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A Cleveland panel creating some of the first successful discussions in Ohio between a school district, charter schools and a teachers union is coming to an end.

The Cleveland Transformation Alliance, a panel created in 2012 to put warring charter schools and teachers union officials together with city, school district and philanthropic leaders, voted this week to disband at the end of March. 

The panel successfully promoted strong charter schools while warning parents away from those that were failing students. 

The alliance was a crucial part of the broader Cleveland Plan For Transforming Schools, which  let the struggling school district avoid state takeover and made it the first district in Ohio to share local property tax dollars with charter schools. 

In return – coming at a time when even national charter school advocates blasted Ohio as the “Wild, Wild West” of barely-regulated charter schools – the alliance was created to prevent  charter schools with bad reputations and no sustainable plans from opening in the city, while also promoting strong ones.

But the Alliance never had the teeth some expected when it launched and its one attempt to block a school from opening failed. The state also increased its own charter oversight in 2015, reducing the Alliance’s importance.

The panel met another of its major goals – rallying community support for the district. The Cleveland Plan and alliance helped the district pass its first operating tax increase in 16 years in 2012. The district has since passed multiple tax renewals and increases, with the latest coming last November.

With the district no longer in crisis, the panel’s role continued to shrink, and it lost support after a change of mayors in 2022 and school CEOs in 2023.

Mayor Justin Bibb said in a statement that the alliance had a “pivotal” role as the city “strengthened collaboration, improved school choice, and built a foundation for sustained educational progress.” 

Other members of the panel agreed that its time has passed.

“We have fulfilled our original purpose,” said Ann Mullin of the George Gund Foundation who was part of the 2012 negotiations to create the Cleveland Plan. “We can now identify other ways to best support our schools and families moving forward.” 

The mayor’s office and other alliance members say they are still committed to its main task the last few years — creating a school choice guide for families — and will soon pick another group to create it.

The plan was created after then—Gov. John Kasich, who later was the last Republican challenger of Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential race, told the city to come up with a turnaround plan or face state takeover after repeated poor scores on state tests. State Sen. Nina Turner, who later became co—chair of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2020, was a key player in the negotiations and co—sponsor of the state law enacting a plan that had bipartisan support..

Success of the Cleveland Plan included the district improving academically, though not to levels the plan had hoped to achieve. The district had the second-worst test scores out of more than 600 districts in Ohio when the plan passed in 2012. Today, it is the 11th worst.

The district has also shifted  its old focus on neighborhood schools to being a “portfolio” district of different school models, both district and charter, that families can choose from.

School district CEO Warren Morgan and school board President Sara Elaqad said the end of the Alliance does not mean the end of the Cleveland Plan.

“(Having) quality schools, at scale, in the system is the work of all of the community, and that’s what the (Alliance) was about, and it’s what we’re going to continue to be about,” Morgan said. “We’re still committed to the work of high quality choices.”

The district’s financial support of charter schools, controversial when it started in 2012, has continued and even doubled over time. In 2012, after the Ohio legislature approved the plan, the district started sharing more than $5 million a year with selected charters with strong academic results, that served almost entirely Cleveland kids and that agreed to share data and expansion plans with the district.

The district is now sharing more than $10 million with 11 partnering charters, most of them with the Breakthrough Schools, the state’s highest-rated charter school chain and which helped create the Cleveland Plan.

But the district has also not shared money with any new schools or authorized any new charters since before the pandemic.

The Alliance’s control over new charters was never as direct as former Mayor Frank Jackson had wanted. Though Jackson wanted the city to have some say in what schools could open, the state legislature balked and gave the Alliance power to review authorizers and recommend to the state whether that authorizer could open new schools in the city.

Though the Alliance recommended that a Cincinnati-based authorizer should be blocked, its recommendation missed a deadline because of communication issues with the Ohio Department of Education and the recommendation was not followed.

Another controversial part of the Cleveland Plan was eliminating seniority when it came to teacher layoffs and having the district be one of the first in Ohio to use student test scores to evaluate teachers and affect contracts and pay. Those evaluations were changed when test scores lost favor in Ohio and nationally as part of teacher evaluations.

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