s documents to ensure nothing else is out of order, but some have called for a full investigation.

Dive Insight:

The question of accountability for low-performing charter schools has been particularly pressing in Ohio, where charters have proliferated rapidly. The schools are supposed to act with greater freedom from state and local practices in order to test and implement innovative ideas. In return, they are supposed to be easier to shut down if they’re not working.

But as the case in Ohio indicates, the second part does not always happen. Online charter schools, in particular, have struggled to meet expectations; the state's former school choice chief withheld the data of several online schools during this summer’s scandal. How to hold them accountable and close them if they’re not working remains an area of discussion in Ohio and elsewhere.

“I’ve been very disappointed and upset about this. It is so counter to what I believe. I believe in accountability for all schools,” Ross told the state board. “We need to have accurate data for that. So the exclusion of e-school data … from our sponsor evaluations was wrong. If somebody had shared that with me, it wouldn’t have happened.”