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Since taking office in 2019, Governor DeWine has prioritized expanding and improving career pathways. One of the benefits of a well-designed pathway is the opportunity for students to earn industry-recognized credentials (IRCs). Credentials allow students to demonstrate their knowledge and skill mastery, verify their qualifications and competence via a third-party, and signal to employers that they are well-prepared. IRCs may be prerequisites for certain jobs and can also boost earnings and employment.
Although Ohio has some room to grow when it comes to data collection and transparency, it does annually track IRCs at the state and district level. In this piece, we’ll examine a few takeaways from the most recent state report card.
1. The number of credentials earned by Ohio students is skyrocketing.
Over the last few years, the number of credentials earned has dramatically increased. Chart 1 demonstrates that between 2018 and 2023 the number tripled. The two most recent years, 2022 and 2023, represent a particularly steep incline.
Chart 1. Number of credentials earned statewide, 2018–2023
This credentialing surge can be attributed to several factors. First, state-funded initiatives like the Innovative Workforce Incentive Program—which was designed to increase the number of students who earn qualifying credentials in “priority” industry sectors—are likely having an impact. Second, Ohio lawmakers passed a revised set of graduation requirements in 2019 that made room for career pathways. Under these standards, students must not only complete course requirements to earn a diploma, but also demonstrate both competency and readiness. For the competency portion, they are permitted to meet standards based on career experience and technical skill, which can include earning at least twelve points in the state’s credentialing system (more on that below). For the readiness portion, students must earn at least two diploma seals. The Industry-Recognized Credential Seal is one of those options.
2. It’s unclear whether the most-earned credentials are valuable to students.
There are several ways to determine the value of a credential. One is by considering whether the state has identified it as valuable. In Ohio, credentials are assigned a point value between one and twelve. Point values are based on employer demand and/or state regulations and often signal the significance of the credential. For example, within the health career field, credentials like CPR First Aid or respiratory protection are each worth one point. In that same career field, a Certified Pharmacy Technician is worth twelve points. Unfortunately, as demonstrated by Table 1, none of top ten credentials earned by students in Ohio are worth twelve points. Half are worth just one point.
Table 1. Top ten credentials earned statewide 2023
The prevalence of one-point credentials isn’t a recent development. Chart 2 demonstrates that credentials worth one point have consistently been the most earned since 2018. Over the last six years, the number of twelve-point IRCs being earned hasn’t increased as rapidly as the number of one-point IRCs earned. And the gap between the two has grown each year. In 2018, the gap between one-point and twelve-point credentials was just over 10,000. By 2023, it had grown to more than 39,000.
Chart 2. Credentials earned statewide according to point value, 2018–2023
Another way to determine value is by examining employer demand. If employers are eager to hire graduates who possess a certain credential, then that credential is more valuable. But determining demand can be difficult, as employers often don’t signal which credentials are necessary for a job position, which are just “nice to have,” and which are irrelevant. A 2022 analysis of IRCs conducted by ExcelinEd and Lightcast attempted to offer some insight on employer demand by examining the average annual number of Ohio job postings that requested credentials over a two-year period (2020 and 2021). It’s by no means a perfect measure—it’s possible that employers value certain credentials even if they don’t mention them in job postings, and that some IRCs give students an unseen boost over other applicants. But until Ohio has better data, job postings are the easiest way to uniformly assess employer demand across the state.
Table 2 below identifies the top ten credentials statewide and how many were earned in 2023. Column three identifies the average annual number of Ohio job postings that requested each credential. Column four calculates the difference between recent supply (the number of credentials earned by the class of 2023) and previous employer demand. Red shading indicates that a credential is oversupplied, while green shading indicates an undersupply. With one exception—a state-issued driver’s license—all of Ohio’s most frequently earned credentials were not in high demand by employers. That should concern us.
Table 2. Annual demand for top ten credentials earned statewide
A third way to consider value is through wages and salaries. Unfortunately, as is the case with employer demand, wages and salaries can be difficult to pin down. The aforementioned IRC report offers some insight. For example, although National Incident Management System (NIMS) credentials don’t have much annual demand, the postings that do request them have advertised wages above $50,000. But other credentials in Ohio’s top ten list—like CPR First Aid, OSHA 10-Hour, and RISE UP Retail Industry Fundamentals—don’t have advertised wages identified by the report. In other words, we don’t know for sure that students who earn these credentials end up in well-paying jobs. Going forward, it will be crucial for state leaders to follow through on linking education and credentials with workforce outcomes like wages.
3. Some districts are posting higher credential numbers than others.
In 2023, the five districts with the highest number of IRCs were Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton, and Cleveland. All five of these districts are in the Ohio Eight. Together, they account for nearly 9 percent of Ohio’s students and roughly 12 percent of the credentials earned statewide. Table 3 identifies credential earning numbers from the last six years for each district as well as the state.
Table 3. Number of credentials earned in selected districts, 2018-2023
Given that it’s the largest district in the state, it’s not surprising that Columbus posted the highest number. In fact, in 2023, the district made up nearly 5 percent of all credentials earned statewide. But there have been some pretty significant increases elsewhere, too. Akron, for instance, went from 100 credentials earned in 2018 to more than 1,200 the following year. Other districts, like Cincinnati, Dayton, and Cleveland, didn’t see sharp increases until 2022 or 2023.
These rapidly rising numbers raise some important questions. For example, what credentials did students start earning in Akron to account for such massive growth? Are Columbus students earning the same credentials in 2023 that they were in 2018? To find out, we compiled some additional tables that can be found here. They identify the top three credentials earned in each district between 2018 and 2023. The number of IRCs earned appears in parentheses. There are a few interesting data points to note.
First, Akron’s sudden surge is attributable to RISE UP credentials. Since 2019, students in the district have earned 2,529 Retail Industry Fundamentals credentials and 1,739 Customer Service and Sales credentials. Each of these IRCs is worth six points and can be earned in the same career field (business, marketing, and finance or hospitality and tourism), which means students can bundle them to earn a diploma. And yet, according to job posting data, neither credential is in demand by employers. Remember, it’s still possible that employers in the Akron area value these credentials. But we don’t know for sure. In a similar vein, we have no idea whether these credentials lead to well-paying jobs with advancement opportunities. Until Ohio directly links workforce outcome data to credentials, there’s no way to know whether Akron students who earned these IRCs are better off.
Second, Cleveland’s sudden increase between 2022 and 2023 is also attributable to RISE UP credentials. The district’s top credential during 2022 was Microsoft Office Specialist PowerPoint 2016, with twenty-one credentials earned. The following year, the top credential was Retail Industry Fundamentals (223 earned), followed closely by Customer Service and Sales (217 earned).
Third, in the last two years, an increasing number of Columbus students are earning credentials from the National Incident Management System. These IRCs account for the district’s top four credentials in 2023, adding up to a total of 2,913. That’s approximately 46 percent of the district’s 2023 total. Columbus isn’t the only district that’s championing these credentials, either. Cincinnati and Cleveland also had National Incident Management System credentials in their top three during 2022 and 2023.
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Over the last few years, Ohio policymakers have prioritized improving career pathways. Expanding opportunities to earn an IRC has been a key part of those efforts. The good news is that more students than ever are earning credentials. The bad news is that it’s unclear whether the students who are earning those credentials are better off. Going forward, Ohio leaders must carefully consider how to ensure that students—and schools—are incentivized to focus on meaningful credentials that lead to well-paying jobs.
The term “citizen science” refers to research in any field conducted with participation from the general public and/or amateur researchers—a way of crowd-sourcing data in more volume through observations or experiments conducted outside of a lab. Citizen science (CS) is utilized by NASA, NOAA, and other reputable research entities and was front and center during the solar eclipse earlier this year. CS also has the potential to allow K–12 students access to a broader range of scientific education than a typical classroom can offer, including data analysis and reporting. A new report looks at how two teachers have attempted to implement CS at the elementary level. It’s a limited picture, but this qualitative report does go inside the black box of the classroom, giving us some curricular ins and outs that are illuminating.
A group of researchers led by Sarah J. Carrier of North Carolina State University are engaged in a multi-year study of CS in elementary classrooms. Specifically, the development, deployment, and evaluation of curriculum support materials to help a group of teacher volunteers integrate two CS projects—one conducted by the National Weather Service, the other by a national nonprofit organization—into their classrooms. The new report is a case study of two fifth grade teachers implementing these materials in year three of the larger study. These were chosen for analysis because the CS project content aligned with the fifth grade science standards (weather and ecosystems) in the unnamed state(s) where the schools were located. They also connect science to other subjects such as English language arts (reading and writing informational text), math (manipulating data and graphing), and social studies (mapping). The primary questions: How do teachers incorporate CS projects in their classroom and in the schoolyard and how do teachers navigate their school contexts to include CS projects in their science instruction?
Both teachers were twenty-year veterans at Title I schools (meaning they had a high percentage of their students identified as economically disadvantaged). The schools posted years of low performance ratings in math, reading, and science, the last of which fell far below their state’s average regularly. The schools were located in rural communities in unidentified state(s) in the southeastern part of the country. Both teachers received one day of professional development training on the CS projects, as well as the researchers’ curricular materials. While these data come from year three of the larger study, it is important to note it was year one for actual classroom deployment. Data come from teacher-provided documentation of their use of the materials, along with data from classroom observations, instructional logs, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. No dates of implementation are provided.
One teacher, called “Taylor,” reported both internal and external barriers to full implementation of the curricular materials. As a result, her students had very limited exposure to CS. Barriers included skepticism about students’ abilities to understand and execute the more concrete scientific and mathematical operations required and her belief that “administrative pressure to prepare students for science assessments” meant that science activities not directly related to concepts and tested vocabulary took precedence over everything else during class time. Most lessons consisted of vocabulary review and test preparation, along with video clips and lectures. Taylor’s students did not participate in data analysis or share CS data with the science community. In fact, the totality of data from the research team suggested that her students went into the schoolyard to search for ladybugs—a single aspect of just one of the CS projects—for only eight minutes on a single day when an observer from the team was present.
The other teacher, called “Morgan,” reported similar concerns about her students’ abilities related to the CS projects. However, she told the researchers that “Just because they are low in math and reading does not mean they cannot do science. It just means that I’ve got to adjust.” Observation and interview data showed Morgan devoting significant time to reviewing both the curricular materials and the two CS projects themselves. In a mid-year interview, she reported that she had adapted the materials to her students’ abilities and interests. In the end, she documented student activity with the CS projects (checking a rain gauge, entering data, or doing class activities) during thirty-one weeks of the year. She reported needing to bolster her students’ knowledge of geography and topology and re-teaching how to set up and label a graph (all of which, she states, should have been learned in fourth grade). Morgan also taught her students how to enter rainfall data into a spreadsheet and upload it to the National Weather Service website. Most students ended the year able to do this work independently. In a focus group, one of Morgan’s students confirmed that reading a rain gauge all year helped them to learn about “the decimals to where we understand how much it is.” Another student reported, “We measure the precipitation by hundredths.”
Carrier and her team conclude that the commonalities of Morgan and Taylor’s student populations, school contexts, and CS curriculum supports demonstrate the importance of teachers in science education (at least in this limited context). They also believe they can refine their curriculum support materials to help various types of teachers. Taylor’s teaching style is described as “teacher-focused” and she herself as a “selective user” of curriculum, with many external influences limiting her ability to plan, adapt, and deploy curricular materials. Morgan’s teaching style, on the other hand, is described as “student-focused” and she as a “learner/modifier” type of curriculum user. While these definitions are likely too simplistic to have much applicability beyond the walls of their two specific classrooms, the detailed descriptions of science teaching and learning within those walls are valuable evidence of how quality instruction can be provided to the highest possible level. They are not to be ignored.
SOURCE: Sarah J. Carrier et al., “Citizen science in elementary classrooms: a tale of two teachers,” Frontiers in Education (October 2024).
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“Charter school laws have been arguably the most influential school reform efforts of the past several decades,” write economists Douglas Harris and Feng Chen.
Since the first law creating these independent public schools of choice was passed in 1991, we’ve learned many lessons about their impact on students, the traditional K–12 system, and the communities where they exist. Here are three of those lessons:
1. Charter schools reduce academic inequality by closing student achievement gaps.
2. Charter schools raise the overall quality of public schools.
3. Creating more charter schools will improve the quality of K–12 public schools and reduce inequality in America.
This is what I call the virtuous improvement cycle of charter schools.
Over the last eighteen months, four national and two state reports on charter schools were released, providing more evidence of a dynamic, self-improvement cycle.
What follows overviews the current charter school landscape; summarizes the national and state reports; and suggests how charter schools build social capital and provide young people with a foundation for pursuing opportunity.
Today’s charter school landscape
Since 1991, forty-six charter laws have created 8,000 schools and campuses that enroll 3.7 million students, around 7.5 percent of all public school students. Charter school enrollment is increasing while traditional district school enrollment is decreasing. For example, over the five years from 2019–2020 to 2023–2024, charter enrollment grew by around 393,000 (+12 percent) students, while district enrollment decreased by around 1,750,000 students (-4 percent). Around six out of 10 (58 percent) schools are in urban areas, with the others in suburbs (25 percent), rural areas (11 percent), or smaller towns (6 percent).
These schools employ around 251,000 teachers, who are younger and more racially and ethnically diverse than traditional district school teachers. Additionally, charter schools consistently enroll more students of color and students from low-income families than traditional district schools. Currently, seven out of ten (71 percent) are students of color compared to around half (54 percent) of district students, with six out of ten students receiving free and reduced-price lunch compared to half in district schools. Hispanic students are the fastest-growing student group in America’s charter schools.
Charter school effects: National studies
The first 2023 report was from the Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes. It found that the typical charter student made gains in reading and math test scores greater than the typical district student. Charters added six days of learning in math and sixteen days in reading. Charter management organizations operating multiple schools were especially effective, regularly “returning more positive, and often gap-busting, results,” the report says.
The second 2023 report was from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Bureau of Economic Research. It summarized thirty years of evidence for lottery charter schools—schools where more students apply than can be accepted, requiring lotteries to determine who can enroll. This gold standard scientific research concludes, “Existing evidence shows that charter schools can improve academic achievement and longer-term outcomes like four-year college enrollment, particularly among lower performing students, non-white students, low-income students, and students with disabilities.”
The third 2023 report was from the Tulane University researchers quoted above and published in the Journal of Public Economics. It examined school district data from 1995 to 2016, analyzing the effects of charter schools on standardized tests and graduation rates, including the impact on students attending nearby public schools.
It found that districts growing charter schools’ market share by 10 percent increased math and reading scores and high school graduation rates for all students, not just one particular student group. This is partly the result of the competitive effects of charter schools, including replacing underperforming traditional district schools with better-performing charter schools.
The 2024 report is Searching for the Tipping Point: Scaling Up Public School Choice Spurs Citywide Gains from the Progressive Policy Institute. (Disclosure: I am a senior advisor at PPI. My colleague Tressa Pankovits is the author of the report. I was not involved in any of the project research.)
This first-of-its-kind analysis examines student math and reading test scores between 2010–2011 and 2022–2023 in grades three to eight in ten school districts. These districts have more than half of their students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch; enroll more than 15,000 students; and have at least one-third of their students attending brick-and-mortar charter or charter-like schools.
The analysis shows that low-income students in both public charter schools and traditional district schools across those cities are catching up to statewide student performance levels, typically closing the achievement gap by between 25 percent to 40 percent. This suggests that a sustained commitment to creating public charter schools where at least a third of the district students are enrolled in these schools contributes to improved academic outcomes for all students.
The report concludes, “While one-third is not a guaranteed tipping point, it is true that in every case where charter schools reached or exceeded that scale, academic growth rose across the entire city for all of a city’s low-income students. Students in low-income urban communities start catching up with the performance levels of all students statewide, regardless of the type of school they attend.”
This analysis cannot determine if charter schools are the only cause of this improvement. For example, state and district policies on accountability or other issues may interact with charter policy to create an environment that produces this result.
Charter school effects: State studies
One state report published in 2024 was on Florida charter schools. It found strong evidence that charter schools in twelve large and diverse districts improved reading scores (though not math scores) and lowered absenteeism rates of students in traditional district public schools.
The other 2024 analysis was of Massachusetts charter schools. This was another gold-standard lottery study that found urban charter schools improved student college preparation, enrollment, and graduation. Nonurban charter schools did raise college enrollment and graduation, though they also reduced state test scores and Advanced Placement enrollment. The report concluded, “Our results suggest that there is more than one path to a college degree and that test score impacts may not predict college outcomes.”
All six of these analyses suggest that the chartering model based on parent (and teacher) choice, school autonomy, and accountability for results creates a dynamic, virtuous cycle that has a positive effect on every student and school in a district.
Building social capital
Charter schools also build what the sociologist James Coleman called social capital, which he defined “…as a resource for action [that includes] obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms.” A charter school’s social capital comes from the relationships that exist among people: the children who attend it, the educators who staff it, the parents and other community members who support it. A charter school lacking social capital is not likely to be much of a productive learning environment or community asset.
Charters create new forms of association. While some charters are neighborhood schools in the old-fashioned sense, others transcend particular neighborhoods or geographic places. They may be organized by curricular philosophies like Montessori or classical education or by place-based geographic approaches like charters located in parent workplaces. There are also networks of charter schools or charter management organizations that cross district and state boundaries and are organized around a common mission and instructional design.
Charter schools display elements that sociologist Robert Nisbet thought essential to community association, including a high degree of personal intimacy, social cohesion, and moral commitment. As he wrote in The Quest for Community, “Community is the product of people working together on problems, of autonomous and collective fulfillment or internal objectives, and of the experience of living under codes of authority which have been set in large degrees by the persons involved.” This working together is a form of civic participation and renewal.
Pathways to opportunity
Not every charter school has lived up to its promise or been a source of community civic renewal. Many have been closed for not serving their students, families, or communities. However, there is ample evidence that the charter model of parent (and educator) choice, school autonomy, and accountability for results produces academic, competitive, and social results that lay the foundation for a young person’s pursuit of opportunity.
In doing so, successful charter schools reduce inequality and promote equal opportunity for students in both charter and district schools. In that sense, chartering creates a self-improving system of public education. It is a system change because it creates an opening for new school innovations that create incentives for the district sector to change. The result is a dynamic, virtuous cycle for a self-improving system.
This virtuous cycle helps young people in charter and district schools develop knowledge, relationships, and an identity. These are the building blocks for creating a self-directed life and what the economist Deirdre McCloskey calls “a new liberty of permission” that allows young people to pursue opportunity and human flourishing.
These studies should motivate policymakers and local community members to create more high-quality independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.
Editor’s note: This was first published on Forbes.
At Partnership Schools, we are excited that so many Ohioans are excited about the “science of reading.” In 2023 legislation that took effect this school year, Governor DeWine and the General Assembly have mandated that all reading curricula follow this approach—one we know well, since Partnership Schools have implemented it for over a decade.
The science of reading is a body of research that points to several key ingredients for effective reading instruction, particularly systematic phonics instruction and building background knowledge, of which vocabulary is perhaps the most important form. Veteran Cleveland Partnership teacher Lisa Marynowski and members of our academic team explained those elements in a Partnership Post back when the legislation passed.
But as the Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill astutely points out in a comprehensive road-map to effective rollout of the policy, curriculum mandates won’t advance students’ reading without effective implementation. Aaron notes that twelve of fifty-five urban districts in Ohio were already using strong science of reading curricula before the mandate went into effect, including the curriculum our schools use: Core Knowledge Language Arts.
The right materials and sequencing are essential. Yet as Aaron notes, teachers and schools must use these tools effectively to help students read well.
Since the Partnership network of schools began over a decade ago, we’ve been working to level up our implementation of curricula based on the science of reading. We are still learning how best to support teachers as they undertake the incredibly complex, vital work of teaching young people to read fluently, with deep understanding and engagement in the texts they are reading.
So what have we learned so far about effectively implementing research-backed reading curricula in our classrooms?
1. Even best-in-class curricula—based on the science of reading—don’t teach students to read. Teachers do.
We see a real difference in students’ progress depending on how teachers implement the curricula. When a teacher implements the curriculum with fidelity—holding a high bar both for their lesson preparation and the learning they expect students to demonstrate—then young readers learn avidly and are hungry for more. But when teachers implement a curriculum out of compliance alone and without a spirit of curiosity and rigor, students progress far more slowly.
2. Most elementary educators are not trained to teach phonics, so we owe them effective, efficient training to develop that skill. But to build the skill, we also have to—and can—build the will.
Anyone who thinks teaching phonics is simple can get a taste of how complex it is from this analysis of just two minutes of effective phonics practice from Teach Like a Champion’s Doug Lemov and Jen Rugani.
Jen has a growing fan base among our teachers in Cleveland, whom she has trained. She packs a lot into a day’s workshop. But even when the list of skills to teach and practice is long, she takes the time to start with cognitive science and reading research. Teacher buy-in increases as they reflect on how that science shows up in their own experiences as readers. As a result, Jen builds teachers’ will to implement curricula effectively by exploring the why behind the work with them first. We find that when teachers are more familiar with the research behind what they’re doing, their will to do it well often increases.
3. Teaching phonics well requires a high degree of precision, expert modeling, and real-time feedback to students.
In baseball, the difference between a home run and a foul ball is often a matter of millimeters—a shoulder just a smidge too high or weight distribution that’s just a little off. The same is true of teaching phonics well: The little things matter a lot.
For a deeper dive into the fine points of what we see great early elementary reading teachers doing, an overview of how a few of our colleagues adapted to do it during Covid still resonates with us.
4. The work doesn’t end at third grade.
The complex texts students should encounter as they get older will challenge the limits of their fluency. Sometimes described as “meaning made audible,” fluency spans the ability to read with automaticity, appropriate intonation, and expressiveness. It is the job of teachers at every level to build fluency through instruction, in both explicit and implicit ways. They can do that in part with lots of shared reading aloud, in which teachers carefully prepare to maximize fluency development and comprehension at the same time.
Note that we say students should encounter complex texts. Too many students don’t read rigorous, grade-level texts as they get older, and that is deeply problematic for their success in high school and beyond. For so many reasons, it is crucial for us to center ambitious books in our reading classes, as Doug Lemov and Emily Badillo, another expert who has trained our upper elementary and middle school teachers in cultivating fluency, elaborated in Education Next recently.
5. Urgency matters.
We must teach every day like the future of our students hangs on the next few minutes of instruction—because it does.
That urgency calls on us to do many things well—including lesson pacing. Our team has developed year-long pacing guides that go beyond slotting in one lesson a day, and we try to guide our teachers in how to judge when some skills may need an extra day of instruction.
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These are not easy decisions with high-quality reading materials, though. These curricula are dense, involve spiraled practice and repetition over time, and students come to us with varying degrees of readiness for the work. Yet their cumulative growth depends on teachers teaching deeply the entire scope and sequence by the end of the year, one year after another.
A few years back, our colleague Fiona Palladino coined the phrase “patient urgency” to describe how we needed to make progress as educators. It is an ethos that Ohio legislators, educational pundits, and parents might adopt now, as we all seek to improve students’ reading. Like all deep investments in children’s learning, the shift to implementing curricula based on the science of reading must be done well and urgently—and it will require years of sustained resolve, knowledge-building, and responsive implementation to produce the gains we seek.
But in our experience—one in which we get to go into middle school classrooms and hear students reading complex texts like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass fluently or gasping out loud at details in the works of John Steinbeck and C.S. Lewis—that effort is worth every minute.
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The champion and the championed
Lt. Governor Jon Husted yesterday received the 2024 Champion for Public Charter Schools Award, given out by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools to honor bipartisan state policymakers who are making an exceptional difference for charter school families and communities in their state and who go above and beyond to shape students’ futures for the better. Kudos to a longtime champion of children and high-quality educational options in our state. Husted received the award during an event in Columbus discussing the findings of new research into the impacts of a charter funding program that he and Governor Mike DeWine helped bring to fruition. Analysis finds that funding from the Quality Community School Support Fund, which has provided supplemental aid to quality Ohio charter schools since FY 2020, has allowed charters to boost their teachers’ salaries, reduce staffing turnover, and drive student learning gains. The full report can be read or downloaded here.
The wheels on the bus go nowhere
Speaking of elected officials working to help charter schools and the families they serve, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost last week fought back against efforts by Columbus City Schools to dismiss a lawsuit against them related to inadequate transportation. He asserts that the district continues to evade responsibility to transport district-resident students attending charter and private and STEM schools who are entitled by law to bus service. “Students need transportation now,” he said in a new filing with the state Supreme Court. “The law clearly provides them with that right. The fact that the district may face future fines does nothing to help these students with their current ongoing harm.”
Charter accountability
Most aspects of Ohio’s school accountability systems were suspended during Covid-disrupted school years in 2020 and 2021. Well, as far more normal patterns have returned, so too have the accountability requirements in state law. This includes a mandatory closure provision for charter schools who earn very low ratings on report cards over a three year span. The Maritime Academy of Toledo has, unfortunately, posted two such report cards in consecutive years. (And they are not alone.) Which means that they could be facing closure next year. School leaders in the Glass City are concerned. “I believe in accountability, and I believe in the report cards,” said Maritime Academy superintendent Aaron Lusk. “We need more time because of the specific nature of our school. Community schools are supposed to be innovative. They’re supposed to be different than public schools. But we’re held to the same measure, but also held to an automatic closure law.”
Say it out loud
Here’s a nice profile of Lorain Bilingual Academy, the only such immersion school in an area of the state featuring a very high concentration of Spanish-speakers. The story is great, but I sure wish Spectrum News would have specified that it was a charter school, so that it could highlight the innovative nature of charters generally and LBA specifically, but also because they could highlight the open enrollment aspect as well. No attendance boundaries, no tuition, no pre-requisites. Seems like a vital part of the story.
Uncharted political waters
Education Week reporter Arianna Prothero this week suggested that charter schools are in “uncharted waters” during the current election season. By which she means two things: 1) That both positive and negative political rhetoric about charters from the usual sources is muted or even absent, left behind by other concerns in education and elsewhere; and 2) That what messages are out there are…unusual. Including some traditional opponents finding positive aspects in the charter school space and some traditional charter supporters nervous about negative aspects. Interesting stuff.
Virtuous improvement cycle
Bruno Manno, Senior Advisor with the Progressive Policy Institute, published a piece in Forbes last week laying out what he calls “the virtuous improvement cycle” that high-quality charter schools foster. When charter schools close longstanding student achievement gaps, they reduce academic inequality. This in turn raises the overall quality of public schools. And he cites numerous research reports that back up his assertion. By creating more charter schools, America will be able to improve the quality of K-12 public education and reduce inequality. A good piece that is worth a read.
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Under the bold leadership of Governor Mike DeWine and Lt. Governor Jon Husted, Ohio lawmakers enacted the Quality Community Schools Support Fund (QCSSF) in 2019. The program—the first of its kind in the nation—provides additional state dollars to support high-performing public charter schools (also known as “community schools” in Ohio). From FY20 to FY23, between 20 and 40 percent of Ohio’s 320-some charters met the state’s performance criteria and received an extra $980 to $1,600 per pupil, depending on the year. Though it’s too early to study its impacts, lawmakers in last year’s state budget further increased program funding starting in FY24.
QCSSF helps address longstanding funding gaps faced by Ohio charters, which have historically received about 30 percent less taxpayer support than nearby districts. This shortfall has exposed charters to poaching by better-funded districts that can attract teachers via superior pay. It has also limited charters’ capacity to provide extra supports for students, most of whom are economically disadvantaged and could use supplemental services such as tutoring. The gap has also required charters—even high-performers—to operate on a shoestring, leaving them little room in their budgets for expansion. Besides limiting these schools in practical ways, underfunding charter students’ educations by virtue of their choice of public school is simply unfair.
We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have proudly advocated for QCSSF. To be sure, even with the most recent boost in funding, it still doesn’t quite achieve the ambition of full funding equity for all charter students. But it does represent a big step forward. Given our support for the program, it might be surprising to see our interest in also evaluating it. Why put it under the research microscope and risk dinging it?
For starters, while you’ll often find us backing choice-friendly initiatives, we also seek programs that work for students. To that end, Fordham has commissioned studies that shed light on policies we broadly support (evaluations of private school scholarships and inter-district open enrollment being two examples). Sometimes the results are sobering—and have led us to pursue course corrections—and at other times, they’ve provided encouragement to press onward. In sum, we remain committed to rigorous analysis that helps policymakers and the public understand how education initiatives function and how they impact students.
We are also mindful that initiatives lacking follow-up research and solid evaluation are more susceptible to the chopping block. Consider one example. Back in 2013, Ohio lawmakers launched a brand-new, $300 million “Straight A” fund that aimed to spur innovative practices. The program was initially greeted with enthusiasm but just five years later it had vanished. One likely factor is that no one got under the hood to study the program, which allowed skeptics to more easily cast doubt on its efficacy. Without evidence to guide their decision-making, policymakers may well have assumed it wasn’t working and chose to pull the plug whether or not it was actually boosting achievement.
With this in mind, we sought to investigate—as soon as practically possible—whether QCSSF is achieving its aims. Conducted by Fordham senior research fellow and Ohio State University professor Stéphane Lavertu, this analysis examines the program’s impacts on qualifying charter schools’ staffing inputs and academic outcomes. The study focuses on data from 2021–22 and 2022–23—years three and four of program implementation—as the prior two years were disrupted by the pandemic. To provide the clearest possible look at the causal impacts of the extra dollars provided by QCSSF, Dr. Lavertu relies on a rigorous “regression discontinuity” statistical method that compares charters that narrowly qualified for QCSSF to charters that just missed meeting the performance-based criteria.
We learn two main things about the program:
Various factors could have driven the academic results, including the ability to implement high-quality curricula or tutoring programs with the QCSSF dollars. But we suspect a particularly strong connection between the reduced teacher turnover and the positive outcomes. Provided that turnover is not caused by efforts to remove low-performing instructors, studies indicate that high levels of teacher turnover—something Ohio charters have struggled with because of their lower funding levels—hurts pupil achievement. The QCSSF dollars, however, have allowed charters to pay teachers more competitive wages and retain their talented instructional staff—thus helping to improve achievement.
Leaders of high-performing charters (including those sponsored by our sister organization, the Fordham Foundation) agree that the additional resources have proven pivotal. Andrew Boy, who leads the United Schools Network in Columbus, said, “Since the addition of the QCSSF, we’ve been able to vastly improve teacher pay to attract and retain more effective, experienced staff, which allowed us to serve more students and deliver on our mission.” Dave Taylor, superintendent of Dayton Early College Academy (DECA), said, “We have used these funds to address key strategic areas of focus: increasing teacher compensation, ensuring we have high quality instructional materials in all classrooms, and taking control of our students’ transportation. The QCSSF has truly been instrumental in DECA’s ability not only to weather the challenges of the pandemic but to be well positioned to serve students well long into the future.”
The findings from this report should encourage Ohio policymakers to keep pressing for improved charter funding. They should also ease concerns voiced by skeptics that charters would not put these additional dollars to good use (“obscene profits on the backs of students is the charter standard,” one bombastic critic said last year). Au contraire: The charters that qualified for the QCSSF program used the funds primarily to boost teacher pay, and the result was that students benefited. Isn’t that something we can all cheer?
Fordham remains committed to fair funding for charter students and to shining light on the QCSSF program. Indeed, we intend to come back in the next few years with updated evidence on the program. But for now, one can confidently say that the program has so far worked as intended and driven improvement in Ohio charter schools.
