William Lager, Charter Czar, Makes the Drop to Ensure Lack of Regulation of Ohio Charters

It is no longer acceptable to deprecate women as Mike Royko does in his 1978 column “Bucking Hard for the Equal Rights Amendment,” but just for today I am going let Mike Royko’s references to “do gooder ladies” go.  Royko was the very savvy and funny longtime Chicago newspaper columnist. We will focus on his intended topic: the role of money in politics:

“I was talking to an ERA lady recently.  She was fretting that the (Equal Rights) amendment might again fail in Illinois, after all of her hard work… I said, ‘Make the drop.’  She looked puzzled and asked: ‘Make the what?’  ‘The drop. Give them some money.’ She still didn’t understand. ‘Money? For what?’  ‘Bribes.’…  That’s the trouble with the ERA crowd and most do-gooders.  They are earnest, diligent, and energetic.  But they don’t have much sense.  Throughout the history of this state, sly people have been getting what they want out of Springfield.  They haven’t done it by being honest, earnest, diligent, and energetic… They have done it by throwing a shoebox full of money through the transom of a Springfield hotel room.”  (The essay appears on pages 109-111 of One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko.)

What we used to think was the way things were done in Chicago has come to dominate politics everywhere in America.  The result is that the powerful are regularly buying the policies that affect the rest of us, and nowhere is that clearer than in the policies that shape our public schools, the quintessential institution of the 99 Percent.

As with Royko’s column, the subject today is state government, not in Illinois but in my state, Ohio, whose legislature, after a year of crafting some relatively weak oversight of charter schools, went home at the end of June without passing even a weak bill.  Late last month, Patrick O’Donnell of the Plain Dealer reported, “The Ohio House will head off on summer break without voting on the new accountability and financial reporting rules for Ohio’s $1 billion charter school industry that have been in the works for months.  House leaders skipped a vote on the package late last week and have left it off the schedule for Tuesday, the last session before leaving for recess.” “Republican leaders say the delay is to clear up some issues with the just-revised bill.  Others call it an attempt to buy time to water down the bill to please charter school operators who donate to Republican candidates.”  Rep. Teresa Fedor, a Democrat, interpreted the move: “They never will call a vote, which means the tax dollars will continue on the ripoff train.”

As the legislature adjourned for its summer break without doing anything about charters, Doug Livingston clarified the meaning of all this in the Akron Beacon-Journal: “Though there are only 24 online schools among the more than 380 charter schools in Ohio, they receive nearly one in three state dollars set aside (each year) for charter schools or $267 million… The two largest—the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) and Ohio Virtual Academy—received $185 million in state funding.  Two are run by influential for-profit companies.  White Hat Management, which operates Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning academy founded by Akron industrialist David Brennan, and Altair Learning, which operates ECOT and is owned by Bill Lager.  Brennan and Lager have given more than $1.4 million in political contributions to state lawmakers since 2009….”  It is worth noting as well that recently term-limited Ohio House Speaker William Batchelder, when he left the legislature in January of this year, revolved directly into a lobbying job and took on a very powerful and influential client: William Lager.

On Saturday, in his 10th Period blog, Stephen Dyer published the next chapter in the story of Ohio’s failure to regulate charters.  Dyer shows how William Lager of ECOT and Altair Management knows Mike Royko’s rule about ‘making the drop’: “Just a few days after the Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives declined to take up House Bill 2… the campaign committee meant to re-elect his members got a familiar maximum level check (as permitted by law) from William Lager, who runs the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT).  Not to be undone, so did the Ohio Senate’s campaign committee.  Both were for $18,798.51.”

Dyer continues:  “Last year, the state of Ohio paid ECOT $104 million to educate the 15,088 students it received from Ohio’s local public schools.  That $6,921 per pupil is nearly $2,500 more than the average Ohio school district received last year from the state before charters, vouchers and open enrollment were deducted.  ECOT’s per pupil state funding is larger than all but 52 of Ohio’s 613 school districts.  And this is for an electronic school without buildings, custodians, buses, heating, cooling, sports teams, etc… The question now is this: Will the contributions keep House Bill 2 from moving this fall?”

Mike Royko clearly understood the rules in Springfield back in the 1970s.  William Lager clearly understands the same quid pro quo politics today around charter schools.  It used to be called “buying votes.”  Today this is just the way things are in Ohio and, I suspect, most other places.

Special Interests Threaten Future of Public Education as Money Drives Politics

In Winner-Take-All Politics, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe the impact of organized money on our national politics:  “The foremost obstacle to sustainable reform is the enormous imbalance in organizational resources between the chief economic beneficiaries of the status quo and those who seek to strengthen middle-class democracy.  Powerful groups defending the winner-take-all economy—business coalitions, Wall Street lobbyists, medical industry players—are fully cognizant of the massive stakes involved, and they are battle-ready after years of training.” (p. 291)

Last weekend the NY Times launched a series of articles that demonstrate the power of organized money in state politics as well.  Powerful organizations, able to designate themselves as not-for-profit, are wielding enormous political influence as money is bundled and distributed to skirt even the political funding regulations of the most careful states.  Such funding has permitted political groups to “flip states,” contributing to the reality that 36 states are now run by one-party—one political party holding majorities in both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion.  Today 13 state governments are controlled solely by Democrats and 23 by Republicans.

The NY Times reports, “Both sides rely on interlocking networks of political action committees, party organizations and nonprofit groups, often based in states with forgiving campaign finance rules, that work in concert to raise contributions and shuffle money to thousands of local races around the country.  In some states, liberal or conservative donors have established political nonprofits that function like shadow parties, often exempt from the contribution limits or disclosure requirements that apply to candidates and traditional parties…  Campaign contributions that would be banned or restricted in one state can be sent to a state where the rules allow money to flow more freely, often scrubbed of the identity of the original donor.”

The Center for Media and Democracy has also exposed the role of the State Policy Network of conservative state foundations all linked in a well-staffed national network and working in tandem with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which pairs member legislators and business lobbyists to craft model laws that  benefit business and promote privatization, and that can be introduced in several state legislatures all at once.

Public education has been targeted in one-party states that now lack bipartisan checks and balances.  In this blog I have recently written about what is happening to public education in some of those states .  Closest to my heart, of course, is my own state, Ohio, where I have been tracking very closely issues around school finance for 25 years.

Only recently, as Ohio politics has been entirely dominated by big money and one party rule, have I seriously believed that engaged citizens—including the public school teachers and parents who know the most about what is happening in their communities’ schools—can have virtually no impact on what happens in Columbus.  It is a frightening feeling as we watch state funding reduced year after year—school nurses and librarians cut; school social workers eliminated in Cleveland, a school district with more concentrated poverty than most American cities; and students pay to play sports or join the debate team even in relatively wealthy suburban school districts.

And yet Ohio’s charter scams continue unregulated.  Ohio takes more from public school districts to pay for students in charters than the state aid allocated per child in traditional public schools. And William Lager and his Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow siphon millions that ought to be flowing to the state’s public school districts.

This week brought another report of lax oversight.  The Columbus Dispatch reports that 17 charter schools closed last year in Columbus alone.  All were authorized by something called the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center (ESC), based not in Columbus but instead in Marion and Tiffin.  Jim Lahoski, the superintendent of the ESC told the Dispatch that, “he doesn’t think the ESC is particularly at fault.  It was a difficult market, and some of the operators simply weren’t ready to handle running a school.”

When the Dispatch asked the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) whether the ESC, that seems unable effectively to vet charter school plans, ought to be sponsoring charter schools, ODE spokesman John Charlton replied that Ohio law does not give the ODE the real power to regulate the sponsors of charter schools: “The way it works right now is, if a school has a sponsor and they sign a contract, that school can open.  We don’t have any approval or denial power.”

During 2013, when 17 charter schools closed mid-year in Columbus, 250 students had to find other schools on short notice.  Nine of these schools lasted only a couple of months into the fall, but neither the state nor the school districts whose money had followed children to the charters were able to recoup the money.  “The state spent more than $1.6 million in taxpayer money to keep the nine schools open only from August through October or November.”

There is no discernable movement in the Ohio legislature, however, to strengthen regulation of Ohio’s worst charters or to regulate their sponsors.  Steve Dyer, a former member of the Ohio House of Representatives and former chair of the House Education Subcommittee of the Finance Committee, explains: “Nearly $888 million is being spent on Charters this school year—a 7.7% increase over last school year’s record amount.  Between Charters and Vouchers, Ohio now spends more than $1 billion a year on privately run schools.”