As the start of the school year approaches, who is cleaning up Ohio’s wretched charter school system?

Not the Republican-controlled Ohio House. Its members fled the Statehouse for summer vacation without enacting a bill approved by the GOP-majority Senate that would have strengthened the state’s notoriously lax regulation of charter schools.

Click here to read more Blade editorials

Not Gov. John Kasich, despite his warning in his State of the State message last February that he would work to prohibit charter operators “from sponsoring new schools if they’re not doing their job.” Mr. Kasich is spending more time these days pursuing the Republican presidential nomination than charter school reform. Last week, he dismissed the charter controversy as “just a political thing.”

Not the Ohio Department of Education, where a top official recently admitted tossing out poor test scores for some online charter schools, thus improving the state evaluations of their sponsors on which funding decisions are based. That official, David Hansen, has quit, but state Schools Superintendent Richard Ross is slow-walking his response to what critics call a violation of state law. The department has rescinded the bogus evaluations, but has not corrected them.

Not State Auditor Dave Yost, a Republican, who says he will not conduct a special examination of the department’s statistical manipulation. Mr. Yost previously has demanded enhanced financial transparency for charter schools, and aggressively investigated incidents of data scrubbing by several urban school districts in Ohio, including Toledo Public Schools.

And surely not the operators of Ohio charter schools, many of whom are for-profit entrepreneurs and some of whom are big contributors to the campaigns of Republican elected officials across the state. They are lobbying lawmakers to relax performance standards for charter schools further, making it even easier for bad schools to stay in business.

These operators claim it’s unfair to hold charter schools that primarily serve students who are poor, disabled, at risk of educational failure, or not fluent in English to the same standards as traditional public schools in general. That position ignores consistent findings that charter schools perform no better overall — and often worse — than Ohio’s traditional schools.

Last week, seven of the 19 members of the State Board of Education sent Superintendent Ross a bluntly worded letter, calling him “a prime suspect in what has occurred. Mr. Hansen may have taken the fall, but you were his boss. Whether by mismanagement, or deliberate instruction to Mr. Hansen, you are culpable as well.”

The board members demand a “full and thorough investigation” of the Education Department to be conducted by an independent firm hired by the full board, whose results would promptly be made public. The members call Ohio’s current practice of allowing charter sponsors to monitor their own schools “a huge conflict of interest that results in an entirely unreliable and incredible investigative outcome.”

State Rep. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo) wants the U.S. Education Department to reject state applications for federal grants to new charter schools. She cites “the abysmal lack of regulations for charter schools in Ohio, as well as the failed, unacceptable leadership of the state superintendent.” The Education Department responded that it has “little interest or time to play politics.” That’s reassuring.

The reforms needed to end abuses within Ohio’s charter school system and improve schools’ performance are evident. Charter sponsors must provide more-active oversight of their schools and be prepared to respond assertively to warning signs of educational failure. The schools must make more information public about their finances and operations.

And if they refuse to do these things, the state must be prepared to step in promptly to close bad charter schools and to hold their operators accountable for their misuse of public money, rather than acquiesce in continued failure and conflicts of interest.

The state’s casual regulation of poor-performing charter schools has made Ohio a national laughingstock. Yet the state has shifted hundreds of millions of public dollars from traditional schools, which educate the vast majority of Ohio students, to charter schools.

Some of Ohio’s 400 charter schools, such as the Toledo School for the Arts, are among the best public schools in the state. But too many charters waste the tax money they pocket, provide inferior instruction to their students, and resist accountability.

Who gets more attention from the Republican officials who run state government: the charter school operators who donate to their campaigns, or the taxpayers who support charter schools financially and the 120,000 Ohio students who rely on charter schools for their education?

Statehouse pols have an opportunity to dispel such doubts — assuming Ohioans still have any doubts.

First Published August 9, 2015, 4:00 a.m.