Fordham’s big 2018 study of high school grade inflation illuminated the prevalence and consequences of this practice, and should motivate policymakers to find ways to clean it up. One promising approach could take the form of accrediting organizations, which exist to ensure quality and academic integrity in our schools. As I’ve written before, just as accreditors are well-positioned to crack down on fraudulent practices in the online credit recovery space, they’re also well-suited to discipline schools that use grades to misrepresent what students know. Indeed, they have an obligation to do this, if only for the sake of their own credibility.

Education is a public trust and the public ought to be able to trust the credentials that our schools confer. Grade inflation erodes that trust by signaling to stakeholders—parents, universities, employers, etc.—that students have learned more than they actually have. Schools that have succumbed to this practice lack integrity and, thus, credibility, especially regarding the credentials they award, which are largely acquired by earning passing grades in a sufficient number of courses. If grades cannot be trusted, neither can diplomas.

In Georgia, my home state, in response to a big expose of school systems’ misuse of online credit recovery course to boost their graduation rates, the Georgia Department of Education said that “students who pass a course [are expected to be] proficient in the material.” A reasonable standard: credits represent proficiency! Yet in 2018—when just 39 percent of Georgia students were proficient in math according to the state’s own exams, and 46 percent in science—the high school graduation rate hit a record high of 82 percent.

For better or worse, the state has no legal obligation to require honesty from schools, nor does it have obvious means of monitoring this. Which creates the void that accreditors should fill. The very purpose of accreditation is ensuring that schools—the knowledge and skills they impart, the credentials they award—warrant public trust. Yet I can cite no examples in recent memory, at least in Georgia, where an accreditor has taken action in the case of schools that mislead the public via dishonest course grades, despite that practice being widespread and well-documented.

This must change, and AdvancED—which accredits over 1,000 public school systems worldwide and is the leading accrediting body in the U.S.—could lead the way. The organization’s standards are designed to, among other things, ensure “the establishment of a learning culture built on high expectations for learning.” Grade inflation undermines this principle, and two of the organization’s standards make this vivid:

Standard 2.5: “Educators implement a curriculum that is based on high expectations and prepares learners for their next levels.”

A school that allows students to routinely earn high grades for things like coming to school, participating in class, and finishing assignments—regardless of their actual level of achievement—does not have high expectations. Worse, low standards leave kids ill-prepared for the next level. Students who aren’t proficient in core subjects like math and English when they leave the K–12 system can be expected to struggle in college and beyond.

Georgia has a merit-based HOPE scholarship that provides up to four years of full tuition to residents who attend in-state colleges. Eligibility requires graduating from high school with a GPA of 3.0 or higher, and earning at least that average every year a grantee attends college. Between 2012 and 2016, however, while eligibility among entering college freshmen increased from 52 to 63 percent, over 20 percent dropped out in their first year, and less than 20 percent earned good enough grades to retain the scholarship for all four years.

In recent years, more than a quarter of students from Douglas County, Georgia (where I live), who graduated from high school and attended a public university still required remediation in math. This isn’t surprising considering the district’s 30 percent proficiency rate on state math exams, but it’s surely surprising to parents who for years saw A’s and B’s on their children’s report cards. (Last year, for example, 48 percent of all geometry grades were A’s or B’s, even though just 21 percent of students were proficient in the subject.)

Circumstances like this, which are scarcely unique to Douglas County or Georgia, clearly violate Standard 2.5. But there’s more.

Standard 2.10: “Learning progress is reliably assessed and consistently and clearly communicated.”

This standard signals the accreditor’s expectation of accuracy and honesty in the reporting of student learning to stakeholders. Standardized test scores may meet this standard, but surveys indicate that parents trust the judgment of their children’s teachers—in the form of grades—more than they do test scores. So when grades are inflated, they are anything but clear indicators of actual learning.

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Accreditors have enormous power to correct behavior that undermines public trust. If they took their role seriously and threatened to suspend or publicly put on probation schools that consistently fail either of the two standards cited above, grade inflation would decrease. But they aren’t and it isn’t. That must change.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a piece in this space arguing that education reformers had “overplayed our hand, overstated our expertise, and outspent our moral authority by a considerable margin” as the movement morphed from idealism to policymaking over the past two decades. The way to get back on track, I suggested, is to refocus ed reform’s considerable energies on improving classroom practice, rather than continue to make the blithe assumption that schools and districts need only to be properly incentivized or kicked in the britches in order to do right by kids.

So it’s gratifying to see my colleague Mike Petrilli take this idea and run with it in a series of blog posts heralding the “Golden Age of Educational Practice.” The encouraging notes he’s received from state and district-level officials suggests this is a rich vein of ore to be mined. But I’d like to suggest tapping the brakes before rushing headlong into Ed Reform 2.0, to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes that have dulled ed reform’s impact and undermined its credibility—particularly among frontline teachers and administrators, who are invariably tasked with bringing our grand plans to fruition in classrooms.

I obviously agree with Mike that evidence based practices could make a significant difference in improving student outcomes. But there’s a danger that lurks in the hearts of accountability hawks that is not content with merely identifying effective practices, but wants to mandate them.

I was going to suggest trying "educational malpractice" laws--teach little kids how to read using evidence based practices OR GET SUED--but @rpondiscio poo-pooed the idea...

— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) January 10, 2019

I didn’t “poo-poo” this malpractice scheme when Mike raised it in an early draft of one of his recent essays. I begged him to drop it. Bluntly, it doubles down on the worst ed reform impulse, shifting from "Schools and teachers know what to do. If they fail, shut ‘em down" (c. 2002), to "It's their job to figure out what to do. If they don't we'll sue ‘em!” (c. 2019) Mike backed off this idea briefly, then suggested instead that we sue deans of ed schools if they fail to teach evidence-based practices. To an accountability hammer, everything is a nail.

Shifting ed reform’s focus to improving practice is an acknowledgment that underperformance is not a failure of will, but a lack of capacity. It’s a talent-development and human capital-strategy, not an accountability play. Forcing changes in behavior, whether through lawmaking or lawsuit, may win compliance, but it doesn’t advance understanding and sophistication. Teachers need to understand the “why” behind evidence based practice to implement it well and effectively. To that end, let me suggest a few ideas that might shape how to think about classroom practice and education research, and a role for policymakers—not a leading role, but a supporting one. Taken together these might not bring about Mike’s devoutly wished, “Golden Age of Educational Practice.” But they might keep it from blowing up on the launch pad.

1. Ask the right questions

Education research lacks the precision to dictate classroom practice. “What works?” is the wrong question. “The right question is ‘Under what conditions does this work?’” observes Dylan Wiliam. He also notes that education research suffers from “physics envy”—a wish common among social scientists (and policymakers) for the mathematical precision and certainty of “hard science.” Dan Willingham points out an even more critical difference: Physics and other hard sciences “strive to describe the world as it is, and so strive to be value-neutral,” he notes. “Education is an applied science; it is in the business of changing the world, making it more like it ought to be. As such, education is inevitably saturated with values.”

2. Understand and accept trade-offs

A good example the values-laden nature of education research and its application is the new RAND study that found “restorative justice” lowered suspension rates and closed racial disparities in suspension rates, while improving teachers’ perception of school their schools’ environments. However it lowered students’ perception of classroom management and their peers respect for one another. It also had significant downside for test scores, particularly for black students. Let’s assume subsequent studies replicate these findings (never a certainty—another confounding problem for policymakers). So does it “work?” If you’re a devout accountability hawk for whom many things are important, but none more than test scores, you’re likely to say “No.” Parents’ views matter too; they might not support a practice that makes their kids feel less safe in school. But others may argue vehemently that there is no greater priority that breaking the “school-to-prison pipeline” by reducing suspensions and keeping kids persisting in school. A debate about trade-offs and opportunity costs is very different than arguing whether something “works.” Those discussions will and should vary greatly depending on local context. As Willingham notes, the value of quality research is its predictive power. It tells you what’s likely to happen if you pull a lever. It’s silent on whether it’s a good idea, or if the trade-offs are worth it.

3. Kill education myths

A modest start to improving instructional sophistication is identifying common myths about education and stopping them. A good example of this is “learning styles,” the theory that students have an optimal way of taking in new information, and that instruction is most effective when teachers know each student’s learning style and adapt their instruction to account for it. The evidence base for learning styles isn’t just thin, it’s been as thoroughly debunked as phrenology and astrology. Yet according to some studies, over 90 percent of teachers still believe it. Like a slasher-movie villain, science keeps killing learning styles, but it won’t stay dead. Other common “neuromyths” that need to go: the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains, and that children tend to be either left-brained (rational) or right-brained (creative). Indulging pseudoscience is not a good look for a field that wants to be taken seriously as a profession.

4. Learn the lessons of cognitive science

Some myths are benign, others have upended schooling entirely. The unquestioned belief in “twenty-first-century skills” holds that it’s more important for kids to learn, practice, and master critical thinking, problem solving, cooperation, and creativity than to study any particular body of knowledge. But cognitive science tells us those cognitive “skills” are not directly teachable or transferable like, say, riding a bike. They are largely “domain specific.” To think critically about topics in science or history, for example, requires knowing a lot about those topics. You can’t train kids to be all-purpose critical thinkers and polymath problem solvers. The same is true of reading comprehension skills and strategies. “Good readers can find the main idea of a text when they know how to decode the words on the page in front of them, and when they have the content knowledge to understand the text they are reading,” notes an exceptional new paper written by David Steiner of Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, and Learning First’s Jacqueline Magee. If teachers don’t understand this—if teacher prep programs don’t emphasize—the inevitable result is “well-meaning but ultimately poor practice…wasting countless hours of instructional time.”

5. Stop demanding bad practice through policy

If there’s a policy play here, it’s not “identify best practices and make them mandatory.” It’s stop functionally demanding bad practice through poorly conceived testing and accountability measures. The best example is reading tests. Smart accountability policy should incentivize the steady, patient investment in content knowledge across the curriculum. That’s where growth in language proficiency and vocabulary come from. But the expectation that schools should put points on the board immediately functionally demands that teachers turn reading instruction into dull and tedious skills-and-strategies sessions in finding the main idea and making inferences. “Language comprehension is a slow-growing plant. Even with a coherent curriculum, the buildup of knowledge and vocabulary is a gradual, multiyear process that occurs at an almost imperceptible rate,” E.D. Hirsch, Jr. has observed. “The results show up later.” Almost nothing in the test-driven education policy we’ve enshrined over the last thirty years accounts for this.

The last point might be the most important, at least for policymakers and others in a position of authority over schools. Accountability isn’t going away, nor should it in a system that runs on public funds. But it won’t do for pundits and policymakers to natter on about evidence-based practice while ignoring the instructional signals our policies send to teachers. Let’s fix that first.

A 2017 report by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that 30 million “good jobs” nationwide were held by the “middle”—workers who have less than a bachelor’s degree but more than a high school diploma. More than half of states have responded to the demand for this emerging workforce by including a new accountability measure in their ESSA plans: industry credentials, which can include short- and long-term certificates, licensures, badges, and more. But with accountability expectations at stake (not to mention the funds that go with it!), how can we ensure states and schools are incentivizing students to only participate in high-value industry-based credentials?

In response to this question, Education Strategy Group, alongside the Council of Chief State School Officers and Advance CTE, assembled a Career Readiness Expert Workgroup, comprising researchers and state and industry leaders. They focused on, among other things, how states can inspire and support students’ attainment of high-value credentials, incentivize schools and districts to prioritize them, and recognize and emphasize their importance.

Identifying industry-recognized credentials as high value is not enough to ensure student participation, say the report’s authors. States must also eliminate barriers to attainment and establish pathways rewarding students for participation. Promising policies include waiving certain costs like exam fees, increasing access to testing sites, and as Florida does, requiring districts to inform parents and students the value earned (wages, upward mobility, etc.) from industry-recognized credentials. Rewards can include credit hours and accolades for completing career-and-technical-education courses. Tennessee, for instance, gives postsecondary credit for earning certain high-value industry credentials, and in Ohio career and technical education is an alternative path to a high school diploma.

The authors also recommend that states incentivize schools and districts to offer high-value credential opportunities through additional funds, public praise, or boosts on accountability measures. Kansas, for one, offers a fixed sum to schools for each student who graduates with an industry-recognized credential, and Florida does something similar, but bases the additional funding amount on how valuable it deems the credential. Kentucky matches Florida’s approach, but awards schools points on its accountability system instead of more money.

The report’s third recommendation is that states positively recognize the attainment of industry-recognized credentials. They can do this by establishing career and technical education as a formal and respected pathway to career readiness, and by publicly celebrating the earning of credentials, much as they do with diplomas. Virginia sets a good example by separately reporting this in school accountability reports.

Overall, the report is valuable guide for state governments who want to evaluate, identify, and promote high-value credentials. The many state-specific examples will be especially helpful. But policymakers should careful to tailor any reform to their states’ and districts’ unique circumstances.

SOURCE: “Credential Currency: How States Identify and Promote Credentials of Value,” Education Strategy Group (September 2018).

In a previous post, we looked at Fordham’s recently-updated interactive map of the nation’s schools to compare private school options in Milwaukee, a city with the nation’s oldest private school voucher program, with those in Minneapolis-St. Paul. In contrast to the Twin Cities, which lack such programs, in Milwaukee, we found a number of private schooling options located in some of the high-poverty areas lacking charter schools, areas we have been calling “charter school deserts.”

In recent years, new voucher or tax credit scholarship programs have been proposed in a few key states, only to face defeat. In deeply blue New York, a proposal for a tax credit scholarship program died in 2015 despite a diverse, bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and community activists—including the state’s Democrat governor—supporting the programs.

Meanwhile, in deeply red Texas, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed both a tax credit scholarship and an ESA for special needs students only to have the Republican-controlled House refuse to consider either bill. And in Colorado, local politics led to the demise of the Douglas County voucher program as voters elected several anti-voucher school board members in 2017.

To see how private school choice programs could have impacted these three jurisdictions had they been implemented, let’s take a look at our updated interactive map. It shows all of the public traditional and charter school elementary schools in the U.S. and was recently amended to include most private elementary schools too.[i] Our map also highlights (via tan shading) each city’s “charter school deserts,” aka high-poverty areas that lack charter schools.

The Bronx, New York

Despite being home to more charter school students than any city other than Los Angeles, New York City has large stretches of charter school deserts, particularly in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. But do private schools serve as oases there? Mostly not. While the area near Fordham University has a few private schools such as St. Philip Neri School, Our Lady of Refuge School, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel School, the areas south of the Bronx Zoo are bereft of charter and private schools alike.

Note: Blue dots indicate grade K–5 private schools as reflected in the Private School Universe Survey for 2015–16. Shaded areas are charter school deserts, areas with high poverty and no charter schools.

Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York is a city of considerable poverty, with a child poverty rate three times the national average. And unfortunately, the city boasts few schooling options for families other than the city’s traditional public schools. Private elementary schools appear to be particularly inaccessible to poor students, as they are primarily located in the city’s affluent suburbs. Just four private elementary schools—none of which has more than one hundred students enrolled—are located in the city’s high-poverty areas.

Note: Blue dots indicate grade K–5 private schools as reflected in the Private School Universe Survey for 2015–16. Shaded areas are charter school deserts, areas with high poverty and no charter schools.

Dallas, Texas

Dallas has large charter school deserts in Oak Cliff, south of downtown, as well as the high-poverty area around Fair Park and South Dallas. The city’s private schools are generally not located in those areas, but rather are concentrated in suburban and more affluent locales. Only a few, mostly religious private schools are located near the center of the city or in its charter school deserts. The one non-faith-based school serving those neighborhoods is the J. Erik Johnson Community School (recently renamed “Momentous School”), an elementary school founded by local business and community leaders and located in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. In short, poor communities, by and large, still have little access to private school options.

Note: Blue dots indicate grade K–5 private schools as reflected in the Private School Universe Survey for 2015–16. Shaded areas are charter school deserts, areas with high poverty and no charter schools.

Houston, Texas

The country’s fourth largest city, Houston, is sprawling, and its charter school deserts sprawl as well. The largest concentration of private schools are clustered in affluent western and southwestern parts of the city, but some private schools in Houston are indeed serving high-poverty areas that lack charter schools. Resurrection Academy and Family Christian Academy, for instance, serve the poorer eastern part of the city, while Pueblos Royal Christian School is located in the high-poverty Pasadena area. The high-poverty area north of the I-16 loop is a true “school choice desert,” with virtually zero options beyond traditional public schools.

Note: Blue dots indicate grade K–5 private schools as reflected in the Private School Universe Survey for 2015–16. Shaded areas are charter school deserts, areas with high poverty and no charter schools.

Denver, Colorado

Denver is a relatively middle-class city that has a large and growing number of charter schools (with 20 percent of students enrolled in them), such that it lacks the giant charter school deserts seen in Houston, the Bronx, Dallas, and Rochester. While Denver’s private schools are largely clustered in the metro’s more affluent eastern part, a few dot the city’s charter school deserts. For example, three religious schools, St. Therese Catholic School, St. Pius X Catholic School, and Cedar Wood Christian Academy, are located in a higher-poverty Aurora suburb. And a few, such as St. Bernadette Catholic School and Redeemer Lutheran School, are also located in the poorer western part of the city. In contrast, the higher-poverty area north of downtown (around Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) boasts an assortment of both charter and private schools.

Note: Blue dots indicate grade K–5 private schools as reflected in the Private School Universe Survey for 2015–16, and orange dots indicate grade K–5 charter schools as reflected in data obtained from GreatSchools in 2018. Shaded areas are charter school deserts, areas with high poverty and no charter schools.

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Since there remain a dearth of private school options in many of these metropolitan areas, it’s not hard to see how the creation of private school voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs might have further benefited low-income communities there. After all, families in these communities probably can’t afford private schooling without public help.

Although some private schools are indeed located in poorer locales in all three places, many more might choose to expand or locate anew if families there had choice programs in place to help them attend them. This is what we’ve seen in Florida—the state provides equitably funded scholarships and as more students enroll in the state’s voucher and tax credit scholarship programs, the number of private schools in Florida continues to grow, helping to create a plethora of educational options for Florida families.

To explore the locations of private, charter, and traditional public schools in your own community, click here.

[i] Unfortunately, not all private schools respond to the federal survey that we used (Private School Universe Survey), but a large majority of them are captured as of the 2015–16 academic year. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the response rate is 80.6 percent. We define “elementary school” broadly, including all schools serving students in any grade from kindergarten to fifth grade.

NOTE: On Tuesday, January 22, 2019, we released a report entitled Shortchanging Ohio’s charter students: An analysis of charter funding in fiscal years 2015–17. This is an abridged version of the report’s introduction and conclusion. You can read the full report and findings here.

All students deserve equal access to an excellent K–12 education. Yet the quality of their educational opportunities shouldn’t hinge on zip codes, family backgrounds, or the type of school they attend. Sadly, due in part to polarizing politics, Ohio has long underresourced its public charter schools, shortchanging tens of thousands of needy students in the process and leaving them with uneven opportunities.

Fordham and others have taken pains through the years to document this injustice. Based on data from 2001–02, we published an analysis in 2004 revealing massive funding gaps in our hometown of Dayton. That analysis found that the city’s charters received about $3,000 per student less than the district. Unfortunately, the situation did not improve. Ten years later, using 2010–11 data, an analysis by funding expert Larry Maloney found charter funding gaps of a similar size.

States and cities with high-performing charter sectors typically combine strong oversight with sufficient funding. For many years, Ohio did neither very well. However, state lawmakers made much-needed reforms in 2015 that strengthen charter accountability—a critical first step in assuring sector-wide quality. But there have been no detailed analyses since the Maloney report that examines charter funding in Ohio.

Over his two terms, Governor Kasich made a variety of school funding changes and shifted toward a more student-centered approach. These changes impacted charter school funding as well, including a new (but modest) school-facilities program. Given these changes—and with Governor Mike DeWine taking the helm—a fresh look at charter funding equity is needed. Has Ohio cured its long-standing funding disparities? Or are charters still badly underfunded?

This study of charter funding reveals continuing inequities in the Buckeye State, the most troubling of which are found in the Big Eight cities.[1] According to my analysis, Big Eight charters receive on average $10,556 per pupil in total revenue versus $14,648 for the Big Eight districts during FYs 2015–17. These urban charters, then, face funding shortfalls of a staggering $4,092 per student, equivalent to receiving 28 percent less revenue relative to districts.

These figures reflect total revenue from all public sources (federal, state, and local) and nontaxpayer sources, with the vast majority of school revenues being generated through the public sources. Big Eight charters and districts receive nontaxpayer funding of roughly equal amounts ($533 and $556 per pupil, respectively); thus, the shortfall in charter revenues can be traced to disparities in public funding amounts, specifically a lack of local funding for charters, as the figure below illustrates.

These percentages, however, mask the true impact of these inequities: translated into dollar terms, Ohio shortchanged Big Eight charters of $253 million per year during FYs 2015–17—tens of millions of dollars that would have supported the needs of children, many of whom come from low-income families or are students of color.

Though some charters have produced exceptional results on shoestring budgets, such glaring inequities have consequences. Most troubling is that they rob children, many from low-income and minority families, of the educational opportunities they deserve. With less funding, charter students may not receive the one-on-one or small-group tutoring they need; they might have fewer opportunities to take art or music classes; and they may have less access to advanced or specialized coursework. Children attending public charter schools might have fewer opportunities for extracurricular activities that allow them to develop important intangible skills, and these funding shortfalls could make important health and social services out of reach for at-risk children.

Moreover, underfunding Ohio charters has systemic consequences, as well. For instance, charters often resort to paying teachers lower wages, leaving great instructors vulnerable to being lured away by districts that can offer more lucrative pay. Ohio charters also lack access to capital resources that enable them to build quality school facilities. In fact, Ohio charters often dip into their already thin operational budgets just to cover rental payments. Ohio’s inequitable funding system also yields an inhospitable location for charters to take root and serve more children in need of quality educational opportunities.

Recognizing both the moral imperative and practical need to fund charters fairly, several states have moved to strengthen charter funding. Just last year, Colorado and Florida passed legislation that now allow their charters to receive a portion of local tax revenue. Amid a major school-funding overhaul, Illinois also approved revisions ensuring that its charters will now receive the same operational funding as nearby districts.

Ohio lawmakers should follow in leading states’ footsteps. We acknowledge that achieving this goal is fraught with politics. But it’s important to keep two things in mind. First, we must make careful distinctions between brick-and-mortar and online charters. Site-based charters ought to be funded at parity with their nearest districts. E-schools are a completely different educational model, and legislators are already wisely considering alternative arrangements such as competency-based funding. Second, we must not forget that Ohio recently enacted strict charter accountability reforms that now ensure taxpayer dollars are being used responsibly to meet the needs of children and families. In fact, given the serious penalties for poor results, it’s fair to say that Ohio’s school-accountability policies are now tougher for charters than for districts. Within the past three years, more than seventy charters have closed—and more may shutter as the state’s automatic charter closure law goes back into effect after a period of safe harbor.

It will take courageous policy makers, of both political parties, to remedy charter funding inequity in Ohio. For state leaders who wish to act, we offer three concrete steps that would move Ohio toward fairer charter funding.

Shift Ohio to a direct-funding approach for charter schools. The pass-through mechanism by which the state currently transfers charter funds through districts is unnecessarily complex and leaves charters exposed to criticism by creating the false appearance that districts fund charters. So long as the state funds charters, Ohio should pay them directly out of the foundation appropriation in the state budget. Though this proposal would not resolve the funding gap, it would clear up confusion and be fairer to both district and charter schools.

Improve the support for facilities. On average, Ohio charters spend very little on capital investments that can help them serve future generations of students. And most charters continue to scrape by in rented space, typically paid out of their operational budgets. To improve facility support, state legislators should pursue two initiatives: First, they should boost the modest $200 per pupil facilities reimbursement to an amount more in line with such costs. Second, they should appropriate new money to the Community School Classroom Grant that provides aid to cover charters’ renovation and construction costs. In so doing, they should also broaden program eligibility so that more charters can apply for funding.

Ensure that brick-and-mortar charters receive operational funding on par with their nearest districts. Here, state lawmakers face two choices: either pony up more money from the state budget or require local school boards to share locally generated revenue with the charter schools in their boundaries, having all public funds truly “follow students.” On the first option—more state aid—legislators either could tie charter funding amounts to their nearest districts’ state and local revenues or they might introduce a multiplier—a “charter school weight”—that is added to the state’s base per-pupil amount of funding. For example, charters might receive 1.3 times a base amount of $6,010 per pupil, yielding a modified base of $7,813 per student. Alternatively, though likely to face political headwinds, lawmakers could simply require locally generated funds to follow children to charters—public schools serving students whose families also pay taxes to that district. Though very limited, there is precedent in Ohio for local tax-sharing agreements—one established in Cleveland—and state lawmakers could require, or incentivize, these types of arrangements.

Legislators on both sides of the aisle need to recognize that providing second-class charter funding simply isn’t fair to their students. Ohio is long past due in funding charters equitably, and much work remains.

[1] The Big Eight refers to Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown.