Troubled Ohio charter schools have become a joke — literally
Yes, some charter schools are great, but others are a mess — especially in Ohio, where academic results across the sector are far worse than in traditional public schools and financial and ethical scandals are more than common. How bad is the problem? The Plain Dealer ran a story this year that started like this:
Ohio, the charter school world is making fun of you.Ohio’s $1 billion charter school system was the butt of jokes at a conference for reporters on school choice in Denver late last week, as well as the target of sharp criticism of charter school failures across the state.The shots came from expected critics like teachers unions, but also from pro-charter voices, as the state considers ways to improve how it handles charters …
An example of a joke from the conference: “Be very glad that you have Nevada, so you are not the worst,” charter researcher Margaret “Macke” Raymond said of Ohio. Raymond, from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, conducts research on charter schools and issued a report late last year that said Ohio charter school students learn 36 days less math and 14 days less reading than traditional public school students — conclusions she drew from crunching data obtained from student standardized test scores.
And the bad news just keeps on coming for Ohio charters, also called “community” schools, which in 2013-14 educated more than 120,000 students, or 7 percent of the total public school enrollment in the state. Consider this:
No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.
That’s the first paragraph of a story this month in the Akron Beacon Journalabout the newspaper’s review of 4,263 audits released last year by the state, which says that Ohio charter schools appear to have misspent public money “nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” It says that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the Troubled Ohio charter schools have become a joke — literally - The Washington Post: