DaytonDailyNews.com

Gov. Ted Strickland must be stopped in his drive to put charter schools out of business.

His proposed budget would cut funding for the state's 330 charter schools by about 20 percent overall, which, for many, would mean they'd be done.

The schools already get far less in taxpayer money than traditional public schools. That's the price they pay to buy autonomy to operate free of sometimes stifling bureaucracy and rigid union contracts.

In Dayton, the cut would be a travesty for the charter schools that are besting or equaling Dayton public schools. Especially tragic would be the potential double-whammy that the Dayton Early College Academy would suffer.

Let's be clear: If the governor gets his way, this special school that is putting Dayton on the map nationally in the school reform movement is history.

DECA, as the school is known, is a celebrated charter high school that allows students to attend high school classes and take college classes at the University of Dayton and other area colleges. Its mostly disadvantaged students are posting phenomenal test scores, graduation rates and college-acceptance rates.

The exact amount charter schools would be cut varies. DECA's calculations are that it, for sure, would lose 17 percent of its state money.

On top of that, the governor also wants to eliminate certain funding for Ohio's nine early college academies. Across the state, 2,200 students are attending high schools that are working hand-in-hand with a college to introduce kids early to college-level material. They earn college credit if they can keep up.

These schools might or might not get the money that former Gov. Bob Taft and then-Speaker Jon Husted, both Republicans, expressly set aside in previous budgets for these experimental schools. Instead, bureaucrats would decide whether to fund them; who knows what they'd do.

Not just at DECA, but at eight other academies, low-income students — many of them minority, many from families where no one has ever gone to college — are taking college classes and succeeding.

The governor is correct that there are horrible charter schools in the state that deserve to be shut down. But they need to be closed in an honest, straightforward way — by showing how they are not meeting standards or not following the law. Punishing every charter because Gov. Strickland is so high on traditional public education is betraying the thousands of children who are demonstrably better off in these alternative schools.

These mostly small schools are already at a disadvantage in that they get no funding from the state for their facilities, and they don't get money from local property tax levies. Many pay their teachers less (when benefits are included), while they also typically have longer school days.

Go figure how it makes sense for the governor to dock schools that already are doing a lot with a little.

Most of the reputable local charter schools that are making better progress than some public schools are, even so, not shining examples of educational excellence. Even with the freedom to do things differently and to put incredible demands on their staff, they're struggling.

DECA, on the other hand, has in five short years exceeded everybody's expectations. It is changing the lives of its 300 students in profound ways. And this school is pretty much those kids' last chance to lay a foundation that allows them to dream of college and to succeed there.

Maybe Gov. Strickland doesn't know how awful his budget would be for this one particular school because of its admittedly unusual status as both a charter school and an early college academy. But he needs to know about it because DECA is already doing what he says he says schools should aspire to achieve.

Charter schools have an important and now entrenched place in Ohio's educational landscape. Even a governor shouldn't get to eliminate them without having to spell out that as a goal. And he should take tremendous heat for trying.