Stephen Dyer: Ohio Charter Schools Still Struggle
At his substack 10th Period, Stephen Dyer explains that Ohio’s charter schools are still not living up to their big promises. Way back in 2015, he wrote about the state’s plan to improve its “historically ridiculed” charter sector. Since then…well…
Since I wrote that piece, Ohio has spent nearly $9 billion on charter schools. And what has resulted? The same sad performance Ohio’s charter schools have given us for the last 25 years.
Need proof?
Let’s look at the list of “high performing” charter schools the state put out this year. First thing first: There are 23 schools on the list. Out of 269 non-dropout recovery charter schools. That’s 8.5% — about the same as it’s always been.
Here’s the kicker: The “high performing” charter schools perform about the same on test score data1 as the average Ohio urban public school district. And Riverside Academy’s Performance Index Score of 48.8 is worse than the 50.8 of Dayton, which is Ohio’s worst-performing Ohio Major Urban school district.
Again, this is from one of Ohio’s 23 “high performing” charter schools!
That’s right. After nearly $17 billion spent on Charter Schools since 1998, Ohio has 23 “high performing” ones that score about the same as the typical urban public school district. And the typical non-high performer scores about the same as Columbus City Schools and worse than Canton, Akron, Cincinnati and Toledo while Ohio’s non-urban districts (all but a handful of Ohio Public School districts lose at least some students to charter schools) perform about twice as high on the measure.
There’s more, and it’s not pretty. Read the full article here.