March 27, 2005
Charter Schools Alter Map of Public Education in Dayton
By SAM DILLON, NY TIMES

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DAYTON, Ohio - For decades, conservatives have dreamed of an America in which public schools would lose their monopoly on government education financing and face the harsh reality of market competition. Here in Dayton, their dream has come true with a vengeance.

Forty charter schools have opened in Dayton, and nine more have received preliminary approval for next fall. That would give this city of 166,000 people about as many charter schools as are in New Jersey, which has a population 50 times larger.

Today 26 percent of Dayton's public school students are enrolled in the taxpayer-financed but privately operated schools, a rate far higher than in any other American city.

Academically, few of the charter schools have proved to be any better than Dayton's public schools, which are among Ohio's worst. Now the authorities are warning that the flow of state money to the charters, $41 million this year, is further undermining the traditional school system.

"Never in a million years did I think we'd end up with 50 charters in a community of this size," said Gail Littlejohn, a former corporate lawyer who supported charter schools as part of a menu of changes when she was elected president of Dayton's Board of Education in 2001. "We're developing two complete and competing public systems."

The mayor of Dayton, Rhine McLin, has called for a moratorium on new charter schools, but neither she nor any other local authority appears to have the power to stop the growth. The Ohio Legislature has given some 60 school districts, universities and other groups the authority to license new charters, and Ohio officials said dozens of would-be educators had been racing to organize schools across the state.

"We're the No. 1 charter school Mecca in Ohio, if not the country," said William Peterson, a former football star at the University of Dayton who has founded three charter schools in Dayton and one in Cleveland and who hopes to open two more here next fall. But the only one of Mr. Peterson's schools that has been rated so far under Ohio's school report card system was classified in an "academic emergency" because of low test scores.

Educators across the nation are watching Dayton because it is one of the few places where charter schools have come to seriously rival the public system. Supporters of charter schools, while acknowledging that quality has been a disappointment so far, say the schools have given parents new educational choices. Critics of the movement say Dayton has become a playground for entrepreneurs who are proficient at obtaining government planning grants and marketing their schools through television campaigns but who are mediocre educators.

"We're close to the tipping point where the charters damage the capacity of the public schools to create a sufficient educational infrastructure for the community," said Thomas J. Lasley II, dean of the education school at the University of Dayton. He said he worried about whether the public schools could respond if several charters collapsed simultaneously, as happened last fall in California. "Other people would say, 'Let the market decide.' But I think that's just experimenting with young people's lives."

However, Jon Husted, the speaker of the state House and a Republican who wrote an important charter school law, says the events here have proved that market forces can reform American education.

"The question that the Dayton Public Schools need to ask themselves is, 'Why are all of these children leaving?' " Mr. Husted said. "Instead of blaming charter schools, they should ask, 'What can we do better to make students stay?' "

Still, he expressed dismay over the proliferation of charter schools - "Our charter growth happened too fast" - and frustration over financial and academic mismanagement at some of the new schools. "How do you write a law to shut down the ones that aren't any good and let the others flourish?" he asked.

Four teachers founded Dayton's first charter, City Day Community School, in 1998, and a dozen more appeared over the next three years.

Among them were the Omega School of Excellence, founded by Daryl Ward, a lawyer educated at Georgetown University, and his wife, Vanessa, who has a degree from Johns Hopkins. The couple, co-pastors at Omega Baptist Church, had discovered that young congregants could not read or do math properly, Mrs. Ward said.

Two other charter schools founded in those years were run by Edison Schools, the for-profit company based in New York. Another school that began enrolling Dayton students was Electronic Classrooms of Tomorrow, based in Columbus, which offers classes over the Internet.

The charter schools grew rapidly because parents in Dayton were eager for alternatives, said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education advocacy group based in Washington. The foundation, named after a Dayton industrialist, has promoted charter schools nationwide and especially in Dayton, and also appears to have helped their growth here.

Terry Ryan, a program director for the foundation, said that in the early years of the charter movement in Dayton, "we knew what was going on in just about every school" because community and business leaders had established or were operating them. But more recently, the spread of charter schools has been so rapid, Mr. Ryan said, that "we just can't keep up."

Some of the newest schools have been founded by Dayton natives who started one charter here and wanted to expand. Five were Internet-based schools located elsewhere in Ohio that have enrolled Dayton students. Three others were run by National Heritage Academies, a company based in Michigan that operates 51 schools in five states.

Most of the new schools have sought to recruit local educators as teachers and administrators, and Mr. Ryan said that finding the right people was an increasing challenge.

"Starting charter schools is hard work," Mr. Ryan said. "You need people who understand how to run businesses, navigate the state regulations, and also how to educate children. There's reason to wonder whether our community has the human management capacity to run 50 charter schools."

The charters, Mr. Finn said, have already had one positive effect: their surging enrollments convinced voters of the need to reorganize the school system, and in November 2001 they elected four reform candidates to the Board of Education, led by Ms. Littlejohn, who promised to raise achievement and offer new choices.

Working with Superintendent Percy A. Mack, Ms. Littlejohn and her team have refocused district spending to classrooms from administration, improved school discipline and increased training for teachers. Much remains to be done, however: the district remains on the state's academic emergency list.

But rather than focusing on restructuring, Ms. Littlejohn says, she increasingly spends her days "redoing budgets and figuring out how to downsize schools."

A 2003 poll conducted for the Fordham Foundation found that parents in Dayton appreciated the choices that charter schools were providing. A growing number of parents also believed the public schools were improving. In recent interviews here, several parents with experience in public and charter schools expressed concern about the costs of sustaining two school systems.

"It's stretching everybody's dollars too thin," said Carrie Arnold, a data entry clerk whose son has attended public and charter schools. "We need one terrific school system, not two substandard ones."

In Ohio, as in most of the other 40 states that have laws authorizing them, charter schools receive the state's basic per-pupil amount of money for each enrolled student, about $5,200, plus more for disabled children and some other students. Ohio officials deduct the money from the state money flowing to the school district in which the students reside.

Because 6,141 Dayton students are enrolled in charter schools this year, Dayton has lost $41 million of its $114 million in state school aid. Local taxes have provided the public schools with an additional $108 million, for a total budget this year of $222 million.

But Dayton faces a double financial whammy. In 2002, voters approved a $600 million construction project to replace or renovate 34 public schools, for which the state was to pay about 61 cents on the dollar. But with students leaving to enroll in charters, the city has already had to abandon plans to replace eight schools, and more cuts may be required, Ms. Littlejohn said.

"This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is slipping through our fingers," she said.

Steven E. Burigana, chief operating officer for the Ohio Department of Education, said that as students moved to charter schools from traditional public ones, the state would reduce its construction aid to Dayton. "Ms. Littlejohn has a legitimate anxiety," he said.

US Charter Schools

The Center For Education Reform: Charter Connection

Charter School Development Center