Five key questions to ask now about charter schools
FILE: Former Florida governor Jeb Bush listens before speaking at his foundation’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington. Bush is a big booster of charter schools and vouchers. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
You can tell that National School Choice Week is nearly upon us — it runs from Jan. 25- 31 — by the number of announcements coming forth hailing the greatness of school choice.
Jeb Bush’s Florida-based Foundation for Excellence in Education put out an announcement that it would participate in a march next week in Texas to support school choice (with one of the speakers being Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Jeb’s son). There’s a new poll by the pro-choice American Federation for Children showing (I bet you can guess) that most Americans support school choice. Etc., etc.
There is other school choice news too, but you won’t hear it from the pro-choice folks. This comes from 10th Period blog, by Steven Dyer, a lawyer who is the education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio and who once served as a state representative and was the chief legislative architect for Ohio’s Evidence Based Model of school funding:
In a disturbing new report from State Auditor David Yost, officials found that at one Ohio charter school, the state was paying the school to educate about 160 students, yet none, that’s right, zero, were actually at the school. And that’s just the worst of a really chilling report, which, if the results are extrapolated across the life of the Ohio charter school program, means taxpayers have paid more than $2 billion for kids to be educated in charter schools who weren’t even there. Here are the takeaways:
- Seven of 30 schools had headcounts more than two standard deviations below the amount the school told the state it had.
- Nine of 30 schools that had headcounts at least 10% below what the charter told the state it had, though it was less than two standard deviations.
- The remaining 14 had headcounts that weren’t off by as much.
- However, 27 of 30 schools had fewer students at the school Five key questions to ask now about charter schools - The Washington Post: