White Hat, Deep Pockets.
What will a combined contribution of $35,000 to a single Ohio Senate incumbent in the 2006 general election get you?
Well, if you're White Hat's for-profit education management "industrialist" CEO David Brennan, how about the chance to continue to accept state money without delivering results.
Ohio Senate President Bill Harris, himself the recipient of $35,000 from Brennan (and his wife, Anne) wants to keep our state's charter school funding at the current levels.
He couldn't imagine closing those low-performing Ohio charter schools. From a Dispatch "Daily Briefing blog post:
“The most inhumane thing done in our state would be to cause charter schools to have to close their doors. What happens to those young people? We’re not going to do that.”
I don't know Bill, they could enroll in my district, perhaps my school and I could actually get them to pass the state tests (there's more to teaching than that, but now the politicians understand what I'm saying). Not that I'm surprised to hear him say that.
Asked where the money comes from, Harris said, “I don’t know at this point. But we’re looking and we’ll find it.”
Bill, you could ask your friend and benefactor David Brennan if he knows.
Don't forget William Lager, CEO of central Ohio Altair Learning Management, the EMO that runs ECOT, the "Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow".
While he didn't give money to Harris, he did give out $160,750 for the 2006 general election. I don't know if that's his money or Altair's money (my guess is that it's Altair's) but then again, that's your money-- the money that should go to educate the students of ECOT.
What's offensive to me is the legislature's and state board of education's failure to establish performance standards for drop-out recovery charter schools. The state has an automatic closure provision for traditional charter schools--if they are bad enough, they have to close (and yes, those standards should be tougher than they are). But drop-out recovery schools are exempted until such time as the state sets performance standards for those schools. So the majority of Brennan's Ohio schools--Life Skills Centers--can continue operating with zero accountability.
I found it odd that the House Dems removed the ban on for-profit school operators in their version of the budget yet didn't address this loophole (doing so would pretty much drive David Brennan out of business in the Buckeye State, by the way).