Over at????U.S. News & World Report, Andy Rotherham and Richard Whitmire make the case for closing underperforming charter schools and rewarding successful ones.???? In fact, they speculate that as many as one-fifth of the nation's charter schools ought to be shuttered, including up to half of those in the Buckeye State:
Unfair, you say, to insist on closing bad charters when equally bad traditional schools remain open? Perhaps, but that's what a higher standard is all about.????Charter schools were not supposed to be about just replicating mediocrity.If you assume that a charter school should at least exceed the academic performance of comparable traditional neighborhood schools, then about one fifth of those 4,600 charters need to close immediately. Applying that guideline to states such as Ohio, with loose charter school laws and by extension quality problems, means as many as half of the state's 326 charter should close their doors.
The situation in Ohio illustrates the dysfunctional politics of charter schools. Many Republicans there have never seen a school of choice they didn't like, regardless of its quality, while too many Democrats simply echo the relentless hostility of most teachers' unions and the education establishment toward charter schools.
Research backs up their contention.????????CREDO,????Rand, and????KidsOhio.org have all recently issued reports showing that Ohio's charter schools are a mixed bag at best, with the bad schools????seriously weighing down the good. Fordham has been advocating for higher academic????performance????standards????for????charter schools in Ohio????as far back as 2006, and just this spring we've????made recommendations to lawmakers for new????academic????closure standards that would result in at least 10 percent of the state's poorest performing charter schools going out of business.
