According to a new report by RAND, charter schools don't produce substantially different academic results than their district peers. Charter Schools in Eight States: Effects on Achievement, Attainment, Integration, and Competition is the result of a longitudinal study using student-level data to examine charter schools in Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, Denver, Milwaukee, and the states of Ohio, Texas and Florida. It found, among other things, that charter schools do not have an effect, good or bad, on the achievement of students in nearby district schools. The study also confirms that charter schools do not "skim the cream" when it comes to recruiting students--children enrolling in charter schools have similar academic achievement levels as those attending district schools, except in Ohio and Texas, where students entering charter schools are substantially behind the achievement levels of their district peers.
The report offers two major concerns about the Buckeye State's charter schools where the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has served as a charter school authorizer since 2005. First, that the state's virtual schools lag far behind both district schools and brick-and-mortar charter schools in terms of student performance, and second, that the performance levels of charter schools in Ohio vary to a much greater degree than at other sites in the state. Why does charter quality vary so much here? The report's authors present two theories: 1) The state has an unusually diverse group of authorizers (the state has more than 70 of them) and the quality of those authorizers varies greatly, and 2) Ohio's charter schools operate on significantly less funding than their district peers. The report suggests holding authorizers and schools more accountable for results, including closing low-performing charter schools, echoing recommendations made by Fordham over the past several years, including in legislative testimony shared this week with the Ohio House of Representatives.
We support the pending proposal that all charter school sponsors be under the oversight of the State Board of Education if at the same time a bipartisan Community School Quality Advisory Council is created and empowered to deal with charter school quality issues and subsequent policy matters related to school and sponsor quality on an ongoing basis. This body would serve as an oversight and advisory body to the Ohio Department of Education.???? We further recommend that lawmakers ratchet up the state's "academic death penalty" for charter schools and fund all public schools, including charter schools, equally. Then, the state can focus resolutely on performance of charters by letting the closure law work to eliminate poor charter schools.
Under the state's current charter closure law, two schools were identified to be closed based on their August 2008 report card issued by the state education department. If Fordham's recommendation for charter closure had been in place then and if drop-out recovery schools were not exempted from the law, 62 charter schools would be closing their doors at the end of this school year.???? This represents roughly 20 percent of the charter sector in Ohio, and shuttering these schools would go along way toward curing the ills identified by RAND.
