The Transformation Alliance was created to provide some level of review of new charter schools opening in the city, Marnecheck said, but it doesn’t have the authority to stop them from opening up. “But the city did not get the authority that it wanted at the time,” Williams said, citing different priorities among state legislators. Things have gotten better since, she said, but at the time Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and other partners lobbied the conservative state government to grant them more authority on which charter schools could open in the city. She recalls that initially, Ohio was like the “wild west” of charter schools, with few regulations in place. Helen Williams, education program director with the Cleveland Foundation, was part of the group that worked on creation of the Cleveland Plan. “As the CIO (Chief Information Officer), when I came here in 2007, I urged us to stop fighting over kids and start working collaboratively to get kids in better seats.” “I am the person that led this district to partner with charter schools, I mean, that was not a thing done in the state of Ohio,” Gordon told Ideastream Public Media Tuesday, following the announcement of his decision to step down at the end of the school year. That includes 17 local public charter schools.ĬEO Eric Gordon said the partnership with charter schools goes back before his time as the head of CMSD. In the time since, a levy approved by voters included a 1.5-mill tax allocation that gives additional funding to “high-quality” charter schools that partner with CMSD schools, Executive Director Meghann Marnecheck said. The plan also established the Cleveland Transformation Alliance, a nonprofit organization meant to vet new public charter schools coming in the city and to monitor relations between those charter schools and district schools. “The plan is built upon growing the number of excellent schools in Cleveland, regardless of provider, and giving these schools autonomy over staff and budgets in exchange for high accountability for performance,” the summary reads.
The plan ultimately called for transforming CMSD into a “new system of district and charter schools that are held to the highest standards,” according to the plan’s executive summary. So CMSD, the city of Cleveland, local nonprofits and other agencies joined forces to develop a plan that was ultimately approved by the Ohio legislature and then-Governor John Kasich to try to improve the quality of education at a rapid pace. Student achievement levels were incredibly poor at the district, and only about 52% of students were graduating. In 2011, Cleveland’s schools were in serious financial and academic distress, prompting serious scrutiny from the state. Outgoing Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eric Gordon was instrumental in development of the Cleveland Plan to reform the city’s public education system, a plan that Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb says he wants to “double down” on in partnership with the next CEO.įirst, a brief look back in history.
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