Austin Yack writes at National Review Online that charter schools face new hurdles in one key presidential battleground state.

… [T]eachers’ unions and their political supporters remain adamantly opposed to charters (which typically do not have unions), and they are eager to pounce on any chance to discredit them. A controversy over a $71 million federal grant to the state of Ohio to fund charter schools has become the latest bone of contention in this dispute.

When the Department of Education announced its competitive charter-school grants last fall, the news that Ohio had won the largest share of the $249 million awarded to eight states faced an immediate backlash. Ohio, critics said, had been a poster child for everything that can go wrong with charters – from misspent funds to failing schools. Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown called on the Obama administration to take another look at Ohio’s programs before releasing the grant money. This month, the administration announced that Ohio would get the funds, with some strings attached. The news was met with scathing media reports.

“It remains an open question why a charter sector with this record deserves a grant at all,” Washington Post reporter Valerie Strauss wrote. She cited Innovation Ohio, a left-leaning think tank, which found that 37 percent of Ohio charter schools that received federal funds either closed down or failed to open. Strauss also highlighted the state’s charter-sector scandals, saying that it had “misspent tax dollars more than any other [state sector], including school districts, court systems, public universities hospitals, and local governments.” However, this narrative is not entirely accurate.

First off, the Innovation Ohio statistics are not as troubling as they seem. Charter schools are designed to be able to shut down – that’s one reason why parents like charters, since their children are not stuck attending an F-grade institution in their district. “Some are going to close,” Chad Aldis, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Vice President for Ohio Policy and Advocacy, told National Review. “And that’s okay. Those that are not serving the kids well should close.”