Hope Academies, According To The Ohio Department of Education
Friday, March 28th, 2008
The Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) sent the IRS a letter asking it to investigate whether charter schools managed by White Hat Management, Inc. and its affiliates can properly claim 503(c) tax-exempt status.
White Hat Management and its affiliates operate the “Life Skills” and “Hope Academy” charter schools in Ohio, Florida and Arizona. OFT states that the schools are merely a tax-exempt “pass through” to funnel money to the management company– $84 million tax dollars per year.
The Ohio Department of Education database recorded information for 12 Hope Academy locations throughout the state; when examined, the data paints a disturbing picture of what results Ohioans are receiving for their $84 million dollars in tax money diverted from public school districts.
The CEA Blog took a look at the numbers regarding White Hat’s “Life Skills” Centers in an earlier post; now the ODE data on Hope Academies is under scrutiny.
Click on the jump below to take a closer look at ODE data on Hope Academies in the state of Ohio.
Grammy award winning musical jack-of-all-trades Tom Chapin and songwriting partner John Forster aim their guitar and songwriting skills at satirizing No Child Left Behind and the testing mania that has engulfed the nation. “Not On The Test” is available for free download with the lyrics 
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced last week that up to 10 states can begin to use the progress of students’ test scores rather than their actual scores in meeting federal progress goals for No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Interested states would have to submit their proposal to the Department of Education; states with a strong history of reform such as Maryland, North Dakota, Louisiana and South Dakota would be given preference in the process.
The CEA Blog would like to wish everyone a happy, safe and restful spring break. Some recent highlights from around the edu-blogosphere: merit pay for wardens at prisons, students engaging in civil disobedience, using mixed numbers in real life, and the achievement gap between college basketball teams participating in March Madness.
The recent campaign launched by the Center For Union Facts (CUF) has wrongly placed the highly qualified and hard-working teachers of the Columbus Education Association in its crosshairs with the release of its anti-teacher smear campaign. 
As a middle-school Pre-Algebra and Algebra I teacher, I strongly agree with the teachers’ concerns expressed in the Feb. 13 Dispatch article “Teachers disgruntled over volume of tests.” However, some of the information was incomplete or inaccurate.
All unions in both the private and public sectors nationwide face an increasingly steep uphill battle each time they sit down at the table with management to renegotiate their contracts. Issues that involve union members include decent raises, maintaining core job benefits like quality health care and affordable prescription drug coverage, assuring job security, securing pensions and beating back attacks on our unions, including restrictions on collective bargaining rights, legislatively imposed merit-pay systems and paycheck protection schemes.