Academic results produced by charters so bad that even the GOP state legislature is debating serious reforms
The charter-school movement flourished in the late 1990s, in part because of its no-more-excuses mantra maintaining that it wasn’t low-income, urban students who had failed, but the traditional school districts that they attended.
“I believe all children can learn,” President Bill Clinton told a campaign crowd at Ohio State University in 1996, announcing his support for 3,000 new charter schools.
Charters would do better, supporters said, because they would be free of bureaucracy.
“If you turn people loose with their creativity, they do better and they will provide a better education,” then-state Rep. Michael A. Fox, R-Cincinnati, said.
Almost two decades later, the academic results produced by charters have been so disappointing that the GOP-controlled state legislature is debating serious reforms.
A charter-advocacy group has begun to quietly lobby officials this summer to lower the bar for the schools, arguing that high poverty and low English proficiency mean charters shouldn’t be compared to the rest of Ohio’s schools.
“The current Ohio report card does a far better job of reflecting student poverty than measuring how well the school performs,” according to the report that the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education privately gave lawmakers in June.
“Located primarily in urban areas, Ohio’s charter school (sic) serve a population that is far more at risk than the average student in Ohio’s traditional public schools. ... A new solution is needed that takes into account student demographics and identifies poor performing schools for turnaround or closure.”
The presentation, which The Plain Dealer reported on Thursday, had been given to state lawmakers as they worked on their now-stalled charter-reform bill. It begins by noting “Ohio’s challenge”:
• The Department of Education projects the majority of charters will fail the new report card.
• Charter-proficiency results could drop another 20 percent from “already failing grades.”
• “Public opinion and media coverage are demanding raised charter accountability.”
• And the state’s report card measures are “greatly impacted by student demographics having an inequitable impact on charter schools.”
The solution, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Dispatch, is to make the charter report-card grades higher by taking into account differences in student demographics when rating schools.
Schools with high concentrations of poor students or students who are highly mobile, have limited English or have special needs should be compared not against all schools in Ohio, as they are now, but against the average performance of schools with similar student makeup, the group said.
Individual charters would be measured not by how they perform overall, but by how they perform against that average, just as a similar model “helped California charter schools make progress to outperform their state’s (district schools).”
“This comparison of actual results to predicted values determines Charter schools seek allowances based on students’ poverty | The Columbus Dispatch: