After posing pointed questions about cost and oversight, the Cleveland school board postponed a decision on whether to share local levy dollars with new partner charter schools — or at all.
The discussion and decision drew enthusiastic approval from a crowd that had attended to protest the recent layoff, driven by the district’s ongoing budget woes, of nearly 300 educators.
The conversation comes at a time where the district, strapped for cash, is closing and merging dozens of public schools as it deals with enrollment declines and an oversaturation of school seats city-wide. Currently, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) partners or sponsors eight charter schools throughout the city and it’s one of the only school districts in Ohio that shares local levy dollars with these schools.
At the meeting on April 28, CMSD brought a resolution to the board that would have added two new charter partners, bringing the levy funds shared with charter schools close to $10 million. Even if it didn’t partner with charter schools the district wouldn’t automatically get that money because of how state law is currently written.
After the discussion, Board Chair Sara Elaqad moved to table the resolution that would have added two schools, Constellation Puritas Elementary and Broadway Academy, as partners.
“It seemed like there was enough inquiry from the board that I could sense that people would be more comfortable with a second round of discussion,” she told Signal Cleveland. “We’re reassessing our schools—the number of students that they need to have and what they look like—and it makes sense for us to take a different and new look at our charter partners as well.”
Charter school collaboration: A product of the Cleveland Plan
The relationship the district has with charter schools dates back to the passage of the Cleveland Plan. The thrust of the plan at the time was that by collaborating with charters CMSD could both hold them to higher standards while expanding school choice for families. Part of the plan was the creation of a watchdog for district and charter schools known as the Cleveland Transformation Alliance, which was disbanded last spring.
The plan established two main types of collaboration charters: partnership and sponsorship. Both types include a basic agreement where the charter school gets access to taxpayer money raised by local levies and in exchange CMSD can lump charter school test scores into its state report card.
With the schools it sponsors, CMSD has a greater level of control because it authorizes the school to open and provides hands-on oversight but isn’t involved in the day-to-day governing the way it is with a district school.
For a charter to become a partner or a sponsor school, it must apply to the district, serve mostly Cleveland students and meet other requirements, including high academic performance.
Board members had questions about how the district holds charter schools to specific academic standards and how it ensures they adequately serve students with disabilities and English language learners. They also scrutinized the overall strategy CMSD takes toward charter schools, asking if it might be time for a shift in tactics.
“What are the advantages to CMSD?” board member Robert Briggs said, at one point. “I understand the advantages to the charter schools but what are the advantages to us?”
“What happens if we stop doing this?”
At the time The Cleveland Plan was passed in 2012, the goal of partnering with charters was to increase high-quality school options for families and provide more oversight over the schools, district officials said. The idea was Cleveland, which had struggled to pass levies as voters lost faith in its schools, had to create a system that had high performing schools in every neighborhood regardless of who governed them.
Since then things have shifted. CMSD has passed a number of levies but due to enrollment declines and a broken state funding system is still facing a budget crisis. District schools have begun largely outperforming charter schools, CEO Warren Morgan said. And, most importantly, the issue of too many seats and not enough students has become a city-wide problem.
“When the Cleveland Plan was created this was trying to foster and one those ideas was that we would try to have a mutual interest, it’s the Cleveland plan, not the CMSD plan,” Matthew Rado, the executive director of Charter Schools for CMSD, said at the meeting. “That this would be able to help create relationships where we could tackle some problems together and I don’t know that has played out the way we want it to.”
Briggs and Board Member Diana Welch Howell, both questioned Rado about how the district benefits from its relationship with charters. With the addition of the two new charters, CMSD would distribute a total of $9.7 million dollars to charter schools, according to data shared by a CMSD spokesperson.
Since 2012, Cleveland school levies have included language that sets aside money for the partner charters. Because of that, the money from already approved levies would not be available to the district if it dropped all partner and sponsored charters, according to a CMSD spokesperson. Future levies could have different language around that money, however.
But levy money isn’t the only way CMSD invests in charter schools. Welch Howell pointed out that the district also dedicates staff as well as time and energy to managing these relationships and assessing partnership applications.
“What happens if we stop doing this?” she asked Rado at one point. “If we stopped doing this, is there capacity that we could direct toward CMSD, toward [Building Brighter Futures]?”
If CMSD ended these partnerships, the impact would be greater on the charter schools, Rado said. They would lose out on local levy dollars and in the case of CMSD sponsored schools would need to find a new sponsor or risk closure. For CMSD the biggest change would be no longer being able to use charter school test scores in the district’s state report card.
“We do not get their students rolled up in our enrollment, we don’t get extra dollars for them,” Morgan said. “I think it’s something we need to continue to assess and look at and keep asking the tough questions.”
