Stephen Dyer, former legislator and education policy expert, looks at how Ohio’s charters actually perform in comparison to public schools. Spoiler alert: not well.
I’ve written a lot about how Ohio’s Charter School sector has epically failed Ohio’s school children for decades. Yet the federal government keeps shoveling money to them for some reason. The first $49.2 million of that grant funding has been opened up to 59 of 258 graded Ohio Charter Schools (only 20% of “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools qualify, but I’ll deal with them later).
According to the state law about this federal grant, Charters that have a 4 or 5 star rating on Academic Progress and a 3, 4 or 5 star rating on overall test scores, or a meaningful increase in test scores over the last 3 years are eligible.
All but a couple of the qualifying Charters met this first of 4 criteria.
Great, right? I mean, these are supposed to be the kinds of Charter Schools we want to grow — high performing Charters.
Here’s the deal, though.
There are 7 graded metrics on the state report card. So while these Charter Schools — less than 1/4 of all Ohio Charter Schools — do have good grades in these two categories, they still really struggle in the other 5.
And Ohio School districts — 1/3 of whom would qualify for these federal funds if they were Charter Schools — do far, far better on those other metrics. How much better?
A sampling:
- Ohio’s qualifying Charter Schools still have 30% of their grades as 2 stars or 1 star — Ds or Fs in regular grading parlance. Meanwhile, 30% of Ohio’s qualifying School Districts’ grades are 5 stars — A’s for you and me.
- Only 12 of the 59 qualifying Charter Schools received grades in college, career and military readiness. All but 3 of those 12 schools scored 1 star for that component. Meanwhile, 72% of Ohio’s qualifying Public School Districts received a grade of 3 stars or more on that component.
- Only 1 in 5 Ohio Charter School students attend a “high-performing” Charter School under this definition. Meanwhile, every other Ohio Public School District student does (including every child attending the Cleveland Municipal School District