Ohio's schools have been in a perpetual state of reform since the late 1990s. We've created academic standards (and revised them), launched a system of standardized assessments (and modified them along the way), created a vibrant school choice marketplace (more than 90,000 children in the Buckeye State now attend a charter school and 14,000 students utilize a state-funded voucher), and pumped billions of new dollars into both innovative academic programs and fancy new school buildings. As a sort of capstone to all this effort, Ohio was awarded $400 million in Race to the Top (RttT) funds to accelerate these reforms and ??? if the state's budget can afford them ??? to launch additional ones.
Fordham's Ohio team has been tracking student performance data in Ohio since 2003, and, with the help of our friends at Public Impact, each year we report on how students in the state's ???Big 8??? urban district schools perform compared to their peers in brick-and mortar charter schools in those same cities. This is as close to an apples-to-apples comparison of urban schools as we can get in Ohio (see more about the comparison methodology on page 22 here).
Each year we are frustrated by the outcomes because, despite all the energy and investments over the past fifteen years, very little progress has been made by either district or charter schools on the most basic indicators of success, like the percentage of children who pass the state's reading and math tests. There are always a few bright spots ??? a couple of charters showing amazing results or a district having a strong year (e.g., Cincinnati this year, and Columbus in previous years). But, as figures 1 and 2 show, for kids in Ohio's urban areas reading proficiency has remained pretty much flat since 2005-06, and math scores have moved little as well.
What's going on here? Why, despite all the efforts, are basic reading and math scores for our neediest children largely stuck in place? Has school choice failed to deliver? What reforms are we missing or getting wrong??? Should we think far more radically about how we recruit, reward, and retain teachers in these schools? Will Ohio's RttT win help move these indicators in the coming years? These are just a few of the questions we struggle with in trying to make sense of the data.
One thing we do know is that at the end of the day the measures that matter most when it comes to school reform and improvement in the Buckeye State are whether we are helping move more children to proficiency in reading and math. Without these basic skills, the children in these schools do not have bright futures, and those of us who work in education still have a lot of heavy lifting to do.
Check out our city-by-city analyses of school performance here, and stay tuned for a special analysis of statewide school performance in the Ohio Education Gadfly later this week.
- Terry Ryan
