New state report card proves Ohio’s charter school experiment has failed

Source: Plunderbund.com

Charter schools have been touted as the key method by which Ohio was going to improve public schooling in Ohio for over a decade. Charters have long been given flexibility by the state to try innovative programs and have been frequently exempted from many of the same regulations that constrain traditional public schools. Charter schools have also been promoted as providing competition to “failing” urban schools under the premise that the competition would cause both the charters and the districts to make dramatic improvements.

According to StateImpact Ohio, “Charter schools were supposed to offer students who weren’t succeeding in traditional public schools—either because of the school or the student—a good education. They were supposed to apply competitive principles to Ohio’s public school marketplace by encouraging traditional public schools to improve in order to retain students.”

After 15 years of charter school expansion, the new Ohio school report cards provide the strongest evidence yet that this method of using charter schools to supposedly reform education in our state is a complete failure. The latest results from the state make it clear that the large urban districts are not dramatically improving and the charter schools that are supposed to be transforming educational practices while being given every advantage (including a greater amount of state funding) are doing no better.

As you might have heard, the State (as a result of Ohio’s legislators) released new school report cards this year that assign letter grades for Ohio’s public schools in up to 9 different categories. While not all schools get letter grades in each category (i.e., elementary schools don’t receive grades for graduation rate or graduation tests), every school does contribute at least some grades to their overall district grade. Now, instead of only comparing the low achievement scores of the charters with the urban school districts where they reside, we can now compare the combined letter grades of all of the charters with those of all of the individual schools in the large urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown) that have come under attack in recent years. While Cleveland got their own mayoral takeover plan last year, Columbus has been soundly criticized this year, and just last week was vilified by its own mayor, Michael Coleman, in a “pro-levy” commercial and on the mayor’s “pro-levy” website.

Read more: http://www.plunderbund.com/2013/08/24/new-state-report-card-proves-ohios-charter-school-experiment-has-failed/